I was at the movies the other day when I overheard a couple of people talking about Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood. A young fellow with a beard said he thought the film was all right, but that he objected to its portrayal of Bruce Lee who, he said, "wasn't like that at all."
I understand what the young man was talking about. In Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood Bruce Lee is portrayed by Mike Moh as a mouthy braggart who claims he would "cripple" Muhammad Ali in a street fight. He gets his comeuppance when stunt performer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) throws him into the side of a Lincoln Continental. (Some people say that Booth beats up Lee in the movie, but that's really not the case; they actually fight to a draw before their contest is interrupted by an angry stunt coordinator.)
Some people who knew Lee--particularly his family--got mad at Tarantino for depicting him in this way. They contend Lee was always humble and courteous and would have never acted like the character in the movie acts.
Others, including Tarantino, say, "Yeah, well, Bruce Lee kinda was this way. He was proud and sometimes arrogant and might not have been above trying to wipe the smirk off some stunt performer's pretty face."
Bruce Lee was an athlete, a competitor, and a human being. He must have had a sizable ego. He probably could be humble and charming. And in other situations, he could probably be a jerk.
I didn't know him. Neither did Tarantino. And neither did the young man in the movie theater, unless he's the victim of some Benjamin Button reverse-aging syndrome. Lee died in 1973.
Still, even if the real Bruce Lee would never have fought a stuntman because the stuntman laughed at his self-mythologizing (because Bruce Lee never engaged in self-mythologizing), I don't have any problem with Tarantino imagining a fictional Lee and placing him in the fictional context of Tarantino's painted-from-memory movie, set in an alternative 1969.
At this point, Bruce Lee has apotheosized into a durable pop culture symbol, like Elvis and Marilyn and James Dean, an image bound to be appropriated by anyone looking to borrow some period cool. His celebrity has metastasized into what passes for immortality.
Plenty of people are willing to interpret what he means. Tarantino's use of his image, accurate or not, is inconsequential. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood is not the final verdict on Bruce Lee. No one should believe Tarantino is striving to present a fair and balanced portrait of Bruce Lee in a movie that--spoiler alert--dramatically ignores settled facts and alters history.
I resisted telling the young man in the movie theater this because like the real Bruce Lee, I'm not always a jerk. I can understand why people deeply invested in Lee might not like what Tarantino did with the character, but I enjoy the way the scene played out.
But if I am OK with Tarantino goofing around with Bruce Lee's image in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, why am I distressed by Clint Eastwood's treatment of a character named Kathy Scruggs in his film Richard Jewell?
Because Kathy Scruggs is not Bruce Lee.
Like him, she is now dead. She was a police reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1996 when a bomb went off at a park during the Summer Olympic Games. She correctly reported that the FBI was looking at Jewell, a security guard who'd discovered the device minutes before it exploded and saved the lives of dozens of people, as the prime suspect in that bombing.
For the next three months, Jewell's life was made hellish as he was scrutinized by the media and law enforcement. After that, he was exonerated. Eventually American terrorist Eric Rudolph was identified as the bomber and arrested. He confessed and is living out his life in a SuperMax penitentiary.
Jewell died in 2007 of complications from diabetes. He was 44 years old, and it's not difficult to imagine that his ordeal contributed to his death. He should have never been named as a suspect. Leaking his name to the press was inappropriate.
But I don't know what Scruggs did wrong. Eastwood and screenwriter Billy Ray create a scene where she gets information from an FBI agent--an invented character played by Jon Hamm-- by promising to sleep with him. Eastwood and Ray imply this was routine for Scruggs, just the way she operated.
There's no evidence for this. Scruggs is conveniently dead, otherwise Eastwood and Ray and Warner Bros. might be subject to the same sort of legal actions that Richard Jewell filed against various entities after his name was dragged through the mud. (All of whom settled with him except the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which prevailed in the defamation action filed against it by Jewell's estate because "the articles in their entirety were substantially true at the time they were published--even though the investigators' suspicions were ultimately deemed unfounded.")
That's not saying the AJC was perfect; it wasn't. Lots of people covered themselves in shame in the feeding frenzy. Scruggs was colorful. She might have been overzealous--many cop reporters are aggressive. (I was.) The reporting could have been more measured and skeptical of the government sources. But people in this business make mistakes. (Last week in this space I typed Indonesia when I meant Indochina, and a lot of people caught it.)
Bruce Lee is an icon; Kathy Scruggs was a police reporter. She had health problems and died in 2001 of an overdose of prescription pain pills for a chronic back problem. She was 41 years old. You probably never heard of her before this week.
Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood is a fantasy. When I first saw it, before I'd read much about it, I described it as a memory play along the lines of Alfonso Cuaron's Roma. (I have to quit saying that because I've since heard Tarantino describe it in precisely the same way.) It's a work of the imagination that plays with our conceptions of real characters as well as Hollywood prototypes. It's not perfect, but it's a work of art.
Richard Jewell is well-acted, well-shot hack work that strives for relevance by leaning heavily into the truth of the story it's based upon. While it includes invented and composite characters, it purports to tell us something about the Jewell affair.
Maybe it means to remind us that the reputations of ordinary people are small but precious things easily crushed by the assumptions of the pompous and powerful.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 12/15/2019