Lee, Spike

Source:

 African American National Biography

Lee, Spike

(27 Mar. 1957– ),

filmmaker and screenwriter, was born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest of four children of Bill Lee, a jazz composer and musician, and Jacquelyn Shelton, a schoolteacher. During Lee's youth, his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, where they lived in the neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Cobble Hill, and Fort Greene. Lee later used his intimate knowledge of these racially integrated Brooklyn neighborhoods to dramatize in his films the relations between African Americans and their non-black neighbors. Movies and television, such as the Anglo-American The Partridge Family and the African American Good Times, informed Lee's understanding of popular culture. “I-can remember my mother, Jacquelyn, taking me to see James Bond movies,” he reminisced. “She liked them. I used to like 007 myself. I remember seeing Help! with the Beatles and A Hard Day's Night” (By Any Means, 2). Lee's fiction film Crooklyn, which he cowrote with his siblings, documents the influence television had on them.

Spike Lee poses for photographers in Cannes, France, 15 May 1991. (AP Images.)

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In 1975 Lee enrolled at his father's alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated in 1979 with a BA in Mass Communications. That summer Lee interned with Columbia Pictures, and the following fall he entered the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he cultivated a working friendship with cinematographer Ernest Dickerson. “We came in together,” Lee later recalled. “He was from Howard. I was from Morehouse…. We were the only blacks at NYU” (Gotta Have It, 32).

Lee produced his first student film, The Answer (1980), in response to D. W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. The following year his MFA thesis project, the forty-five-minute film Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, which Dickerson shot, won the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' Best Student Film Award and became the first student film ever included in the Lincoln Center New Directors, New Films series.

In 1980 Lee and Monty Ross, a friend from Morehouse, established the production company Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Named after the historically inaccurate, but often cited, “promise” made by the U.S. government to newly emancipated slaves, Lee's company name expresses the consternation of African Americans at America's broken promises and racist policies. The company's first production, Lee's first feature-length film, She's Gotta Have It (1986), with its mixture of humor and intensity, its bold exploration of sexuality and race, and its strong visual style, won the Cannes Film Festival's Best New Director Prize. Shot in ten days for $175,000, the film made more than $7 million at the box office. Lee himself played one of the film's key roles, the fast-talking, big glasses–wearing bicycle messenger Mars Blackmon. Blackmon reappeared in a series of Lee-directed Nike commercials aired from 1988 to 1993 and reprised in 2003 upon the retirement of Michael Jordan.

In 1988 Lee reflected on his Morehouse College experiences with School Daze, a musical set in an historically black college. Controversial in its treatment of color and class divisions within the black community, the film pits wealthy, light-skinned “gammas” against working-class, dark-skinned “jigaboos.” School Daze was Lee's first studio film, and after the production costs reached $4 million, Island Pictures pulled out, but Lee managed to secure additional financing from Columbia Pictures. The film eventually grossed $15 million.

With Do the Right Thing (1989), Lee won an Oscar for Best Screenplay and established himself as a filmmaker of unique vision and distinctive voice. The film, which Lee wrote and starred in, explores African American cultural life in the flashy and confident visual style that came to distinguish Lee's work. Featuring Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Danny Aiello, and John Turturro, Do the Right Thing, like School Daze, mines divisions and differences within the African American community and beyond. In the film, a Brooklyn pizza shop becomes the nexus of escalating racial tension between Italian Americans and African Americans. The action takes place on the hottest day of the summer and climaxes with a street riot and the killing of a black youth by white policemen. Unlike most American films, Do the Right Thing refuses to resolve its plot or its political conflicts. Instead, it ends with contradictory on-screen quotations from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Lee's next film, Mo' Better Blues (1990), about a jazz musician inspired by Lee's father, marked the beginning of his collaboration with leading man Denzel Washington, who later starred in Malcolm X, He Got Game, and Inside Man. In Jungle Fever (1991), about the romance between a married, black architect and his Italian American secretary, Lee presents another bold treatment of race and class.

Malcolm X (1992), based on Alex Haley's biography and a script begun by James Baldwin, engendered controversy even before production began, most notably through attacks from Amiri Baraka. When it went over budget, Lee turned to black celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Bill Cosby, for funds. The film reputedly cost $35 million but it became Lee's highest grossing film, earning $48 million at the box office. The finished film drew praise from critics and audiences, but controversies remained, including concern over Lee's refusal to implicate Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam explicitly in Malcolm X's death. Although Denzel Washington earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in the title role, the film received no other recognition from the Academy. However, the film's influence on the public's perception of the leader is unequivocal, as was its effect on the marketplace. Promotional merchandise and tie-ins for the film, including clothing, toys, posters, and books, were marketed by Lee himself.

Lee followed Malcolm X with the smaller coming-of-age drama, Crooklyn (1994), and the darker Clockers (1995). In 1996 Lee released both Girl 6, written by Suzan-Lori Parks, about an unemployed actress who takes a job as a phone sex worker, and Get on the Bus, about a busload of black men heading to Washington, D.C., for the 1995 Million Man March. Lee again tapped Denzel Washington for a leading role in his next film, the father-son drama He Got Game (1998). Summer of Sam (1999), set in the Bronx in the summer of 1977, has a predominantly white cast led by John Leguizamo.

Lee confronts the history of the representation of African Americans head on with the satire Bamboozled (2000). The film stars Damon Wayans as an Ivy League–educated black network television writer who unintentionally creates a popular hit with a purposefully offensive modern-day minstrel show featuring black actors wearing blackface. While many viewers and critics complained about the film's descent into melodrama, Bamboozled was praised for its fierce exposé of racism in the media. “On a deeper level,” wrote Steven Holden in the New York Times, “Bamboozled addresses the broader issue of minstrelsy and American culture and poses unanswerable questions about black identity, assimilation and the give and take between white and black cultures” (6 Oct. 2000).

In addition to his fiction projects, Lee has directed a number of documentary films. He won an Academy Award for Best Documentary with 4 Little Girls (1997), about the events surrounding the September 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four African American girls. In 2000 Lee captured the stand-up work of comedians Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Bernie Mac in the box-office hit The Original Kings of Comedy, and in 2002 he produced and directed Jim Brown: All American. For HBO, Lee directed a television adaptation of John Leguizamo's one-person Broadway show, Freak, in 1998. Three years later he directed a television adaptation of Roger Guenveur Smith's Obie Award–winning off-Broadway solo performance in The Huey P. Newton Story. Lee's other television projects include filming the 1998 and 1999 Pavarotti & Friends concerts, organized to raise funds for children in Liberia, Guatemala, and Kosovo. In 2006 HBO aired Lee's documentary depicting the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina, titled When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. The documentary chartered the devastation from a multitude of perspectives, and delivered a startling critique of the federal government's response.

Family loyalty helped launch the acting career of Lee's sister, Joie, and the careers in the technical areas of filmmaking of his brothers, Cinqué and David. Lee commissioned his father to write the original scores for many of his films, including She's Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo' Better Blues, and Jungle Fever. Most of Lee's films dramatize family and neighborhood issues. One also finds these themes in 25th Hour (2002), which explores a young Irish American working-class man's ties with his friends, family, and girlfriend on the day before he enters prison for a seven-year term. A critical success marked by a polemical soliloquy from Ed Norton, 25th Hour was also one of the first full-length films to reference the events of 9/11. Further acclaim came in 2006 with the release of Inside Man, Lee's biggest commercial success.

In 1993 Lee married Tanya Lynette Lewis. The couple has two sons, Satchel and Jackson. For more than twenty years Spike Lee has maintained his status as one of only a few American filmmakers whose work articulates a personal visual style and moral vision. He is one of a small number of African American filmmakers from the East Coast who received their film-school training in the 1980s and who produce interesting films about ordinary people, showing that those lives are not so banal as many Hollywood films would have audiences believe.

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