NEW YORK - In the 1970s, martial-arts legend Bruce Lee came up with an idea for a television drama: a gifted martial artist moves from China to San Francisco in the late 1800s and lands right in the middle of its bloody Chinatown gang wars.

He brought it to several American television studios, but they all turned him down because they could not see an Asian actor headlining a Hollywood show. Later, one of the studios even made a similar series, Kung Fu (1972 to 1975), and cast a white actor as the half-Chinese protagonist instead of Lee.