PROFILE, Page 92He's Got To Have It His WayAngry over racial inequities and stereotypes, filmmaker SPIKE LEEcombines his message and his own pop image into a provocativemedia voiceBy Jeanne McDowell
As producer, director and writer of the homecoming-queen
coronation ceremony in his senior year at Morehouse College, Spike
Lee had a vision. He imagined a sophisticated beauty pageant,
reminiscent of the old Hollywood musicals he loved. Rather than the
usual lineup of leggy girls scantily clad in slinky dresses, he
pictured beribboned beauties in floor-length ball gowns. Lee failed
to anticipate the outrage of campus males when they learned they
would be deprived of the show of flesh that was traditionally part
of homecoming. A group ganged up on the young producer, threatening
to beat him up. But Lee stood firm. "In the end he did it his way,"
recalls Monty Ross, a friend from Lee's college days and vice
president of his production company, 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks.
"It was Spike's vision that won out."
These days his subject matter is grittier, but Spike Lee is
still fighting to make movies on his own terms. Paramount Pictures,
Lee claims, asked him to tone down the ending of Do the Right
Thing, his incendiary new film about race relations, so the
32-year-old director took his picture to Universal rather than
subdue the race riot in his final scene. Fiercely independent, Lee
writes, directs and produces his films to prevent others from
"meddling." He doesn't have an agent, publicist or manager, but the
trade-offs of independence are worth it. "What I get is peace of
mind, sanity. I have control over my work. That outweighs
everything else," he says. "So I don't get invited to Hollywood
parties. So I'm not on the Hollywood circuit. So I don't own a home
in Beverly Hills. So Barbara Walters doesn't include me in her
specials. I don't give a s about all that stuff."
With his spindly legs, goatee and black New York Knicks cap,
Spike Lee looks more like a cartoon character than the creator of
the most controversial film of the summer. He is lean and wiry --
120 lbs. tightly wound around a 5-ft. 6-in. frame. His hip,
distinctively New York style has made him a familiar pop-culture
image: stone-washed jeans, a Nike T-shirt, a leather Public Enemy
medallion around his neck, an ear stud and black Nike Air Jordans,
practically his trademark since he appeared with basketball star
Michael Jordan in Nike ads.
But his expressive style of dress belies an air of
self-containment. Lee is serious and taciturn, especially around
strangers. No one will ever accuse him of ingratiating himself to
reporters; a question that bores him is likely to be answered with
a yawn and roll of his eyes. But press the right button, and he
engages like an assault rifle, his words ricocheting off familiar
targets. He rails against New York Mayor Ed Koch: "He's a racist.
Hopefully my film will force a couple of votes, and Ed won't be
around for long"; Walt Disney: "Snow White, Song of the South? I
hated that stuff. That's the difference between me and Steven
Spielberg"; even Michael Jackson: "Cutting off his Negroid nose,
I think that's sick. It's self-hatred."
But beneath the arrogance he wears like a badge of honor is
the deeper, profound racial anger that fueled Do the Right Thing.
"Racism usually erodes self-confidence. It seems to have triggered
his," observes actress Ruby Dee, who plays Mother Sister in Do the
Right Thing. The Howard Beach incident, in which a black man died
after being chased onto a freeway by a white mob -- an expression
in Lee's mind of a double standard inflicted on blacks -- inspired
the film. Even the controversy that erupted over his use at the end
of the film of a Malcolm X quote condoning violence in the name of
self-defense reflects the pervasiveness of that double standard,
he argues. "We're not allowed to do what everyone else can. The
idea of self-defense is supposed to be what America is based on.
But when black people talk about self-defense, they're militant.
When whites talk about it, they're freedom fighters." Why is black
life less sacred than white life? he asks. Why do blacks need the
"stamp of approval" of whites to feel affirmed? Why are his films
lumped together as black, when each one examines a distinctly
different aspect of the human condition? Looking for racism at
every turn, he finds it.
Lee's own personal conflict is far more subtle than simple
black and white. "I want to be known as a talented young filmmaker.
That should be first," he says. "But the reality today is that no
matter how successful you are, you're black first. You know what
Malcolm X says: `What's a black with a Ph.D.? A nigger.' Why should
I spend my time and energy getting around that. I know who I am,
and I'm comfortable with that . . . It's difficult because I don't
have the luxury white filmmakers have. Hollywood makes 500 films
a year. How many of those are black films? On the one hand you want
to be yourself, on the other hand you can't turn your back on black
people. We're torn."
In each of his films, Lee stirs the social pot. His first
success, She's Gotta Have It, in 1986, explored sexual stereotypes
with the tale of a liberated young black woman who refuses to give
up her three lovers. School Daze, Lee's 1988 musical, examines the
tensions between light- and darker-skinned blacks on an all-black
college campus; it evoked the ire of some blacks, who charged him
with airing the race's dirty laundry in public. With Do the Right
Thing, Lee has produced his most provocative film yet.
It is a passion for filmmaking, not racial anger, however, that
drives the director. "Spike has an appreciation, a love and an
inherent understanding of cinema," notes Barry Brown, who worked
on editing Lee's films for the past four years. Lee's cinematic
preferences run the gamut, from Hector Babenco's Pixote and Martin
Scorsese's Mean Streets to musicals such as The Wizard of Oz and
West Side Story, a taste inherited from his mother. Lee, who has
been called a "black Woody Allen," says he admires Scorsese's work.
But suggest that he has been cinematically influenced by others and
he jumps. "I don't try to emulate anyone -- especially Woody
Allen."
Back in 1976, during his sophomore year at Morehouse, Lee
picked up a Super-8 camera for the first time. As the oldest of
five children growing up in a middle-class section of Brooklyn, he
wasn't particularly interested in movies; he loved sports. But
Lee's parents were creative people who exposed their children to
the arts, instilling in them a deep appreciation of culture. His
father Bill Lee, a bass violinist who played with Odetta, scores
all his films. His mother, who nicknamed Shelton Jackson Lee
"Spike," taught black literature until her death in 1977. Reared
in a home where there was a long tradition of education, Lee
credits his family with being the major influence in his life.
The director's fascination with cinema blossomed at Morehouse,
where he was the third generation of Lees to attend the all-black
college. During the summer of 1977, Lee made his first film: he
drove around Brooklyn and Harlem the day after the New York City
blackout and filmed the looting. Even then, Lee's cinematic eye was
drawn to the absurdity of events that unfolded around him. "In a
lot of ways it was funny to me, like Christmas," he says. "People
were walking out of stores with color TVs."
After graduating from Morehouse in 1979, Lee enrolled at New
York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In his first year
there, he had the temerity to parody D.W. Griffith's classic The
Birth of a Nation in a 20-minute student film that took the great
director to task for his portrayal of blacks in the Old South. He
went on to win a student director's Academy Award for his thesis,
Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, about a Brooklyn barber
who is torn between legitimacy and petty crime. After graduation,
he began work on a drama about a young black bicycle messenger but
was forced to abort the project when financing fell apart. Though
he says it was the most painful period in his career, the resilient
director turned around and started working on another script. Using
some of the same actors, he filmed She's Gotta Have It in a rented
restaurant attic over twelve days, editing in his studio apartment.
The 1986 picture, produced on a shoestring budget of about
$175,000, raised mostly from friends and family, plus an $18,000
grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, made about $8
million at the box office and catapulted Lee out of obscurity and
into the spotlight.
In the serene editing room at 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks
(named by Lee for the never realized proposal for every freed slave
after the Civil War), a renovated three-story firehouse in the Fort
Greene section of Brooklyn, Lee is relaxed working with a coterie
of close friends, many of whom go back to his days in college and
film school. Those who know him say he is usually quiet, sometimes
temperamental. "Spike is warm, but if you expect him to say, `You
look so wonderful,' you can forget it," says Ross, who is
co-producer of Do the Right Thing. "At the same time, he will throw
two Knicks tickets on your desk and say, `I can't make the game
tonight. Why don't you go?' " On the set, he is serious and
organized, his directorial style, hands-off. "His touch is so light
you don't even know it's there, yet it is," notes actor Ossie
Davis, who plays Da Mayor in Do the Right Thing.
Lee is a cool strategic thinker, a shrewd businessman and
cunning marketer. He plans each detail of his productions down to
the last frame, in part, says Ross, to counter the racial
stereotype that blacks are slipshod businessmen. His marketing
sense extends beyond his proven ability to reach an audience; he
has cultivated a brand awareness of himself. Making a movie isn't
enough, he says. "We're up against the giants trying to hold our
own." Stacks of Do the Right Thing T-shirts were poised ready for
distribution before the film opened. A journal chronicling the
making of the film, which Lee writes for each production as a text
for aspiring filmmakers, is published simultaneously with the
movie's release. Although he doesn't particularly enjoy acting, Lee
says, he stars in his pictures because he knows it will draw
moviegoers. Even his appearance in ads for Barneys and the Gap
clothing stores has helped attract a mainstream following, though
Lee rejects the notion. "Black people spend money at Barneys and
the Gap just like everyone else," he snaps.
The ability to market his own films gives Lee an edge when he
deals with Hollywood. Still he approaches it with distrust and
stubbornness. "I have a script, and they know I have final say.
They know there are things I'm going to demand. If they want to do
the film, these things have to be met, or else we don't do it." But
Lee is in a precarious position: he needs the power, muscle and
money of a major studio to market and distribute his films, while
still protecting his work. "He is fighting for his creative life,"
says former Columbia Pictures President David Picker, who worked
with Lee on School Daze.
Back in Brooklyn, Lee is at home. When he was honored last
month by the Black Filmmaker Foundation, Lee pledged allegiance to
his home borough and teasingly swore never to join Hollywood's
"black pack," whose members include Eddie Murphy and director
Robert Townsend. Lee's next picture, the story of a jazz musician
who must balance his career and love life, will also be shot in
Brooklyn and Manhattan. Hollywood holds little allure for the man
who rides around on a twelve-speed Peugeot bicycle (he doesn't have
a driver's license) and considers a relaxing evening "going to a
Knicks game, where the Knicks are winning in a nail biter, and I
have two seats on the floor." If Do the Right Thing is a financial
success, Lee will be playing in another league. Future movies will
bring bigger budgets, probably accompanied by pressure for more
control from the big studios anxious to protect their investments.
Independence may be harder to retain. "Then the fights will come,"
