Spike Lee

Film Director

• Born: March 20, 1957
• Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia

Lee is one of the premier filmmakers of the twentieth century. His films and documentaries often depict historical or literary subject matter and raise difficult questions of race, class, gender, color, and nationality. They routinely spark heated debates about black identity, aesthetics, urban life, and politics.

Early Life

Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Lee attended Morehouse College and returned to New York after graduation to attend film school at New York University.

Life’s Work

Although Lee made several films as a student, including Last Hustle in Brooklyn (1977), The Answer (1980), and Sara (1981), he began his professional career with an hour-long film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, in 1983. After his attempts to make a film about the experiences of a bike messenger failed, Lee was forced to regroup. His next film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986), a commentary on sexual politics, garnered critical acclaim and earned Lee the coveted New Film Award at that year’s Cannes Film Festival. Lee’s career blossomed thereafter. His success ignited a feverish work ethic that saw him direct one film each year throughout the 1990s, trailblazing what became known as the New Black Cinema movement.

In 1989, Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which he also starred in, sought to capture African American and Italian American ethnic competition and conflict in urban space. The film’s depiction of social angst, gentrification, and police brutality attracted an array of criticism and interpretations that spoke to the racial divide fictionalized on screen, and the work established Lee as a world-class director. Although controversial at the time of its release, it was a critical success, receiving Academy Award nominations for best original screenplay and best supporting actor, and performed well at the box office. It would go on to be considered among the best films of all time.

Members of Lee’s family played key supporting roles in his films. His sister Joie appeared in several of Lee’s films, and his brother David often served as a unit photographer. His father, jazz musician Bill Lee, was an early contributor to the sound of films such as School Daze (1988) and Mo’ Better Blues (1990). Lee himself has played cameo roles in several of his films as well. Producer Monty Ross and photographer Ernest Dickerson (classmates of Lee at Morehouse and New York University, respectively) have formed the core of Lee’s production staff over the years.

Other definitive films by Lee include Jungle Fever (1991), which examined the politics of interracial dating; Malcolm X (1992), an epic portrayal of the slain African American leader; Bamboozled (2000), Lee’s critique of the television and film industry’s treatment of African Americans; and She Hate Me (2004), a comedy critical of the pharmaceutical industry.

During this period, Lee partnered with HBO to produce several made-for-television documentaries. In 1997, he directed Four Little Girls (1997), a documentary on the legacy of the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four African American girls. His documentary on the life of football great, actor, and community activist Jim Brown appeared in 2002, and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Lee’s meditation on the aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, appeared in 2006.

Although Lee’s films are directed at mainstream audiences, his oeuvre developed along a continuum of artistry dedicated to African American life and culture. In the 2000s, he began to produce work that dealt less explicitly with race in American society. Such films as 25th Hour (2002) and Inside Man (2006) allowed Lee to engage such issues as the lingering politics of the Holocaust and American life after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. These productions showed Lee’s ability to juggle the film industry’s commercial imperatives with his desire to produce work of social relevance.

Lee continued to direct a mix of documentary and feature films through the late 2000s and into the 2010s. Miracle at St Anna (2008) was a fictionalized version of the experiences of African American troops, known as buffalo soldiers, in World War II. Lee profiled basketball star Kobe Bryant in Kobe Doin' Work (2009), provided a follow-up to When the Levees Broke with If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise (2010), and documented the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Michael Jackson album Bad with Bad 25 (2012). Other feature films included the drama Red Hook Summer (2012), set in Brooklyn; Oldboy (2013), an adaptation of a violent manga; the vampire film Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014); Chi-Raq (2015), a modern film adaptation of Aristophanes's play Lysistrata. In 2017, he directed a ten-episode season of a televised version of She's Gotta Have It for the streaming platform Netflix, which was then renewed for a second season.

He then directed the crime drama BlacKkKlansman (2018), which is based on a true story about an African American police officer who infiltrated a Ku Klux Klan branch. For his work on BlacKkKlansman, Lee—along with his cowriters—won the Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) in 2019. Lee was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Directing and the film was nominated for Best Picture.

In addition to his feature films, Lee has directed a number of television commercials for Nike, the Gap, and the US Navy through Spike/DDB, his commercial advertising company. He has also directed several music videos.

Significance

A student of national and international filmmaking techniques, Lee has made films that bear traces of both French New Wave and postwar Italian Neorealist styles. He also has carried on the legacy of African American filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, Haile Gerima, Melvin Van Peebles, Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and Robert Townsend. Although many of Lee’s works are not the “race films” of Micheaux’s day, there is a sense of collective representation and signification in Lee’s works. His success in a variety of visual media has had a profound impact on younger African American filmmakers, including John Singleton, Allen and Albert Hughes, and Reginald Hudlin.

Although Lee’s work has drawn criticism for being didactic, difficult, or heavy-handed, he has often cast such capable actors as Samuel L. Jackson, Halle Berry, Roger Guenveur Smith, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Rosie Perez, and Denzel Washington, many of whom became stars after working with Lee. He also was responsible for introducing longtime actors and activists Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis to a new generation of moviegoers.

Lee’s achievements have led critics to label him as both an insider and outsider in Hollywood. Through his production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Lee has been able to maintain a rare level of autonomy and control within the existing production and distribution structures of the film industry. Funding his projects has routinely challenged Lee, however, and he has relied on a number of African American celebrity donors.

In 2015, Lee, who despite several nominations had not won an Academy Award up to that point, was presented with an honorary Oscar.

Bibliography

Amos, Candace. "7 Films that Prove Spike Lee is Deserving of His Honorary Oscar." Daily News, 28 Aug. 2015, www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/7-spike-lee-oscar-worthy-films-article-1.2340833. Accessed 23 Sept. 2015.

Baraka, Amiri. “Spike Lee at the Movies.” In Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara. Routledge, 1993.

Fuchs, Cynthia, editor. Spike Lee: Interviews. UP of Mississippi, 2002.

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Temple UP, 1993.

McGowan, Todd. Spike Lee. U of Illinois P, 2014.

McMillan, Terry, et al. Five for Five: The Films of Spike Lee. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1991.

Massood, Paula J., editor. The Spike Lee Reader. Temple UP, 2008.

Vest, Jason P. Spike Lee: Finding the Story and Forcing the Issue. Praeger, 2014.