A Brooklynite, a third-generation alumnus of Atlanta's Morehouse College and a graduate of New York University's film school, Lee won immediate acclaim for his commercial debut, SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT (1986). This independently produced, stylish, black-and-white (and partly color) feature did surprising box-office business and garnered critical acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the film's sharp, witty direction impressed critics, Lee's portrayal of the comic streetwise hustler Mars Blackmon (and his trademark litany, "please, baby, please, baby, please, baby, baby, baby, please") proved to be the most compelling element of the production.
Between film projects Lee directed himself as Mars in an Anita Baker music video ("No One in the World"), a short made for "Saturday Night Live" (Horn of Plenty), and most notably, in two Nike Air Jordan television commercials ("Hangtime" and "Cover") in which Mars Blackmon appears with basketball star Michael Jordan.
Television work, in fact, has been a much more frequent outlet for Lee's creative energies, as he battles to make uncompromising yet commercial films about the black experience within Hollywood's white-dominated financing, production and distribution system. Following the success of SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT, a number of black musical artists -- including Miles Davis, Brandford Marsalis, Steel Pulse and Grandmaster Flash -- sought Lee to direct their music videos. With a film production team that included editor Barry Alexander Brown and the gifted cinematographer (and neophyte director) Ernest Dickerson, Lee completed not only a number of videos, but also five one-minute spots for MTV, another series of Nike commercials, and ads for Jesse Jackson's campaign in the 1988 New York Presidential primary.
These projects all supplemented Spike Lee's driving ambition, the production of feature films for his company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. After the self-described "guerilla filmmaking" techniques employed to produce the low-budget SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT, as well as his earlier NYU thesis film, JOE'S BED-STUY BARBER SHOP: WE CUT HEADS (1982), Lee's second feature, SCHOOL DAZE (1988), was partly financed by Columbia Pictures. Despite Columbia's underfinancing (Lee was given only a third of the usual Hollywood budget), SCHOOL DAZE remained true to his provocative vision. And despite the studio's poor promotion efforts and unenthusiastic reviews, the film grossed more than twice its cost. With an all-black ensemble cast, the film satirically addresses, in the form of a musical-comedy, class and color divisions within the student body at a black college: affluent, light-skinned "gammas" clash with underclass, dark-skinned "jigaboos." In the face of production problems (Morehouse, Lee's alma mater, refused cooperation just before shooting began), SCHOOL DAZE was a notable achievement on two counts. Spike Lee became perhaps the first black director given complete control by Hollywood over his film, and SCHOOL DAZE, as one critic wrote, established that a vehicle which "puts real African American people on the screen" could succeed -- redeeming a history of stereotyped screen images by speaking and acting from authentic experience.
Lee's next film, DO THE RIGHT THING (1989), enlarged upon his successes on several levels -- commercially, artistically and thematically. Based on several real-life racially motivated acts of violence in New York City, Lee's politically charged and polemical drama stirred controversy even before its release. The finished film was widely praised for its exciting and flamboyant visual craftsmanship. Like his other films, DO THE RIGHT THING presents a slice-of-life look at a predominantly black environment, in this case a block of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Lee's portrait is both celebratory and critical: the mise-en-scène, music and dialogue are rich in allusions to African-American cultural history (a deejay's litany of black musical stars mixes with the score written by the director's father, jazz bassist Bill Lee), and, as in SCHOOL DAZE, Lee also unflinchingly presents the divisions within the black community by centering the film on a photograph of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and ending it with seemingly opposing quotations from both men. More importantly, DO THE RIGHT THING focuses its tense drama on the interracial violence that occurs between Bed-Stuy's black underclass and the white, Italian-American family that runs the local pizzeria. Climaxing with the killing of a black youth at the hands of white policemen and a fiery street riot, Lee's film offers no resolution for the racial violence which has plagued the city.
In presenting both the inter-and intra-racial problems that have marked recent American history, Spike Lee's films collectively call for an awakening of consciousness. A sleeping character in JOE'S BED-STUY BARBER SHOP is hailed with the line, "Wake up. The black man has been asleep for 400 years." SCHOOL DAZE'S problematic climax features warring factions greeting a sunrise with the cry, "Wake up!" DO THE RIGHT THING continues the plea, as the same refrain introduces both the film and Lee's Mookie character.
Lee's next two films failed to live up to the dramatic promise of DO THE RIGHT THING, though both boasted strong performances, increasingly showy camerawork and colorful, stylized imagery. Inevitably, a critical backlash began to develop against the cannily self-promoting filmmaker.
MO' BETTER BLUES (1990) was Lee's first collaboration with charismatic leading man Denzel Washington, who portrays a self-absorbed jazz trumpeter forced to wake up and open his eyes and heart to the needs of those around him. The film intensified the ongoing criticism of Lee for his shallow characterization of female characters. The director also fielded charges of anti-Semitism for his scathing depiction of a pair of Jewish night club owners. In interviews Lee had decried the inauthenticity of jazz films by white filmmakers -- Clint Eastwood's BIRD (1988) was a favorite target -- claiming that, as the son of a genuine jazz musician, he was better qualified to depict that millieu. Most reviewers, however, deemed the film slight and overlong.
JUNGLE FEVER (1991) again courted controversy for its depiction of a lusty affair between a black married professional man and his Italian-American working-class secretary. Despite some powerful scenes and performances, the film is sadly underwritten. The central relationship is neither adequately explained or realistically depicted, with the film emitting much heat but little illumination on race relations, black self-hatred, or the allure of sex with the Other.
Lee's next project would prove to be both his most ambitious and most controversial -- indeed, the intensity of the controversy that surrounded MALCOLM X (1992) even before shooting began made the completed film something of an anti-climax. The press gleefully related tales of Lee intimidating non-black director Norman Jewison into relinquishing the project to him. Lee persuasively argued that only a black filmmaker could tell this story, while some black intellectuals, notably poet/activist Amiri Baraka, publicly doubted that he was the man for the job: Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a revered historical document of a hero more important to black culture than any "Spike Lee Joint" (as he has labelled all his films.) Undaunted, Lee took on the monumental project.
When the film's backers balked at escalating production costs, Lee turned to such black entertainment luminaries as Bill Cosby, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan, who gave him the money to complete the film as he envisioned it. The final product was a three-and-a-half hour, suprisingly traditional biopic that swiftly covers a great deal of material before culminating in an emotionally devastating climax. Though a huge production, the film remains "A Spike Lee Joint," encompassing everything from gangster action, flashy costumes and a big dance number, to location shooting in Mecca, with many jaunty directorial flourishes along the way. Most impressive, however, was Denzel Washington's towering performance as the charismatic Black Muslim leader. Almost inevitably for a mainstream project about such a complex and controversial figure, MALCOLM X has its flaws and omissions. Malcolm's early delinquent phase, in particular, is cleaned up for mass consumption. Nor is the extent of his later radicalism, and the controversy it provoked among both whites and blacks, adequately addressed. The Hollywood blockbuster has never been a congenial medium for overtly political filmmaking but, in the final analysis, MALCOLM X must be viewed as the triumph of Spike Lee's will.
His 1994 film CROOKLYN was a loosely structured story of a jazz musician, his wife and their children in Brooklyn of the 70s. Packed with the sounds of the seventies, and with little narrative, CROOKLYN could be viewed as Lee's return to the kind of depictions of neighborhood, family, and characters he delivered with such adeptness in DO THE RIGHT THING and SHE'S GOTTA HAVE IT. Co-scripted by sister Joie (and brother Cinque), CROOKLYN, unlike prior Lee-helmed features, centered on a female protagonist -- here the only girl child among the Carmichael's five. Reportedly the film's brightly and loudly nostalgic family romance was only loosely based on the Lees' own youth.
Other notable producing/directing credits include CLOCKERS (1995), GIRL 6 and GET ON THE BUS (both 1996), HE GOT GAME (1998, also screenplay), SUMMER OF SAM (1999, written by), THE ORIGINAL KINGS OF COMEDY and BAMBOOZLED (also written by) (both 2000), "Jim Brown: All American" (TV) and 25TH HOUR (both 2002), SHE HATE ME (2004, also screenplay), JESUS CHILDREN OF AMERICA (2005), INSIDE MAN (2006), LOVERS & HATERS (2007), "M.O.N.Y." (2008, TV), MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA and SELLING TIME (also writer) (both planned for 2009) and an untitled INSIDE MAN sequel (announced for 2010).
Lee's producing and executive producing credits also include DROP SQUAD (1994), TALES FROM THE HOOD (1995), THE BEST MAN (1999), LOVE & BASKETBALL (2000), 3 A.M. and HOME INVADERS (both 2001), DREAM STREET (2005), and YOU'RE NOBODY 'TIL SOMEBODY KILLS YOU and EVOLUTION OF A CRIMINAL (both scheduled for 2008). For television, Lee has produced "Good Fences" (2003) and "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" (2006, mini-series).
Lee married producer Tonya Lewis in 1993; they have 2 children.
Nominated for Writing - Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen 1989: DO THE RIGHT THING
Nominated for Documentary Feature 1997: 4 LITTLE GIRLS - Producer (w. Sam Pollard)
2 nominations