Bruce Lee wrote down his ideas in small notebooks that he carried with him all the time. These notebook pages were full of proposals for television series and movies. During the time when he was making the series The Green Hornet, Lee, for example, was already twiddling an idea for a TV series for which he even had a title, Ah Shaam, which followed the adventures of a Chinese martial arts teacher in the Wild West in the middle of the Tong wars in San Francisco. Ah Shaam, the protagonist traveled from China to the Far West to free all the slaves from the Chinese mafias in the United States in the second half of the 19th century and in the first two decades of the 20th century. This fighter begins in San Francisco, but then travels the entire United States from end to end making sure justice is being served in all of the cities that are under duress from the Chee Kong Tong mafia. In his notebook, according to the biography from Mathew Polly Bruce Lee: A Life, he had written down: ‘San Francisco’ and ‘Ronin’.
This plot is reminiscent of the Kung-Fu story by Keith Carradine, but in this scenario the ronin is not a mongrel, or, much less, a Shaolin monk. The notebooks and the seven-page proposal that Bruce Lee wrote for Warner Bros have no date, so it has not been possible to determine if the story takes place before or after the TV series that did go into production (which also belonged to Warner Bros), from the minds of Howard Friendlander and Ed Spielman (The series was inspired by the experience Spielman had touring the entire Chinatown from the United States in the 60s). The situation, as we understand it, is that Bruce Lee changed the name of the series from ‘Ah Shaam’ to ‘The Warrior’ and sold the rights to Warner Bros. The project was crippled while waiting for the results from the box office of The Big Boss. The film was a success and the television series was forgotten. This took place on October 1971.
Now, 47 years later, The Warrior (Cinemax) sees the light! Behind the camara is director Justin Lin (Fast & Furious 6 and Star Trek Beyond) and the writer and scriptwriter Jonathan Tropper (co-creator of Banshee). They have turned Bruce Lee’s seven-page proposal into an “action-packed crime drama.” The idea has undergone some changes. The protagonist continues to be called Ah Sahm, is also a martial arts prodigy who immigrated from China, but in this case before doing good, he becomes a hitman for one of the most powerful criminal families in San Francisco, something that sounds slightly like Into The Badlands (AMC) – the hitman that later turns for the good.
The idea to resurrect Lee’s series commenced in 2013 when Justin Lin began to negotiate with Bruce Lee Enterprises. The series is based on Lee’s handwritten notes found by his daughter Shannon Lee and not on the one Lee had developed for Warner Bros. And, of course, on his phenomenal fighting style, huaaaaaw!
