TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071789/07178900.023

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.3 KB | 230 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 92

He's Got To Have It His Way


Angry over racial inequities and stereotypes, filmmaker SPIKE
LEE combines his message and his own pop image into a
provocative media voice

By 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," says the
director. Spike Lee is ready.