*goes back to blindly praising white direcktors*


latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-ca-mn-spike-lee-20120729,0,774930.story

>Spike Lee's fighting spirit hits new heights on film and beyond

The filmmaker's challenging new work, 'Red Hook Summer,' will have to compete with his famed outspokenness, which has garnered the most attention recently.

By Steven Zeitchik, Los Angeles Times

8:00 AM PDT, July 27, 2012

NEW YORK — When he took the stage after the world premiere of his new film "Red Hook Summer"at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Spike Lee had other things on his mind besides the movie. The director embarked on a series of digressions, riffing on everything from the whiteness of Utah to the supremacy of the New York Giants.

Then he dropped what amounted to a smoke bomb in the normally polite confines of a post-screening question-and-answer session. Hollywood studios, he said, "know nothing about black people." It was the start of a self-admitted "tirade" about what he saw as the inherent racism, or at least ignorance, of Hollywood. By the time he finished, the entire room was sitting in silence.

The moment offered a telling snapshot into Lee's career. At 55 and with little need for validation, Lee is making films as audacious as ever, brass-knuckled yet textured affairs, like the tough urban drama "Red Hook," that hark to his 1980s and early '90s heyday.

Yet more than ever he seems unable to get out of his own way. Millions of people know that Lee retweeted shooting defendant George Zimmerman's incorrect address a few months ago as part of the grass-roots campaign on behalf of Trayvon Martin, creating a problem for an unrelated elderly Florida couple. A far smaller number, it's safe to say, know Lee has a challenging new film coming out.

The behavior raises two questions that are inextricable from Spike Lee, 2012 edition. Is he one of the best filmmakers working in America today? And if he is, why do so few people seem to talk about it?

On a warm spring day, Lee sat in his coolly stylish office in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn (an autographed poster of a Fellini movie, vintage New York baseball paraphernalia), much of his person tricked out in Knicks gear as he flipped the sports pages of a New York tabloid. His beloved NBA team had just eked out a win in a playoff elimination game, but things weren't looking good. He gave a short bitter laugh. "Live to fight another day," he said, tossing the paper into the trash.

It's a comment that could apply equally to the director. Many artists with Lee's dossier — more than two dozen films, a pair of Oscar nominations, countless film-festival prizes, a couple of Emmy wins, a reputation as an icon of the independent film movement — might show signs of mellowing. But he continues an almost reflexive need to needle that began since he came on to the scene with streetwise Brooklyn dramas "She's Gotta Have It" and "Do the Right Thing."

Although he expressed regret the morning after the Sundance screening, explaining that "I'm here to talk about the movie, and everything else distracts from that," he showed a more pugilistic side in his office. "What I said was the truth," he said. "I just left off a couple of 'mother--,'" finishing his word with a seven-letter profanity.

A few years ago he got into a war of words with Clint Eastwood about an absence of black people in Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" — an altercation that resulted in the grizzled director telling Lee to "shut his face." His prickliness is evident in an interview too: He balked when asked how studios handle black issues. "Why would they check in with me? I'm not the black cultural czar," he said, with a hint of hostility.

Lee may be "the hardest-working man in show business since James Brown passed," as "Red Hook" co-writer and co-producer James McBride said. But he can also seem to work overtime supplying ammunition to his critics, generating as many headlines as film reviews.

Yet inescapable in all this is that in combativeness also lies, perhaps, some of his genius. Clarke Peters, the"Treme" actor who stars in "Red Hook," said that the two are impossibly entwined. "I think Spike is at the mercy of his creativity," the actor said. "It's just got to come out of him, whether it's in his work or his outspokenness."

And therein lies the paradox of Lee: To tone down his fighting spirit is to curb what makes his work so exciting. But to keep the fighting spirit high is to, at times, prevent large numbers of people from noticing that work.


Passion at work

At a point when many directors would take an easy paycheck, Lee is crafting some of the most interesting pieces of his career. He has branched out to various passion projects, like the multi-part Katrina documentary "When the Levees Broke" and beginning this week, Mike Tyson's one-man show, "Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth," which he's directing in a limited Broadway run.

There are probably few contemporary American directors taught as often in college classrooms — with some of that teaching done by Lee himself, who at NYU guides young talents like"Pariah" director Dee Rees.

And perhaps nothing offers as much evidence of his renaissance as "Red Hook." There's a case to be made that the movie is Lee's best in years, harking to early Brooklyn-based classics like "Do the Right Thing." There are numerous callbacks to that film, including Lee appearing in quick bursts as the memorable Mookie, still delivering Sal's pizza, and more indirect allusions, with its storyline about a boy coming of age in a neighborhood filled with socioeconomic tension. (After all, in the intervening years Brooklyn has seen a rush of gentrification, becoming a place where yuppies and hipsters live cheek-by-jowl with the working class.) This time, though, Lee adds issues of religion. And he does it all in a very Lee way — pushy but not preachy.

Following the story of Flik (the first-timer Jules Brown), an Atlanta adolescent who is sent to live with his preacher grandfather nicknamed Da Good Bishop (Peters), it shows a boy who seeks to resolve conflicts common to growing up anywhere while also layering in issues particular to Brooklyn and the black community. All this before it packs a third-act punch (let's just say it involves religion and a heinous sex act).

There are numerous sermons as well as plenty of street interactions between Flik, Da Good Bishop and various locals — Lee has compressed a few of these scenes from the Sundance cut, but the film still clocks in at over two hours — which can give "Red Hook Summer" a languorous, feel. Yet "Red Hook" is bracing stuff, a movie that aims to ask difficult questions about big subjects like race, religion, urban renewal and parenting, aided by a vérité look and a melancholy score from piano maestro Bruce Hornsby.

The movie is also the latest chapter in Lee's ongoing saga about Brooklyn. Though he lives with his wife, attorney Tonya Lewis, and their two children in the very different precincts of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Lee was raised in Brooklyn, and he sees the movie as a way to weigh in on some of the changes that have rattled it — particularly in several pointed scenes contrasting the middle-class white newbies and the less-well-off black perennials.

He also hoped the movie would follow in the tradition of coming-of-age movies. "I wanted to tell a story that was the black 'Stand By Me,'" he said. "I loved that film, but where were the black people?"

To pull all of this off, Lee took real gambles. He made the film on a brutal 19-day schedule, often shooting without permits. To find several of the child leads, he recruited at a New York theater school; the children said that when Lee first came to their class they didn't even know they were reading for a movie part.

He financed the low-budget movie (under $1 million) with his own money, using many of his students as crew members, and for the first time in his career is partly paying for the distribution himself, retaining a tiny New York company to help. (The movie hits New York theaters next week and Los Angeles venues two weeks later.)

Nor was the shoot easy. "Red Hook" (named for the waterfront Brooklyn neighborhood) features actors playing gang members in hardscrabble housing projects, and the sight in those projects of the Bloods' trademark red bandannas prompted various factions to harass Lee and his crew. "People think of Spike as this king of Brooklyn, but it's not like he strolls through as the lord of the manor," Peters said, recalling the sight of gang members lurking.

What really got under people's skin at Sundance wasn't the occasional gang moment but a scene in that third act that involves the Bible and one of the worst crimes you can imagine. The film's sales agents stood in the lobby outside the screening and before it began warned festivalgoers that it would be "divisive." Afterward, the online commentator Erik Childress of efilmcritic.com wrote, "I have so many negative things to say about Spike Lee's 'Red Hook Summer' that I don't know where to begin." He was one of the more gentle skeptics.

McBride said he was opposed to the questionable scene and debated Lee about it. Lee said he knew from the start that he had to include it, because to simply suggest it offscreen was to shy away from the very things he wanted to confront. "It's not pretty, but it was something that needed to be dealt with," he said, adding that it may have been the most difficult scene he's ever shot.

But Lee said he was untroubled by the reaction that the disturbing plot turn had come out of left field. "I like storytelling where the filmmakers are two steps ahead of the audience; otherwise what's the purpose of doing a film?" he said, almost unconsciously returning to a favorite theme. "People have been conditioned by the Hollywood formula, A to B to C all the way to Z," he said. "They've been bamboozled, hoodwinked."


Speaking out

Yet all the filmmaking ambition in the world can't disguise that Lee can be his own worst enemy. And he seems to know it. To interview the director is almost to watch a man at war with himself — about how much of a provocateur he should be, about whether speaking one's mind is an obligation or a distraction.

Asked how he felt about "The Help,"a race-themed movie that was one of Hollywood's biggest hits last year, he paused for a long 10 seconds, then said, "No comment. No comment," before giving a knowing laugh that suggested, you won't trap me.

Then, a minute later he lets it rip on another race-themed subject. "There's not a black person in Hollywood who has greenlight power," he said, when asked a general question about Hollywood liberalism. "All these executives, the gatekeepers, they're all Democrats, they all fundraise, they support Obama. But you go into their offices and the diversity they talk about is not reflected in their workplaces, it's not reflected in their hiring practices, it's not reflected in the films they make." Lee, who has occasionally made bigger-budgeted studio films, such as the 2006 hit "Inside Man" for Universal, said he encourages black students to become executives to tilt this balance of power.

McBride, who also co-wrote Lee's period war picture "Miracle at St. Anna," acknowledges that Lee can be direct but says the filmmaker is hardly malicious and doesn't merit the kind of backlash he receives. "He's honest, and he doesn't make small talk, so people think he's abrasive," he said. "But I don't think he wakes up in the morning and thinks 'I'm going to shake America by its boots.' I think he just wants America to think."

It is admittedly hard not to feel that the subjects of Lee's movies are responsible in some part for why some filmgoers have chosen to ignore him; there are not that many high-profile socially conscious filmmakers working today to begin with, let alone those willing to repeatedly touch the third rail of race.

There was a time when one might argue that these media dust-ups might have actually helped Lee; after all, as a young filmmaker looking to make a name for yourself, a little extra attention never hurts. But for an established name they serve mainly as a distraction. What's more, when Lee was first starting out, the public was inclined to buy tickets for difficult independent dramas (it's hard to conceive of now, but even a lesser-regarded Lee film like "Jungle Fever" grossed $32 million when it came out in 1991, $53 million when adjusting for inflation). But moviegoers have turned increasingly to comic-book spectacles and youthful fantasies, which makes Lee's fight for filmmaking relevance harder than ever.

For his part, Lee chooses not to express regrets about either his work or his public kerfuffles. "I don't look back," he said, and "I don't explain. What's the point? I'm done with that. It impedes progress. I just focus on the ongoing effort to do what I set out to do — build a body of work for 40 Acres and a Mule," his production company.

Lee is next directing a remake of Chan-wook Park's"Oldboy"with the backing of mainstream Hollywood companies. (Asked how he might switch up the movie's Asian settings and themes, he said, "I'm not going to tell you that," and then let go a laugh somehow both good-humored and dismissive.)

The movie comes with big stakes. It's a new take on a piece that was a favorite among film fans around the world and also stars well-known names like Josh Brolin and Sharlto Copley. The combination of these elements with Lee's chops could open a new avenue for Lee and bring the focus back to his films — if a certain combative alter ego doesn't get in the way.

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We out here trying to function.