Cliff Booth and Bruce Lee Fight / Braddu Pittu Prease

About

Cliff Booth and Bruce Lee Fight / Braddu Pittu Prease is an image macro meme based on a controversial scene from the 2019 film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, where Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt fights Bruce Lee, played by Mike Moh. The scene inspired numerous image edits, including some that a mimick a stereotypical Asian-American accent through the phrase "Brad Pitt Please".

Origin

On July 26th, 2019, Sony Pictures release the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood… in theaters.^[1] In the film, the character Bruce Lee monologues about his mastery of hand-to-hand combat. Stuntman Cliff Booth, who is watching Lee talk, mocks the actor and the two fight (shown below).

Controversy

Following the release of the film, some objected the portrayal of Bruce Lee. Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter, criticized the characterization presented in the movie.^[2] She said:

"I can understand all the reasoning behind what is portrayed in the movie. I understand that the two characters are antiheroes and this is sort of like a rage fantasy of what would happen… and they’re portraying a period of time that clearly had a lot of racism and exclusion.

I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-ass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.

Lee's former co-star, former professional basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said the scene "disturbed" him. He wrote in the Hollywood Reporter:^[3]

That’s why it disturbs me that Tarantino chose to portray Bruce in such a one-dimensional way. The John Wayne machismo attitude of Cliff (Brad Pitt), an aging stuntman who defeats the arrogant, uppity Chinese guy harks back to the very stereotypes Bruce was trying to dismantle. Of course the blond, white beefcake American can beat your fancy Asian chopsocky dude because that foreign crap doesn’t fly here.

I might even go along with the skewered version of Bruce if that wasn’t the only significant scene with him, if we’d also seen a glimpse of his other traits, of his struggle to be taken seriously in Hollywood. Alas, he was just another Hey Boy prop to the scene. The scene is complicated by being presented as a flashback, but in a way that could suggest the stuntman’s memory is cartoonishly biased in his favor.

Actor Mike Moh defended his performance and the film. He said in a interview with Birth.Movies.Death:^[4]

I'm not going to tell you what the original script had exactly, but when I read it, I was so conflicted because he’s my hero – Bruce in my mind was literally a God. He wasn't a person to me, he was a superhero.

[…]

It's a hugely important scene – what better way to show how dangerous Cliff is than for him to show up and even match him for a little bit with Bruce? And the only reason why I got thrown into that car is because I was so cocky, like, oh I'm going to do this again. And at that moment when I get slammed, that's when Bruce realizes, oh shit, this guy is not just a stunt guy. Because Bruce didn't always have the most affection for stuntmen; he didn't respect all of them, because he was better than all the stunt guys. So after I got slammed, I get serious. And then we get into this scuffle, which is stopped – so it's a tie. I can see how people might think Bruce got beat because of the impact with the car, but you give me five more seconds and Bruce would have won.

Image Macro Series

The image of Booth bracing and stretching Lee's arm grew in popularity over the next year. On August 22nd, 2019, an anonymous 4chan user posted a screenshot of the moment to the /sp/ board (shown below).^[5]

That day, an anonymous 4chan^[8] user posted the image with the caption, "NOOOOOO BARADU PITTU PREEEEZE SUM WAN SATOPPU HIM." The caption helped begin a trend in which memers mimic Lee's voice through text by posting phrases that mock stereotypical Asian accents by replacing Ls with Rs and adding Us to the end of words.

On January 3rd, 2020, comics artist Joshua Luna published a comic of the scene, criticizing Pitt and the depiction of Asians in Hollywood (shown below).^[6]

The scene spread throughout 4chan's /tv/ board as a means to undermine or make fun of other users, particularly Bruce Lee fans and Asian posters. Most of it, is done by editing, captioning or photoshopping the faces on both Cliff Booth and Bruce Lee (example below, right).

Others used other media to represent the fight. On May 16th, an anonymous 4chan^[7] user posted a GIF of a recreation of the scene using the video game Tekken (shown below, left).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References