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Shelton Jackson Lee (born March 20, 1957 in Atlanta, Georgia), better known as Spike Lee, is a groundbreaking and controversial film director, producer, writer, and actor noted for his many films dealing with social and political issues. He is also a distinguished documentarian and teaches film at New York University.

Biography

Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta to Bill, a jazz musician and Mary, a school teacher. Lee moved with his family to Brooklyn when he was a small child. As a child, his mother nicknamed him "Spike" because he was a tough kid. In Brooklyn, he attended John Dewey High School. Lee enrolled in Morehouse College where he made his first student film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn. He took his film courses at Clark Atlanta University, and graduated with a B.A. in Mass Communication from Morehouse College. He then enrolled in New York University's Tisch School of the Arts where he made numerous student films. He graduated in 1982 with a Master of Fine Arts.

Lee's thesis film, We Cut Heads, was the first student film to be showcased in Lincoln Center's New Directors New Films Festival. The film went on to win a Student Academy Award. In 1985, Lee began work on his first feature film, She's Gotta Have It. With a budget of $160,000, Lee could not even afford to shoot retakes and the film was shot in a mere two weeks. When the film was released in 1986, it was critically acclaimed and grossed over $7,000,000 at the U.S. box office.*

At their best, Lee's films are penetrating and energetic portraits of people and places, interweaving psychology and context, time and place. Lee's movies have examined diverse and complex issues, ranging from race relations, the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime and poverty, and political issues. Many of his films include a distinctive use of music. Lee's father is a jazz bassist and is responsible for the music in some of his son's films, including Mo' Better Blues starring Denzel Washington.

Lee's films have garnered considerable critical acclaim. Film critic Roger Ebert has described Spike Lee as one of the greatest filmmakers in America today. Lee's film Do the Right Thing was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1989. His documentary 4 Little Girls was nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award in 1997.

Lee will be directing the CBS legal drama Shark in the fall of 2006. Shark will star James Woods and Jeri Ryan.

Influences

In Fort Greene, the place where Lee spent his adolescence, he was beaten nearly to death by his dad and this had a severe impact on his earlier films. While living there, he felt like an outsider, living in a predominately white neighborhood. Although he was able to involve himself within the black community that did exist there, because he had previous experiences within diverse communities, he had the ability to take on the perspective of both the insider and the outsider. Lee also observed the struggles that existed between the black and white communities.

Richard A. Blake, author of Street Smart: The New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee, writes: “For Spike Lee, Fort Greene functions like the observation tower, as though one could stand atop the column of the Martyrs Monument and look out on other areas of Brooklyn and the rest of New York. Sometimes what he sees and reports can make others, especially black audiences, quite comfortable”

Spike Lee has made a major impact on the film industry. In addition to the numerous films and TV specials he has been involved with, Lee has achieved even more. He has his own production company, ’40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks,’ a recording studio, and retail outlet, ‘Spike’s Joint,’ that includes various merchandise associated with his films.

In his "Book of Film," Ebert said, “Spike Lee’s work as a whole has been more perceptive and useful than any other single cinematic source in helping us understand the situation of the races in modern America” (Ebert 536). Following this statement are some of Lee’s journal entries written during the making of Do the Right Thing. In one of his entries, he describes himself as being “blessed with the opportunity to express the views of Black people who otherwise don’t have access to power and the media” (Ebert: Lee 544).

Controversy

Lee has never shied away from controversial statements and actions involving American race relations. In 1992, Lee encouraged young black students to skip school and flock to theatres to see his movie Malcolm X. Ten years later, after headline-grabbing remarks made by Mississippi Senator Trent Lott regarding Senator Strom Thurmond's failed Presidential bid, Lee charged that Lott was a "card-carrying member of the Klux Klan" on ABC's Good Morning America.* In addition, Lee claims that NASCAR is a racist institution and has implicated country music to some degree by association.

Lee has been criticized for depicting Italian-Americans in a stereotypical manner in some of his films, most notably Summer of Sam, Jungle Fever, and Do The Right Thing. In most of his films, he has incorporated anti-Italian epithets somewhere in his scripts. Lee however has defended his portrayal through his real-life Italian-American friends most notably Michael Imperioli. He has also been criticized for what some regard as anti-Semitism. He was once quoted as saying, "There's an unwritten law that you cannot have a Jewish character in a film who isn't 100 percent perfect, or you're labeled anti-Semitic."

Lee was the executive producer of the 1995 film New Jersey Drive, which depicted young African-American auto thieves in northern New Jersey. At the time, the city of Newark had the highest automobile theft rate in the country, and Newark mayor Sharpe James refused to allow filming of New Jersey Drive within the city limits. Years later in the hotly-contested 2002 Newark mayoral campaign, Lee endorsed James' opponent Cory Booker.

More recently, Lee commented on the federal government's response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. Responding to a CNN anchor's question as to whether or not the government intentionally ignored the plight of black Americans during the disaster, Lee replied, "It's not too far-fetched. I don't put anything past the United States government. I don't find it too far-fetched that they tried to displace all the black people out of New Orleans."

At a 1998 Cannes Film Festival screening of Summer of Sam, Lee said the National Rifle Association should be disbanded and Charlton Heston shot with a .44 Bulldog, when asked what he would do to combat violence in the United States. *

Heston later replied: "I see some irony here; back in 1963, when was still in diapers, I was protesting alongside Martin Luther King Jr. to obtain freedom for all African-Americans, right now [with the NRA I'm working to secure freedom for all Americans. I demand no apology, my character speaks for itself."

Lee later apologized to Heston for the comment.

Trivia

  • Always credits his films as "A Spike Lee Joint".

  • Spike is the son of famous composer Bill Lee. Bill Lee has been the composer for at least five of Spike's films.

  • Lee's classmate in Tisch School of the Arts was Oscar-winning director Ang Lee. The Taiwanese director was the assistant director for Spike Lee's thesis film, We Cut Heads.

  • In 2003 Lee sued the Spike TV television network claiming that they were capitalizing on his fame by using his name for their network. The claim was settled out of court.

  • Lee also appeared in the documentary Hoop Dreams, giving a lecture to young African-American students getting a college sponsorship for their basketball talents.

  • Lee is also famous for directing a series of Nike commercials featuring Michael Jordan, which helped establish Jordan as a highly successful commercial pitchman. In several of the commercials, Lee also played his alter ego of Mars Blackmon, a character he created for his first major film, She's Gotta Have It.

  • There were actually two versions of the "Fight the Power" video. One was composed entirely of clips from Do the Right Thing, while the other depicted the members of Public Enemy leading a huge political rally in the streets of Brooklyn. The latter version features a cameo apperance by Tawana Brawley.

  • Lee received death threats, allegedly from the Nation of Islam, over his 1992 biopic Malcolm X. The threats prompted Lee to remove scenes in which the NOI is depicted as plotting the murder of Malcolm X.

  • A noted detestor of Lee is actor Faizon Love who claimed that Lee's portrayal of Malcolm X was a huge failure in his eyes. According to Love, when you're recreating any kind of serious story on film you don't cast yourself as the "sidekick" and try to add in comic relief. He finishes his argument with the analogy that Lee putting himself in Malcolm X would be like putting comedian Gilbert Gottfried in Schindler's List.

  • Likes use a cinematic technique where the actor rides on a camera dolly with the camera with things happening in the background to make it seem like the character is in a world of his own for a period.

  • Spike Lee is mentioned in the song "Light My Candle" from the Broadway musical Rent

Selected filmography (as director)

Television work

  • Freak (1998) (telefilm)
  • Pavarotti and Friends 99 for Guatemala and Kosovo (1999)
  • Pavarotti and Friends for the Children of Liberia (1998)
  • A Huey P. Newton Story (2001)
  • [[The Concert for New York City (2001) (segment “Come Rain or Come Shine”)
  • Jim Brown: All American (2002)
  • Sucker Free City (2004)
  • Miracle's Boys (2005)
  • When the Levees Broke (2006)
  • Shark (2006)

External links

1957 births | Living people | People from Brooklyn | African-American/Black film directors | American screenwriters | African-American actors | American film producers | American film directors | Morehouse College alumni | English-language film directors

Spike Lee | Spike Lee | Spike Lee | Spike Lee | ספייק לי | Spike Lee | スパイク・リー | Spike Lee | Spike Lee | Spike Lee | Spike Lee

 

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