Cliff Booth and Bruce Lee's Green Hornet set altercation

Cliff Booth and Bruce Lee's Green Hornet set altercation turns a public disagreement over stunt work into a physical contest with lasting professional consequences. In 1966, Cliff was doubling Rick Dalton on The Green Hornet when he challenged Bruce Lee’s boasts about fighting. What Bruce proposed as a friendly test became a painful collision; Cliff was fired, his stunt work with Rick largely ended, and the encounter left both men with reason to expect another confrontation.

Background: a dispute over respect

At the time, Bruce Lee was known to American stuntmen less as a future movie star than as Kato on The Green Hornet. Cliff, meanwhile, had a reputation in the stunt community as a ringer: an outsider a stunt gaffer could hire to retaliate, within the conventions of the set, against a director or actor who mistreated the crew. That informal role rested on the stunt team’s inability to answer insults or blows directly. Cliff’s willingness to do so made him useful, but also made his work dependent on a community that could decide it no longer wanted him.

Lee had already acquired a bad reputation among stunt players. He showed little regard for them and, during fight scenes, sometimes tagged them with his fists and feet. Warnings did not change the behavior, and a number of stunt performers refused to work with him. Cliff disliked Lee before the two faced one another: he had watched Lee and Van Williams film a fight, seen the crew applaud Lee’s quick kicks and leaps, and dismissed the display as dancing. Their antagonism therefore preceded the famous contest; the argument on set brought an existing judgment into the open.

The challenge on The Green Hornet

The immediate dispute began while Lee was holding court with the crew. Asked who would win in a fight between him and Muhammad Ali, Lee said he would beat Ali senseless if anything were allowed. He had studied 16-millimeter footage of Ali and noticed that Ali dropped his left, but understood that a boxing match would favor the heavyweight champion. Lee’s confidence instead rested on a hypothetical fight without gloves, in which he could kick. Cliff laughed at the claim, then told Lee he should be embarrassed to imagine beating Ali and challenged his credibility as a fighter.

Lee answered that his hands were registered as lethal weapons and used that as a reason not to fight. Cliff called the explanation an excuse and questioned whether Lee had ever taken a serious punch. With colleagues watching, Lee offered a friendly contest: two out of three falls, with neither man supposed to hurt the other. Cliff accepted. For him, such contests were familiar, though they usually took place in bar parking lots in the early hours of the morning rather than before a film crew.

The opening round went to Lee. He leapt toward Cliff with height but little forward thrust, tapped Cliff in the chest, and knocked him onto his back to the crew’s applause. Cliff got up smiling and asked Lee to do it again. The easy manner of that response disguised how differently the two men understood the contest: Lee had meant to demonstrate his skill without causing injury, while Cliff was prepared to hurt him.

On the next leap, Lee used less height and more forward force. Cliff pivoted at the last moment, caught Lee by the leg and belt, and swung him into a parked car. Lee’s lower back struck the vehicle, and his shoulder blade caught the passenger-door handle. He was badly hurt. The exchange had left the terms of the friendly contest behind: Lee had set out to put Cliff down, but Cliff’s response was deliberately forceful, and he would have accepted the possibility of lasting injury.

Consequences for Cliff’s work

The third round never began. The stunt gaffer’s wife intervened, and Cliff was quickly fired. He had been hired to double Rick on the show, not as a ringer to publicly defeat Kato. The distinction mattered: Cliff’s personal challenge to Lee had become an incident on a production where Cliff’s employment already depended on the approval of people who distrusted him.

Randy Lloyd, the stunt gaffer, had not wanted to hire Cliff because he believed Cliff had killed his wife; Randy’s wife, Janet, shared that belief. The contest added a new reason to reject him: Cliff had tried to break the television lead’s back in front of the crew. After the incident, he effectively stopped being Rick’s stunt double and became his gofer. Rick kept paying him to drive, run errands, and remain available, but the modest salary was meant to be supplemented by stunt jobs. Suspicion that Cliff was a murderer had already made those jobs scarce; the confrontation with Lee further damaged his prospects.

That loss exposed how precarious their working arrangement had become. Once, Cliff’s place on Rick’s projects had been secured by contract, and a chair bearing his name waited on set whenever Rick worked. By the time Rick was guesting on other television shows, Cliff was no longer guaranteed employment. Getting him hired required Rick to speak to a show’s stunt gaffer, whose first responsibility was to his own crew. The Lee incident thus did more than cost Cliff one job: it deepened an existing decline in work and made his livelihood still more dependent on Rick’s intervention.

An unresolved conflict

Cliff expected the incident to follow him beyond the set. He knew Hollywood was small enough that he might encounter Lee again on a street, in a parking lot, at a restaurant, or at a traffic light, and he imagined that only the police would interrupt a future fight. The account does not describe a later meeting; instead, it leaves the possibility of renewed violence suspended over their separation.

The episode also sharpens the contrast between the men’s different forms of performance. Lee’s extraordinary movement had impressed the crew, while Cliff treated the display as a challenge to the practical toughness he valued. In the contest, Lee’s first leap won applause, but Cliff’s second-round counterattack produced an injury and an immediate professional cost for himself. The stuntman’s ability to turn a staged encounter into real violence may have served the logic of the ringer, but here it crossed the boundary between workplace retaliation and dangerous personal conflict. Cliff emerged not with a secure place in the stunt community, but with less work, a damaged relationship to the set, and a grievance he believed could flare again.