Artistic License History / Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story

• In the film, Lee's father signs him up in a martial arts school because he dreams of a demon haunting the boy. In real life, he did it because Lee was an unruly teenager who would get in many street fights. In fact, Lee was already a trained western boxer by this time, having been coached in the St. Francis Xavier's College.
• In line with the previous point, the filmic Lee gets sent to United States for heroically beating up several racist British sailors, making his parents afraid of retaliations. The real story is much less virtuous, although certainly not any less cinematic: what really transpired was that Lee beat the crap out of a another rich boy in a martial arts challenge, which made Lee's mother send him abroad on the fear of legal action. It's also said that the boy's family had connections with The Triads and the Tongs Triad and Lee's mother feared a contract had been put on Bruce's head.
• The film portrays Lee as being alone and forced to work for seedy bosses in United States, when in real life he lived with two of his siblings, Agnes and Peter, and worked as a waiter for the restaurant of Ruby Chow, a wealthy friend of their father. There is some truth in that the young, punkish Lee didn't like to work there and complained that he was being worked like a slave, but he later outgrew this.
• The character of Jerome Sprout is an obvious replacement for Jesse Glover, a black Judo practitioner who was Lee's first ever student. One wonders why couldn't they keep his real name as they did with several other characters.
• In the film, Lee is solely a teacher of kung fu: he neither practises other disciplines nor learns from any training partner, as most of those are portrayed as novices, and he gets his Jeet Kune Do philosophy mostly from self-experimenting. In contrast, the historical Bruce Lee favored cross-training and was constantly seeking knowledge from any source he could find. For example, he was already a boxer, as mentioned above, and later learned judo and wrestling with several grapplers (such as Gene LeBell, whom he taught kung fu in turn) and was also very experienced in Karate, Kickboxing, Tai Chi, Hapkido and Taekwondo. The Jeet Kune Do philosophy was the result of that, an approach (rather than a discrete style) born of a mix of martial arts.
• Bruce is depicted opening his first martial arts school out of inspiration by Linda, whereas in real life he'd opened it long before meeting her. In fact, their relationship started as a Teacher/Student Romance.
• Bruce's father is shown to have died shortly after his daughter Shannon was born, whereas he'd been long dead by that time - he passed less than a week after *Brandon’s* birth.
• Although an American citizen, the real Lee was proud of his Chinese background and there is no record of him ever refering to himself as an American.
• The movie repeats the pop belief that Lee gained the ire of the San Francisco kung fu community because he was teaching to non-Chinese. This was certainly claimed by Lee in real life, and it has probably a basis of truth given the social conditions of the period, but this thesis, aside from being an exaggeration in any case (most of Lee's students were Chinese, while in turn, Wong Jack-man, the master that challenged him and who serves as the inspiration for Johnny Sun, had non-Chinese students as well), also fails to mention others factors that were much more important for the masters' rage, like Lee's penchant for publicly deriding their traditional styles and making extrovert challenges that he could beat any of them any day.
• It's also notable that the film elects to portray the kung fu masters as The Omniscient Council of Vagueness, complete with matching dark robes and an impressive underground arena. It goes hopefully without saying that the San Francisco kung fu community did not have those levels of cohesion, power and theatricality (it doesn't have them even today).
• In the film, the Kung Fu (1972) series is presented as an idea by Lee named The Warrior that got surreptitiously stolen from him. There is a real life precedent for this, as Linda Lee claims so in her book about him, but most other biographers believe it to be false. Lee did conceive a similar series named The Warrior, but he never went forward with it because he thought no American company would greenlight a series with an Asian lead (something he didn't complain for, believing the same would happen with an Asian series with an American lead).^note The series was nominally produced fifty years later as Warrior (2019), with his daughter Shannon serving as a producer, although this ultra-violent show probably had little to do with Lee's original concept. The development of Kung Fu started a few years earlier and had nothing to do with Lee; the only connection is that Lee auditioned for the title character's role, but was rejected because, just as he thought, producers didn't think Asians were bankable enough to be lead characters (and especially because Lee's heavy accent and intense acting style weren't fit for the character). Lee spoke openly about Kung Fu, stating he didn't blame them for casting the white David Carradine, and never made any accusation of plagiarism or intellectual theft.
• The film implies that Bruce was neglecting his family in favor of his movie career, and shows him being violent and psychologically abusive towards them. Not only do many biographies claim otherwise, to the point that Lee was famous for often inviting his family to the set while filming, but one of which shows pictures of them together on the set of Game of Death. Similarly, while some of his partners and relatives do note Lee had a fearsome temper, none of them has ever spoken of him as unstable or abusive, especially towards his family.
• As with Sprout, neither Johnny Sun nor his brother ever existed, although Sun was probably based on Wong Jack-man, a martial artist who challenged Bruce to a no-holds-barred match, while his brother is based on reports of extras on the set of films that challenged Bruce insisting that he was only an actor. Bruce indeed injured his back, but it was due to a weighlifting accident, not by a treacherous attack after a fight.
• The filmmakers Shown Their Work by having Jason Scott Lee fighting with his right side forward, a controversial fighting stance that Lee actually favored, but they screwed the timeline up. In the film, he is already shown with this stance before conceiving Jeet Kune Do, such as in the first fight against Johnny Sun, while in real life, it was precisely during the development of Jeet Kune Do that he came up with it.
• Ed Parker did invite Bruce to speak at the 1964 Long Beach International Karate Championships, but there was no impromptu challenge match as the film portrays. Lee only demonstrated two-finger push ups and his famed one-inch punch.
• This Bruce Lee is scared by an evil spirit chasing him in his dreams. The real Lee was certainly influenced by spiritual beliefs like Buddhism and Taoism, but he was a self-confessed Atheist and was not known to be superstitious or into the occult (rather the opposite, in fact).