Bruce Le, Bruce Li, Bruce Lei – ‘Bruceploitation’ martial arts actors tracked down for documentary about how they imitated Bruce Lee after his death

Film producers cashed in on Bruce Lee’s fame after his death, releasing dozens of low-budget kung fu films with lookalike actors like Dragon Lee and Bruce Li

David Gregory, who started filming his documentary Enter the Clones of Bruce in 2016, talks about making the film and getting the fake Bruce Lees to take part

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After the death of Bruce Lee (above in a still from “Enter the Dragon”), film studios started cashing in on his fame, releasing low-budget kung fu films starring lookalike actors with similar names. Photo: TNS

Published: 4:15am, 28 Jun 2023

As the 50th anniversary of martial arts icon Bruce Lee’s death approaches, a new documentary investigates a bizarre phenomenon that erupted in the wake of the Little Dragon’s untimely passing.

Enter the Clones of Bruce, directed by documentarian and film preservationist David Gregory, charts the wave of low-budget kung fu films that emerged from Hong Kong almost immediately after Lee’s death, starring a slew of imitators in a subgenre known as Bruceploitation.

At the time of his death, on July 20, 1973, Lee had completed just four martial arts films. The last of these, the US-Hong Kong co-production Enter the Dragon, would be released a month later and became a smash hit around the world.

The film cemented Lee’s status as the face of the genre, and created an unprecedented explosion of interest in kung fu cinema.

Now this new-found global audience demanded more, and as producers went in search of the next Bruce Lee, their less than scrupulous contemporaries took a faster and cheaper path: as-yet-unestablished martial artists were dressed up to look like Lee, and rechristened Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee, or Bruce Liang in titles that deliberately evoked Lee’s earlier hits.

While Lee’s family and Golden Harvest – the studio that made him a star – could do little more than stand idly by, a torrent of films were rushed into theatres.