![]() When I can’t catch a motherfuckin’ cab in the morning, when their lights are on, and then they see me and turn the lights off, or when I say where I wanna go and they say “My shift is ending” and speed away… So as a black person you’re reminded every day that you’re black. You’re reminded that you’re black every single day. SPIKE LEE - Why would not a black person be obsessed with race, when his ancestors were stolen from mother Africa, brought here to build this country? I just find it very…amusing, when people say “Why are black people mad, or upset, or angry?” I think that if you put it into historical context, with all the shit that’s happened to us, we’re very calm! If a single message emerged over the hour or so that we spoke, it’s that one can’t expect to understand a man, much less an entire race, by observing him from afar. ![]() Sitting in a back office at the Fort Greene headquarters of Spike’s production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, we discussed blackness, from its weight and influence in his youth to its notable absence in modern-day Hollywood boardrooms. Let’s just say his indignation wasn’t unwarranted. But for anyone to accuse a man who is black-a fact that American society ensures will dominate his identity for life-of being obsessed. The topic of race has certainly pervaded Lee’s work throughout his thirty-year career, and has often been at the center of his many public controversies, including feuds with prominent filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Tyler Perry. The statement in question was the opinion of some critics that the director and writer is “obsessed with race,” and he didn’t care to wait and see how I might contextualize the quote before responding with a sternness that knocked me back on my heels a bit. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Lee’s Mars Blackmon character became the pitchman for Air Jordan basketball shoes.“First of all, I think that’s a stupid statement.” I’d made it halfway through the first question of my conversation with Spike Lee before he stepped in to set me straight. In addition to his film work, Lee has had a successful career directing television commercials, perhaps most notably for Nike. It won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2018, he directed and co-wrote the feature film BlacKkKlansman, starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier and Topher Grace. In 2017, Lee adapted She's Gotta Have It into a Netflix series of the same name. The film won three Emmy Awards, including one for Outstanding Directing for Lee. In 2006, he produced and directed the documentary miniseries When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, about the devastation wrought on the city of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and the local and federal government’s flawed response to it. Lee’s later directed 25th Hour (2002), starring Edward Norton, and Inside Man (2006), starring Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster. Lee directed a steady stream of films in the 1990s, including Mo’ Better Blues (1990), in which he co-starred with Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes Jungle Fever (1991), about a combustive affair between a Black man (Snipes) and a white woman (Annabella Sciorra) the biopic Malcolm X (1992), starring Washington in the title role Clockers (1995), based on the novel by Richard Price 4 Little Girls (1997), a documentary about the notorious 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary and Summer of Sam (1999), a thriller based on the infamous 1977 “Son of Sam” serial murders in New York City. Do the Right Thing earned Lee an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. ![]() Following the success of She’s Gotta Have It, he went on to write and direct 1988’s School Daze, about fraternity and sorority members at a Black college, and 1989’s Do the Right Thing, about racial conflicts in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. He graduated from Morehouse College and received a master’s degree in film and television from New York University. Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee was born March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Lee also co-starred in the film, playing an annoying bike messenger named Mars Blackmon. The movie launched Lee’s career and established his reputation as an outspoken filmmaker who often tackled controversial subjects such as sex and race relations. Made on a shoestring budget, She’s Gotta Have It was a comedy about a young African American woman in Brooklyn, New York, and her three suitors. On August 8, 1986, actor, writer and director Spike Lee’s first feature-length movie, She’s Gotta Have It, opens in theaters around the United States.
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