But it seems Cliff – and the incident on set – is not pure fantasy after all. Known as “the toughest man alive”, real life Hollywood hard man, two-time national judo champion and master of grappling Gene LeBell worked with Lee as a stuntman on The Green Hornet.

“That’s when I first met Bruce Lee,” LeBell recalls in an undated interview on YouTube. “He is a world class martial artist, and a wonderful guy. And the fellah that ran the stunts on it told me, ‘Hey, the guy that drives the car [Lee’s character, Kato] wants to do all the fights and the other actor isn’t athletic and he doesn’t wanna do it, so this Chinese guy wants to do it. So we want someone that knows martial arts and can take falls for him’.”

The co-author of LeBell’s autobiography, The Godfather of Grappling, tells the story a bit differently. Bob Calhoun caught up with LeBell – now 87 years old – again to discuss the Tarantino scene in an article published last week for online magazine Ozy.

Calhoun writes that LeBell was brought in by the show’s stunt coordinator to deal with Lee, who was “kicking the s*** out of the stuntman” because they couldn’t convince him that he could go easy and it would still look good on film.

LeBell told Calhoun he was told by stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to put Lee “in a headlock or something” – so he grabbed Lee when he got to set.

“He started making all those noises that he became famous for,” LeBell told Calhoun. “But he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he was more surprised than anything else.”

LeBell said he put Lee on his back in a fireman’s carry and ran around the set, with Lee supposedly shouting “put me down or I’ll kill you!”.

“I can’t put you down or you’ll kill me,” LeBell said was his response, before he finally gave in, adding “Hey, Bruce, don’t kill me. Just kidding champ.”

Instead of being angry, Lee realised his jeet kune do style of martial arts – which, true to his idiom “be water”, took elements of multiple different styles to create something more effective – was lacking grappling.

“I ended up working for The Green Hornet, doing a lot of the shows, and I got close to Bruce Lee and he came down to my school and worked out for over a year privately,” LeBell said in the previous interview.

“And I went and worked out with him at his school. I taught him judo and wrestling and stuff like that and some finishing holds which he later worked into some movies, and he showed me most of the kicks and striking which even today I use in the movies. A wonderful, wonderful man and a great martial artist.”

Indeed, Lee beat Sammo Hung with an arm bar in Enter The Dragon and Chuck Norris with a chokehold in Way of the Dragon. So Calhoun wasn’t too happy with Tarantino’s depiction of Lee.

“Actually knowing LeBell makes Tarantino’s fiction all the more galling. In his cute little scene, Tarantino sells both Lee and LeBell short,” Calhoun writes.

“When LeBell scooped Lee up on the set of The Green Hornet, he was already a world-class martial artist when there weren’t that many in the United States.

“LeBell parlayed his pain-inducing skills into careers in martial arts, professional wrestling and Hollywood stunt work, making him the ultimate a**-kicking Renaissance man. And this is what it took to just pick up Bruce Lee and clown him during a TV shoot.

“Somebody like Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth would have just been one of the guys begging the show’s stunt coordinator to call in Judo Gene.”

UFC commentator Joe Rogan – also a good friend of LeBell – sees things a little differently to Calhoun, though.

“I’ve known Gene for years, he’s always super respectful about Bruce Lee. But let me put it this way, if Bruce Lee fought Gene LeBell, he [LeBell] would grab a hold of him and obliterate his head on the concrete one hundred out of one hundred times,” Rogan said on a recent episode of his YouTube podcast.

“Gene LeBell would crush him. He’s a gorilla. It would have been quick. He’s a judo champion with a severe arsenal of neck cranks and joint locks and he is strong like a f****** bear. In his prime he was a tank of a man. Far bigger than Bruce Lee.

“If Gene LeBell really wanted to grab a hold of Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee would be unconscious. As would I, as would many, many other trained martial artists.”

Rogan took umbrage with Lee being portrayed, in his opinion, by Tarantino as “a buffoon” who gets beaten up by “some random dude who is a stuntman” with no apparent martial arts training.

But Rogan said it would make sense if Tarantino based Booth’s character on LeBell, because he was a legendary stuntman, and he was friends with Lee. “If that’s who he’s supposed to be portraying in the movie … if they showed that Brad Pitt was some judo champion that become a martial artists later, then OK, maybe,” Rogan said.

“I guarantee you it didn’t go down like that between them,” he said. “If they did have a fight … Jesus Christ, it would have been horrific. Judo people are different, man. Their core is so goddamn strong. They have this insane ability to manipulate bodies.”