And it was a Xeroxed copy of a receipt, a copy that anyone could fabricate on a home copy machine. Do you recognize the guy all the way on the right? If you want to look it up, the SEAL manual number is K-431-0097.Blake Harris: Great. Then we started meeting on a regular basis over at the VA hospital in Westwood. Kurt had played football at Prairie View College in the 60's. This was significant not only because he wrote the screenplay for Bloodsport, but also because Dux had said some unflattering things about the writer. I mean, they put it on the shelf for two years. And we actually got hired by Motown to write this script! She said, "Wait a minute, I'll be right back" and then comes in with the same magazine. And I said, "Hey, asshole, I'm right over here." joins Paul, June, and Jason to break down the 1994 Sly Stallone & Sharon Stone thriller The Specialist, a movie that argues bombs are more precise weapons than guns. And, like I said, it got me my first agent, a guy named Harold Moskowitz[starts laughing] who, a little while later, was looking for help with another one of his clients. In Etruscan society, gladiatorial games were supposed to be part of the funerary rituals honoring the dead. During the tournament, Dux battles an array of international fighters from various schools of martial arts. When. On this episode of Matinee Monday, Paul Scheer looks back at the "How Did This Get Made?" episode with Nicole Byer on the 1988 cult f. Bloodsport is the name of several supervillains appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics.All of these versions exist in DC's main shared universe, known as the DC Universe.. What is he, a walking dictionary of a secret society? You said "we were working on a sequel." I met Gladys, the woman of my dreams, I had a baby, and I'm miserable. We needed at least $20 million to do this thing right and it looked like it might happen, but it didn't. I'm not gonna stoop to his level. "Tagline:The True Story of an American Ninja. And he was friendly to me. Bloodsport wasn't an Oscar-worthy film in any manner (the original cut was deemed unwatchable and a re-edit was completed before release), but Van Damme's stoic charisma and the memorable. Live from Largo in L.A. they get into Samuel L. Jackson's infamous death scene, LL Cool J's relationship with his bird, Stellan Skarsgrd's new name, and how Saffron Burrows is the film's true villain. So it was lot of college hijinks, trying to get girls and all that stuff. And it wasn't even for the right trophy. And then there was the famous meeting between Jean-Claude and Menahem on La Cienega Boulevard. A simultaneously misleading and fitting title was certainly bestowed upon Bloodsport 4: The Dark Kumite, by far the worst installment of the franchise by a longshot. He was very stiff. I genuinely believed that he believes everything he told me.Sheldon Lettich: I'd tend to agree with you on that. He had an answering machine at the time that had a limit of, like, 50 messages. With Bloodsport and Deadshot picking up each other weapons in battle. Sheldon wrote Legionnaire and was supposed to direct it, but then Jean-Claude got someone else. He was pure, he didn't do drugs. Back when I first started working with Stallone, my agent had told me to bring an idea to pitch him for a script. I don't really want to give this guy a platform for more publicity because that's what he's always looking for.". Are you guys still friendly?Sheldon Lettich: Oh yeah. Dux's trophy from the Bahamas event was at least partially made in the San Fernando Valley. But yes, Idris Elba did an amazing job being the reluctant leader. That's just how funny memory can cloud things. He owes you two more movies! But then Menahem decided he didn't want to make the movie.Blake Harris: Why?Sheldon Lettich: In his words, I'm quoting, "Jean-Claude can't even play one character, how do you expect him to play two?" In 1993, Dux got beaten up by a guy in the first tournament, a guy by the name of "Nasty" Zane Frazier, who is known for knocking himself out when he and his opponent rolled out of the ring and hit the floor. This was all very, very low budget. It made its budget back just the first weekend on the west coast. Originally he'd planned for it to take place in present day, but I just thought that if you've got all of these fighters coming from all of the world like they did in Bloodsportand basically he was just trying to do a different version of Bloodsportthat it would make things more interesting if, for example, this took place in the 1920s because then it becomes really difficult for all these fighters from different parts of the world to journey to this contest.Blake Harris: So Frank was originally hired to write the script for The Quest?Sheldon Lettich: Frank, and they actually put another writer on with Frank. I had them cut down so it would fit him because I'm a bigger guy. I don't know if they ever approached Chuck Norris, but Chuck didn't seem right. In exchange for dropping the suit, they offered me the rights to The Corsican Brothers, which I readily agreed to because, by then, Jean-Claude was trying to get a project set up with Moshe Diamant. And he just started laughing and he says, "Frank, you're crazy. So I watched that happen and then I watched Victor Moore fight Chuck Norris.Blake Harris: Moore fought Bruce Lee and then Chuck Norris? I imagine it's hard to write a personal, firsthand account like that.Frank Dux: Here's the thing. ", How Did This Get Made:A Conversation With Sheldon Lettich, Screenwriter Of Bloodsport, How Did This Get Made: A Conversation with Frank Dux, the Real-Life Inspiration for Bloodsport. I think that's why people really love it. He would punch the bricks, breaking them apart. He was born with all sorts of birth defectshe had one leg shorter than the other, he didn't have a jawboneand because of my own, I don't know, "disability," we became friends. They could shut me out from sequel rights. The concept of gladiatorial games has its roots in the Etruscans, the predecessors of the Romans. Yet with Bloodsport, this was not the case. Okay, try him out. Like I'm a kook because he comes out of a James Bond movie: You Only Live Twice. How did that come about?Sheldon Lettich: Well, it's interesting. But the real contest was just punches to the chest, and Moore beat Lee like 4-2. He kept saying, "Jean-Claude is poison!" And so we climbed back over the wall and onto the set. It's a psychological issue that, believe it or not, happens more than you would think. Well I did, and I landed one right on his nose.Blake Harris: Really?Frank Dux: Yeah, and he was not happy about that. And it may be a typical Hollywood story, but you still never see it coming. But what's crazy is almost everything he says in that interview is an outright lie or a distortion.Blake Harris: I've interviewed a lot of people in my timeincluding a lot of people I believe were trying to sell me on liesbut I never got the sense from Frank that he was trying to put one over on me. I met this guy Sheldon Lettich, who had done a play called Tracers and we became friends. In the early to mid 90s, dinosaurs were soooo cool! And I gotta give him credit there. Like with Legionnaire. He didn't like it. Nobody clapped for Sheldon. So I said, "As long as you're going to have martial arts, why not get Frank?" Absolutely. That it would be helpful and therapeutic.Blake Harris: And was it? A college football comedy, of all things, that took place at a black college in Texas during the 60s.Blake Harris: I think that also earns "left field" status.Sheldon Lettich: [laughing] Maybe. KUMITE! 2. level 2. And on it, they didn't even spell my name correctly. Following his appearances in the two preceding sequels, Daniel Bernhardt returns in the new role of Agent John Keller, who goes into prison . All of this was prior to Bloodsport. And that was the difference. He was totally against any kind of steroids. And we did. How Did This Get Made is a companion to the podcastHow Did This Get MadewithPaul Scheer, Jason MantzoukasandJuneDiane Raphaelwhich focuses on movies. They were just being assholes.Blake Harris: That seemed to happen a lot at CannonSheldon Lettich: Now Blake, I have never filed a lawsuit against anyone in this business, but I filed a lawsuit against those guys, against Cannon. And we made money on that film. And was that something that you and Jean-Claude consciously tried to deliver (or to avoid)?Sheldon Lettich: We tried to do something atypical with Lionheart. She loved it. But Mark had permission to use his name and to basically say that this was a real story. And he said yeah. Viking Samurai 104K subscribers Subscribe 546 16K views 1 year ago How did the Bloodsport Redux trailer go viral and Why this movie needs to get made! I wasn't an actor, but I was a writer, so I got in touch with John and we hit it off. We're not friends [anymore] and he does everything in his power to try and paint me as being a nutball or a kook because of it.Blake Harris: That's why I wanted to focus this piece on you, so you can tell the story in your own words.Frank Dux: So now you're starting to hear the real truth of the matter, you know what I mean? Was Sheldon the first person you shared it with?Frank Dux: Well, it was supposed to be a series. Jean-Claude Van Damme." Sheldon Lettich: In Menahem's defense, I saw the first cutwe all the saw first cutand it was really bad. He's been carrying on like that for years and years. Fights don't go down like that." And the two of them, they didn't talk about it, but they'd basically bicker through their agents because neither one wanted to be the criminal who gets killed at the end. It's a tale so amazing that two months after the film's release, it was dismissed by the L.A. Times as nothing but a fabricated "macho fantasy." Bloodsport (original trailer 720p en) Watch on Synopsis: U.S. Army Captain Frank Dux ( Jean-Claude Van Damme ), who had been trained as a boy by the legendary Ninjutsu master Senzo Tanaka,. I remember him saying, "Michael Dudikoff is a movie star! How much of the story really happened? Because you didn't do it in Hong Kong." Give me a shot with him." 20th Century Fox was high on Only the Strong and we all kind of expected that movie to do better than it did. In 1987's Superman #4, by John Byrne and Karl Kesel, Superman tried to stop Bloodsport's rampage through Metropolis. "Frank Dux: Yeah. Although there is no convenient way to verify each and every detail connected with this story, the editors have verified enough of the basic facts to feel confident in publishing it. And I was writing for Stallone at the time and I actually asked Jean-Claude for some help with some of the dialogue for a script I was working on.Blake Harris: I imagine that this was during that timeabout two years or sowhen Bloodsport just kind of sat there on the shelves. Enter the Ninja?Sheldon Lettich: No, there was no script prior to the "Bloodsport" script. And a lot of pain, I guess, made me fight. Tiger Tanaka, right? He's got a lot of abilities. This thing, it had legs, and started traveling around the world (London, Australia, etc. When I heard that name, it was like bells started ringing. I actually got to take my mother for the first time to see the film. Because Jean-Claude uses people and chews them up as quick as he can. And so we had a great time. Like in South America it was called "Vale Tudo" and if the Japanese were running the event it was "Kumite San Soo," so this was a word that described them all.Blake Harris: That's interesting. But Michael Dudikoff is like 6'2," and the problem was they wanted to film in Asia. Because this is what happened next Sheldon Lettich: So they sent me to Paris and Corsica to do research and I re-wrote The Corsican Brothers, which I was going to direct. And so yeah. It was a no-budget. JCVD RE-EDITED THE MOVIE HIMSELF TO GET IT . In fact, Midway Games attempted to license Van Damme's image for the game. In Enter the Ninja, I didn't use my real name. So Grant's dad, he basically saw that I was struggling to make money so our family could eat and I could buy myself shoes. Menahem had also seen the little 16mm movie [Firefight] I directed and was going to give me my first directing deal.Blake Harris: For you to direct a Lone Wolf McQuade sequel starring Leon Isaac Kennedy and Chuck Norris?Sheldon Lettich: Yes, except that Chuck didn't want to do it. In this case several members of the staff have invested considerable amounts of time and energy checking the details of the following article, which was the product of a series of four interviews conducted over a period of three months. Like, very famously, he turned down Demolition Man. But it was interesting because he's fighting Mike Stone and Mike Stone had reportedly 91 wins. The truth of the matter is that Jean-Claude had done a film called No Retreat, No Surrender. I said to Frank, "That's a great title for a movie." KUMITE! And then Gary Sinese saw the play in New York and he wanted to put it on in Chicago. Over the centuries, however, these . "He's written this Vietnam novel," my agent said, "that the novel's way too long and overwritten. In the end, his psyche was broken when Jimmy Olsen brought his brother onto the scene. Synopsis:U.S. Army Captain Frank Dux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who had been trained as a boy by the legendary Ninjutsu master Senzo Tanaka, decides to honor his mentor by taking the place of Tanaka's dead son in an illegal, no-holds-barred martial arts tournament called the "Kumite. But to my pleasant surprise, Lettich was a complete gentleman. They each got three chances to punch (and block) one another. KUMITE! We encountered a few phonies, but eventually we put together a core group. Like Bloodsport is one of his best movies ever but it still resulted in a great episode. Plus, we hear LL Cool J's hip-hop prayer and the best . That's what they always show on the history channel, those two to the head. KUMITE! And here comes Moore, and Moore drops him in under 30 seconds. Plus the guy was just an idol of mine. "But Sly," I said, "it really wouldn't work that way because one thing that's been established with Rambo is that he's the baddest motherf***er in the world, but he doesn't want to fight. A secret martial arts contest? Blake Harris: The Black Belt article got a lot of attention and certainly must have piqued the interest of some folks in Hollywood. Why not make a budd. And then Troutman gets captured by the Russians and Rambo's feeling guilt because he let his buddy down. So those are the three elements. He went in and redid it. An animatronic dinosaur with a teen's brain, dinosaur charades, a weird striptease for a brain in a bowl, and much more. And he showed up and said, "I see he didn't show up." KUMITE! The ninja school if you want to call it that. Frank and I did write a couple of scripts together, and he received credit on both of them. Shortly after running our last piece, How Did This Get Made: A Conversation with Frank Dux, the Real-Life Inspiration for Bloodsport, I was put in touch with Sheldon Lettich. And he did. And I remember Mark telling us, "Menahem is thinking of casting this guy Gene Claude Van Damme. Look, I take people at face value because I'm not a bulls***ter. And it became real clear and finallyI said show me the proof that I represented myself as a war hero, as a Medal of Honor hero? I buy you dinner tonight." And then the fight was on. That picture with my hands crossed, you can see Bloodsport in the background. Showed him a few screenplays that I had written and we decided to work together on this. Sheldon tells everybody that I told him a story of how I fought these events and he thought that would make a great movie and all this kind of stuff. I was there at every meeting and, of course, they were getting all the ideas out of me. So I was curious why you think you were so skilled? And I said, "Okay, Sheldon, you get the credits, and then when you get up to the next level, you just bring me up." And Tanaka was well known. You know, there's a certain romanticism to that. You can listen to theBloodsportedition of the HDTGM podcasthere. What follows is a conversation with Frank Dux, who was the real-life inspiration behind the movie Bloodsport. And one of those people was Sylvester Stallone, who had put the word out that he was looking for someone to help him write Rambo III. But Menahem had an in-house fixer named Michael J. Duthie, a really good editor, and he basically re-worked the movie. It's incredible." So to compensate, they put me in these metal boots. But I didn't sleep with a reporter beforehand and I certainly didn't break into my instructor's house and steal a sword. But they called me from Hong KongFrank and Jean-Claudelamenting the fact that "Mark DiSalle was messing up the script." I don't remember in detail what our first interaction was like, but we just kind of hit it off.Blake Harris: Was it weird for you at all, as a Vietnam veteran, to be working on a book about the war that was written by someone who hadn't been there?Sheldon Lettich: Well, I didn't know that at the time. And Jean-Claude's phone began ringing off the hook. Commander Alexander Martin available for review. Because my idea for Rambo III was: well, there's only one place Rambo could goAfghanistan. "Blake Harris: [laughter]Sheldon Lettich: I tried to make my case. Jeez. When I was growing up, you couldn't even find "martial arts" in the encyclopedia. After the fight, I go down to him and I said, "Hey, Mr. Moore, do you remember me?" That's bullshit, that's total bullshit.Blake Harris: What about those claims regarding your covert military background? At that point, it was to their advantage. So cool, in fact, that now we have a professional basketball team called The Raptors and no one raised an eyebrow about why a team from Tornoto, Canada would be named that. Use promo code BONKERS for a free month. What was the reaction like from Sheldon, Jean-Claude and Mark [DiSalle]?Frank Dux: They didn't care at that point. Nobody clapped or wanted to have their picture taken with you. Released in theaters 35 years ago, on Feb. 26, 1988, Bloodsport starred Van Damme as Frank Dux, a U.S. Army soldier who leaves the military to enter a fight-to-the-death martial arts tournament in . 4. So you have to get everyone on the same page and agree to make this movie. You wanted to help him be successful. Apparently, Stallone had read the same article and he was thinking exactly the same thing. And it misrepresents my responses. It sold well at the box office, grossing $65 million on a budget of $1.5-2.3 million. How conscious were youand I don't mean with that movie, but in generalabout that kind of formula. I wasn't there. That's what really happened. I kid you not.Blake Harris: So you weren't some kind of jiujutsu prodigy?Frank Dux: Not at all. So he pitched me the story for Kickboxer and I said, "Well, if you're looking for a martial arts film, I've got one of my own that I think you might likeBloodsport." Menahem says, "Oh, Corsican Brothers, that's perfect for Jean-Claude! "Bloodsport" follows Frank Dux, an American martial artist serving in the military, who decides to leave the army to compete in a martial arts tournament in Hong Kong where fights to the death can occur. And I said, "If you're gonna go, just don't pull me with you." This thingwhatever it was calledit was really cool and it would be a cool way to meet chicks.Blake Harris: And how did you go from passively enjoying these things to actual participating and learning how to fight?Frank Dux: I guess one of the things that helped push me in that direction was that I befriended a kid named Grant who had it far worse than myself. And, at that lunch, Mark agreed and hired me to write the script for Bloodsport.Blake Harris: Frank mentioned he already had a script? I should mention that within hours of the piece begin published, we received several unsolicited e-mails from people who had been there and had a significantly different memory of the screening.Sheldon Lettich: [laughing] I'll let you readers draw their own conclusions. And if somebody tells me they were in Vietnam, and in the Marine Corps, I'll believe them. He said, "To be the best, you've gotta fight the best, kid." They were doing a showing of Bloodsport in a theater in my old home town and I just happened to be visiting. They didn't have any proper uniforms. I made a joke and it just took him out of it, snapped him out of it.Blake Harris: Laughter is the best medicine, right?Frank Dux: I took him out of it. These targets included the planned mining of a Nicaraguan port and the planned sabotage of certain Nicaraguan installations including power stations and weapons depots, codenamed OPERATION CORDOBA HARBOR. Well you know how that ended up. That kind of caught my fancy. Mark was against it first, but I said, "Look, I can do a lot with this guy. He basically makes up these stories, casts himself as the leading character and somehow convinces himself that he really did this stuff. And when I told about him the purpose of this How Did This Get Made seriesto investigate how movies got made, and the careers of those involvedhe was happy to clear up any misconceptions and provide additional insights into the making of Bloodsport, his two decades of collaboration with Jean-Claude Van Damme and what it takes to write a badass, blow-em-up action film. And I showed them, here's an issue of Black Belt magazine from two years prior to this; and here's a photo of me in that magazine from January 1976 right after I won it, holding the trophy. That was really my very first entry into the Writer's Guild.Blake Harris: Moving up the ranksSheldon Lettich: Yeah, and around this time I wrote a Vietnam screenplay that got me my first agent. I had my then-fianc back in the United States get all the uniforms for them. It's the amazing tale of Frank Dux, a Caucasian martial artist who fought in (and won) a ruthless secret tournament that's held only once every five years. 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