Black Film & Video Vlog

2009-11-12T19:40:00.001+03:00

Tribeca All Access Call For Submissions

Tribeca All Access (TAA) is a year round networking and career development program of the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) that supports the work of filmmakers from traditionally under-represented communities within the industry by providing access to industry representatives looking for new projects in development. Approximately 20 qualified directors and screenwriters will be selected to participate in one-on-one meetings with key industry players in addition to networking and learning from dedicated panels and comprehensive workshops during the Tribeca Film Festival. Program alumni receive year-round support through TAA OnTrack, which includes educational panels and workshops; TFI hosted presentation screenings; promotional support for completed films; and the use of digital filmmaking and editing equipment.

Tribeca All Access is open to both mid-career and emerging narrative and documentary filmmakers. Applicants are required to apply with a completed feature-length screenplay, documentary proposal, or documentary work-in-progress and must have at least one screenwriter or director attached who qualifies. Projects may be of any subject matter, genre, or budget range suited for independent or major studio production.

The program is now a recognized talent pool within the industry and an unrivaled opportunity to advance your filmmaking career.

Apply Now! Deadline is Monday, December 14, 2009.

Visit www.tribecafilminstitute.org/taa/ for complete details and upcoming events.

2009-01-31T15:40:00.000+03:00

2009-01-25T17:50:00.000+03:00

January 25, 2009

Film

Examining Race and a Future Beyond It

By DENNIS LIM for the New York Times.

“MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY,” an independent feature by the first-time writer-director Barry Jenkins, opens the morning after a one-night stand. Micah and Jo, who don’t yet know each other’s names, are young and black, and for want of a more descriptive term you might call them hipsters. In San Francisco, where the African-American population is less than 7 percent and where “black indie kids” (to use Mr. Jenkins’s term) are scarce, that gives their hookup added significance — at least for Micah. As he puts it to Jo, “You ever realize just how few of us there really are?”

For Mr. Jenkins, who is African-American, the question resounds within the context not just of Bay Area indie culture but also of American indie filmmaking, which is not exactly a bastion of diversity.

Like so many movies about 20-something urbanites, “Medicine for Melancholy,” which had its premiere at South by Southwest last year and opens in New York on Friday, concerns the search for self-definition. But it stands apart for its forthright attention to the push-pull of inclusion and exclusion that comes with being a minority member of a subculture.

Mr. Jenkins, 29, drew on his own experience as a recent transplant to San Francisco. Born and raised in Miami, he studied filmmaking at Florida State University, then worked at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions in Los Angeles. But he grew disillusioned with the industry, and he quit his job to travel the country. He met a woman from San Francisco and moved there to be with her. The end of that relationship, and the period of introspection that followed, led him to make “Medicine for Melancholy” (which is up for three Spirit Awards this year, including best first feature).

“As a person of color from the South, San Francisco was the first city that really made me feel like an other,” Mr. Jenkins said over breakfast in Brooklyn recently. Because he was in an interracial romance when he got there, he added, “I was almost buffered.”

“When that relationship was off,” he said, “it was like I was seeing the city for the first time.”

“Medicine for Melancholy” follows Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins) for a 24-hour period as they feel out each other’s quirks and hang-ups. Mr. Jenkins credits “Friday Night,” the 2002 French film about a brief encounter by one of his favorite directors, Claire Denis, as an inspiration. As a literal date movie, trained on an attractive couple playing out a talky mating ritual as they wander a photogenic city, “Medicine” also recalls Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset.”

The characters keep circling back to questions of race and assimilation, but the film is less an identity-politics polemic than a credible portrait of a young man wrestling with those issues — a situation Mr. Jenkins found himself in not long ago.

He acknowledged that it was odd to experience a racial epiphany in, of all places, liberal San Francisco. But this is also a city where the African-American population is proportionally less than half of what it was in 1970 (the most visible emblem of the black exodus being the razing and redevelopment of the Fillmore district).

Mr. Jenkins’s ambivalence about San Francisco comes across in his film’s visual pallet . The digital-video images, so desaturated they border on monochromatic, have a romantic softness, and San Francisco looks even lovelier than it tends to in more expensive movies. But Mr. Jenkins also liked the idea of “reflecting the theme of a city with the color taken out.”

In making a film so attuned to its physical and psychic environment, Mr. Jenkins joins the ranks of regionalist indie directors whose movies are anchored in a powerful sense of place. “Medicine for Melancholy” does for San Francisco what Kelly Reichardt has done for the rural Pacific Northwest (in “Old Joy”), Lance Hammer for the Mississippi Delta (“Ballast”), Robinson Devor for the Seattle area (“Police Beat”) and Ramin Bahrani for the unseen pockets of New York City (“Chop Shop”).

“It’s absolutely rooted in its milieu, but it’s by no means a parochial film,” said Graham Leggat, the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society. Referring to Mr. Jenkins’s somewhat critical portrait of the city, he said: “It’s not a problematic film for San Francisco. It’s a film made in the spirit of how the city would like to think of itself, as a progressive place where people are fairly oppositional.”

Mr. Leggat noted that while the Bay Area has long been home to a robust enclave of documentary and experimental filmmakers, “there’s not really a vigorous narrative-filmmaking middle class.” The film society has expanded its activities to include production assistance and is committing funds to spur the growth of local filmmaking. But for now, Mr. Leggat said, “there’s not a critical mass of folks who can make a livelihood just working in the business.”

Mr. Jenkins can attest to that. He saves on rent by living with the parents of his cinematographer, James Laxton, an old friend. Through the production of the film he worked as a shipment supervisor at Banana Republic. He made “Medicine” with a bare-bones crew, on a budget that is, even by D.I.Y. standards, small change. (His official answer when people press him for numbers: “Probably less than the cost of your car.”)

Mr. Jenkins wrote the film nearly two years ago — “before Obamania took off,” he said — and race has since moved to the forefront of the national conversation. But instead of toying with vague notions of a “postracial” America, “Medicine” wonders what it would mean to look beyond race, when race still looms large in matters of cultural identity and social justice.

“Micah comes across as pro-black, and Jo’s is more of a post-race point of view,” Mr. Jenkins said. “When I started the film I was teetering between these two viewpoints. It’s like I was splitting my personality in two.”

Making the movie has helped clarify his thinking. “For me the film ended up being even more about class than race,” he said. “Micah talks about the city pushing black people out, but it’s really about pushing poor people out.” With a wry smile, he added: “I used to be obsessed with race. I’m more obsessed with class now.”

2009-01-24T23:58:00.001+03:00

MAN IN POLYESTER SUIT
written & directed by Ed DuRante

2009-01-23T02:09:00.002+03:00

BLACK DYNAMITE

New film sends up '70s `blaxploitation' classics

January 22, 2009

by Peter Howell

PARK CITY, Utah–Can you dig it?

On the day when the U.S. made history by inaugurating its first African-American president, it was a surreal experience at the Sundance Film Festival to watch Black Dynamite, a movie that gleefully rocks every black stereotype imaginable.

That's the whole point of it. Black Dynamite, which sold for $2 million (U.S.) to Sony Pictures following its huge reception here and which is due in theatres this summer, is in its own perverse way every bit as empowering as Barack Obama's rise to glory. A sequel is already planned.

Directed by Scott Sanders, it lovingly riffs on the "blaxploitation" movie genre of the 1970s; low-budget actioners where black anti-heroes with names like John Shaft and Foxy Brown busted crime in the ghetto, all while flipping the bird to "whitey" and "The Man."

It's more than just a straight send-up. No one winks at the camera, except in one scene when a boom mike strays into the picture.

Black Dynamite is a celebration of how much fun blaxploitation movies were, just as Austin Powers makes light of James Bond. You have to feel good about yourself if you're willing to mock yourself.

It opens with a fake ad for malt liquor called Anaconda ("When you pop the top, the panties drop") and goes on to bust every pimp-strolling move you've ever seen.

The title figure actually goes by the name Black Dynamite, played with fearsome authority and expert comic timing by Michael Jai White, who is also the co-screenwriter with Sanders and Byron Minns.

Black Dynamite, former CIA agent, is a complicated man no one understands – except every woman he casts his soulful eyes upon.

BD carries a gun longer than Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, and that's not all he's packing. He can make sweet love to three women at once and do martial arts moves that impress even Fiendish Dr. Wu (Roger Yuan), one of many villains he crosses.

He leaves a trail of bodies in his wake, but that's life, brotha: "Sometimes to do the right thing, you've got to do the ugly thing."

BD is on the trail of the suckas who killed his younger brother. He also uncovers a plot to shrink the genitals of black men, to make them feel subservient to the white man once again. But that's never gonna happen in the era of Obama and Black Dynamite, is it? Damn right.

2009-01-11T02:18:00.002+03:00

January 11, 2009

New York Times

Black Directors Look Beyond Their Niche

By GENE SEYMOUR

IT’S been 10 years since Spike Lee, entrepreneur, provocateur and role model for aspiring directors of color, declared in The New York Times that it was an era of unprecedented possibility for African-American filmmakers. At the tail end of the 1990s there was plenty of evidence backing Mr. Lee’s optimism.

Beginning in 1991, a year that had impressive debuts from disparate black directors like John Singleton (“Boyz N the Hood”), Carl Franklin (“One False Move”) and Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”), it seemed as though each successive year yielded promising starts from African-American talents: Albert and Allen Hughes ( “Menace 2 Society,” 1993), Darnell Martin (“I Like it Like That,” 1994), F. Gary Gray (“Friday,” 1995), Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou,” 1997) and Malcolm D. Lee (“The Best Man,” 1999).Varying degrees of critical acclaim and, most important, financial success came in the wake of these films, solidifying Hollywood’s consciousness of a lucrative African-American audience for films while promising a sweeping, solid and diversified presence of African-American talent in cinema for years to come.

But at the close of yet another decade, the promise still awaits fulfillment. Though some of the aforementioned directors have met or exceeded most of the critical expectations shown in their debuts, they have had mixed-to-sporadic success in getting their subsequent projects into theaters.

“All those people have done stunning, brilliant work,” said Warrington Hudlin, a producer (“House Party”) and co-founder of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. “But the appetite for and expectations of what sells for black filmmakers remains very narrow. It’s always been about what sells, which is as true for mainstream movies as it is for African-American movies.”

You could now literally count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate. One is Mr. Lee, whose 19th theatrical feature, the World War II story “Miracle at St. Anna” was released last fall, while the other is Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based, one-man multimedia conglomerate whose latest blend of low comedy and moral uplift, “Madea Goes to Jail,” is set for release on Feb. 20.

Momentum for African-American cinema, it would seem, has been curtailed or at least stalled in part by studio executives’ preconceptions that black films are “niche product” with limited appeal. Yet at the same time black directors and producers still express optimism that they not only can continue to cultivate their black audiences but also can reach out further and wider to the mainstream, especially when contemplating Will Smith’s all-but-unchallenged supremacy as a box-office draw throughout the world as well as the impact of Barack Obama’s impending presidency.

Ms. Martin’s career trajectory in some ways reflects the erratic fortunes of the African-American filmmaker. Her smart, sexy romantic comedy, “I Like It Like That” won the 1994 New York Film Critics Circle award for best first film. And “Cadillac Records,” her musical history of Chess Records, the rhythm-and-blues label, was released last month to respectable reviews and box-office returns. But the intervening years were dominated by television work and one very frustrating film experience, “Prison Song,” which never went past the audience-testing stage in 2001.

Ms. Martin places much of the blame for her sporadic career in the feature-film business on the conflicts she had over the promotion of “I Like It Like That.” “They insisted on making me the poster child for the film, the ‘female Spike Lee,’ and I said, ‘Look, I don’t mind that. I’m proud to be a black woman director, and I want that out there.’ But we’d gotten some great reviews, and I felt that was what they should be leading with. If it had been a white director, they would have emphasized the reviews, but instead they were trying to get people to see it only because I was black.

“So I fought pretty hard over that. Actually it was more like a head-on collision. And I was told, ‘If you continue like this, you will never work again.’ And I thought, ‘That’s O.K., I paid off my student loans, what’re they going to take away from me?’ So I was getting known for being someone you couldn’t control.”

She also held on to a stubborn selectivity. “I was offered a lot of things that were about women of color, but I didn’t know yet how to make those things good. It was easier for me, at the time, to make things like, say, the pilot for ‘Oz,’ where the harder things were those that seemed like a more obvious fit, like ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ ” she said, referring to her 2005 made-for-TV adaptation of the Zora Neale Hurston novel. “Loved the book, but it had been a challenge for me to make this inner story work.”

The one movie she was involved in during the 14-year break — “Prison Song,” a “hip-hop opera” with the rapper Q-Tip in 2001 — ended badly too, once again, in her view, a victim of pigeonholing.

Its fate was sealed, Ms. Martin recalls, when it was tested for audiences at the Magic Johnson Theaters in Los Angeles, which draws predominantly black audiences. “I told the studio, ‘If you test it there, it will go no further because it is an art film.’ Sure enough, the audiences didn’t get it; the movie never made it to wider distribution.”

The years of exile from the feature-film world, however, have had their benefits. The television work, Ms. Martin said, sharpened her directing chops and helped her mature. Life itself intervened too, helping her play the industry game. “Being a mother, I know now there are ways you can fight for things and get your way without being so overt about it.”

Life intervened as well for Gina Prince-Bythewood, who first achieved fame in 2000 with the romantic comedy “Love & Basketball” but did not direct another movie until 2008, “The Secret Life of Bees,” based on Sue Monk Kidd’s coming-of-age novel in which a white girl bonds with a trio of beekeeping African-American sisters in the 1960s.

“I had two boys, so that took some time, and then I helped produce my husband’s film,” she said, referring to the screenwriter Reggie Rock Bythewood’s 2003 film, “Biker Boyz.” “And I developed two different projects that didn’t go through, one of which was the adaptation of the Wally Lamb book, ‘I Know This Much Is True,’ and that was a shock when that didn’t come about.”

But some self-imposed pressures also weighed on Ms. Prince-Bythewood. Though the critical acclaim and box-office success of “Love & Basketball” brought many scripts her way, “you still felt that as a black director, you had to prove yourself even harder, no matter what people were saying about this great renaissance of black film.”

She is slightly more optimistic now in the afterglow of the success of “The Secret Life of Bees,” Which earned nearly $40 million. Except for Tyler Perry’s last, “The Family That Preys,” no film directed by an African-American has performed better at the box office in the past year.

“I’m getting scripts, probably not as many as you think,” she said. “But I’m now focused on writing and rewriting something that I was working on before ‘Secret Life of Bees’ came my way two years ago, and I know now that I can get my script read by everybody, and the doors will be opened wider.”

For that Ms. Prince-Bythewood can thank the true African-American powerbroker in the film world, one more powerful than Mr. Perry or Mr. Lee: a onetime rap-music performer and television sitcom star named Will Smith. He, along with his wife, the actress Jada-Pinkett Smith, and his African-American producing partner, James Lassiter, produced “The Secret Life of Bees.”

“Will Smith has already made a huge difference, and he’s really just begun,” said Bob Berney, a movie production and marketing analyst who once headed Picturehouse, the now-defunct independent film distributor (and consultant for “Cadillac Records”). “He now has the clout to green-light whatever he wants to make, and he has the power to pick and choose whomever he wants to direct.”

Though the success of movies like “The Secret Life of Bees” perpetually makes black filmmakers more hopeful about their prospects, African-American films still have barriers to break. “The biggest,” Mr. Berney said, “is outside the U.S. where the perception remains within the industry that the international audience for African-American product is close to zero. And yet when you consider the global popularity of hip-hop culture and by extension, black culture, you have to wonder whether this perception comes from outmoded thinking from international buyers who aren’t in tune with today’s audience.”

There are also those who wonder whether the paradigm for success for African-Americans in film has changed to the point where the very notion of “black-oriented product” needs revising.

“Twenty, even 10 years ago, the only way you could see actors like Denzel Washington or Cuba Gooding or even Will Smith was in an African-American movie,” said Zola Mashariki, senior vice-president for production at Fox Searchlight, which distributed “The Secret Life of Bees.” “Now you find that almost every mainstream movie has a black presence, whether in a big-budget action movie or even a comedy geared towards mass audiences.

“So to some extent, that’s a foregone conclusion. What this means for movies whose core target audience is black is that we have to give them something that they’re not getting in the mainstream, which are stories that reflect back their own direct experience, and I think that’s something Tyler Perry has done. This doesn’t mean you’re not hoping for some crossover success. You always want that. But you don’t want that core audience to feel left out, that the movie’s not speaking to their own lives.”

The “Obama factor” could have an impact too.

“I don’t think it means there’s necessarily going to be this flood of black films,” Ms. Prince-Bythewood said. “But I think it will help retrain audiences to be more open to different kinds of black experience. The fact that the most prominent family in America over the next four years will be a black family will help broaden the perception among nonblack audiences that they’re just like them in many cases. And this can only help in terms of crossover, which is something that needs to happen to take African-American film to the next step.”

Yet Ms. Prince-Bythewood and other black directors still temper such utopian thoughts. In hard times like these, struggling to transcend conventional boundaries can be a color-blind struggle. “You could get caught up by racism in Hollywood and everywhere else,” said Lee Daniels, a producer of “Monster’s Ball” and whose adaptation of Sapphire’s novel, “Push,” about the struggles of a Harlem teenager for self-respect, will have its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month. “But it’s as difficult for me as it is for white independent filmmakers to get stuff made. So it’s not about black or white, and the minute you wrap yourself up in these concepts, you’ve put yourself out of the running. I just look for material that’s truthful, and I have to believe that if I can identify with it, the audience will too.”

2009-01-09T01:32:00.000+03:00

I AM SEAN BELL, black boys speak from Stacey Muhammad on Vimeo.

2008-10-16T21:25:00.001+03:00

A few questions with Spike Lee from ekai on Vimeo.

2008-10-13T20:07:00.001+03:00

OUTSIDE MAN:Spike Lee’s celluloid struggles.

by John Colapinto

One morning last June, Spike Lee arrived early at the Sony Pictures Studios, in Culver City, California, to record the score for his new feature, “Miracle at St. Anna,” a Second World War film about the U.S. Army’s 92nd Division, an all-black unit that battled the Nazis during the Italian campaign. Lee was joined in the studio’s control room by his music-recording team, six men and one woman. A large window overlooked the cavernous soundstage where Judy Garland recorded “Over the Rainbow,” in 1938, when the lot belonged to M-G-M. A ninety-five-piece orchestra that Lee had engaged had not yet arrived.

A month earlier, at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Lee had sparked a very public feud with Clint Eastwood when he accused him of having omitted black soldiers from his two recent movies about Iwo Jima, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.” (Historians estimate that between seven hundred and nine hundred black servicemen participated in the battle.) The spat had quickly escalated. Eastwood told the Guardian that he had left the black soldiers out because none had actually raised the flag, adding that “a guy like that should shut his face.” Lee shot back, telling ABCNews.com that Eastwood sounded like “an angry old man,” and that “the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either.”

Lee’s remarks appeared online three days before he began recording the score for “Miracle.” Lee sees the movie, the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers in the war, as redress not only for Eastwood’s Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie “The Longest Day”—and before. “This is the same shit they were doing back in the forties, fifties, and sixties,” Lee had told me a couple of weeks earlier, in New York. “Really, until Jim Brown was in the ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ in 1967. ‘Home of the Brave’ was a great film with a great African-American character in it. But if you look at the history of World War Two films we’re invisible. We’re omitted.”

As the orchestra began to gather on the soundstage, Lee scribbled notes about the score on a yellow legal pad. He is five feet six, with a barrel chest and a pigeon-toed walk. His baleful, half-hooded eyes peered out from behind tortoiseshell frames. There was a diamond stud in his left earlobe. He is fifty-one, and when he briefly removed his Yankees cap a small bald spot was visible at the crown of his short Afro. He wore an orange T-shirt with a picture of Barack Obama and the word “REPRESENT,” and new Air Jordan sneakers with pastel-blue stripes around the soles and gingham details. Lee is a Knicks fan, but he was wearing the sneakers in honor of the Lakers, who that evening were playing in Game Three of the N.B.A. finals. “Going to the game tonight,” he said to Marvin Morris, the movie’s music editor, a mountainous African-American man who sat beside him at the table. “I gotta come correct!”

It’s been more than twenty years since Lee’s début, the 1986 movie “She’s Gotta Have It”—a breezy sex comedy about a liberated African-American woman and her three male suitors—and he remains Hollywood’s most prominent black filmmaker. He has directed eighteen features, three of which (“Do the Right Thing,” “Jungle Fever,” and “Malcolm X”) have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race. Releasing movies at an average of nearly one a year, Lee has maintained a pace matched, in this country, only by Woody Allen. Lee is the artistic director of N.Y.U.’s graduate film program, where he teaches a master class in directing. He also makes music videos and TV commercials (he has done spots for Converse, Jaguar, Taco Bell, and Ben & Jerry’s, among others) and has made two superb documentaries: “4 Little Girls,” about the 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of a black church in Alabama, and “When the Levees Broke,” about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He is able to accomplish so much in part because he often rises at 5 A.M. “You want to get a lot done, you gotta get up in the morning,” he told me. The rest, he says, is “time management.” But Lee’s output also reflects the unusual fecundity of his imagination. “Spike was the idea man,” Herb Eichelberger, who taught Lee in an undergraduate film course at Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), in 1977, told me. “He was a good writer, and he would explore those ideas and turn those ideas and nurse those ideas and turn them into full-blown mini-epics.”

Terence Blanchard, the score’s composer, arrived in the control room, and Lee stood up to greet him. A heavyset African-American from New Orleans, Blanchard has known Lee for twenty years. He played trumpet on “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze,” and “Mo’ Better Blues,” and in 1991 Lee hired him to be the composer for “Jungle Fever.” Blanchard has scored all but two of Lee’s films since. Unlike most directors, Lee includes the composer in the process from the start, often before a script even exists—“from the inception of ideas,” as he puts it. During shooting, Lee sends Blanchard the dailies, and once a rough cut is assembled Blanchard travels to New York, where he and Lee watch the film and discuss where to put music. Blanchard then creates musical sketches and themes, which he sends to Lee. “Once I O.K. that,” Lee says, “Terence sits down and writes the music.” Blanchard later told me that Lee is unusual for his love of highly melodic scores that can almost stand on their own in live performance. (Lee’s emphasis on the music results in scores that often clash with the dialogue, making it difficult to hear the actors. “Of course you want people to understand the dialogue,” he told me. “But the human brain is wonderful—with the correct score and the correct mix, the brain can multitask and hear the dialogue and the music at the same time.”)

Before Lee and Blanchard could get to work, a Sony studio employee approached carrying a cardboard tube that contained a poster of “Miracle at St. Anna.” He wanted the men to sign it, so that it could be mounted in the hallway next to posters for other movies whose scores had been recorded in the studio.

“Yeah, O.K.,” Lee said, brusquely. He added, “We want the John Williams spot”—referring to the composer who writes the endlessly imitated music for Steven Spielberg’s movies.

“You’ll be right next to John Williams,” the Sony man said, in a mollifying tone. “How’s that?”

“We want the John Williams-Spielberg, you know?” Lee repeated.

“We’ll take down the ‘Memoirs of a Geisha,’ and put yours—”

“Don’t put us next to Judd Apapoe, whatever that guy is,” Lee interrupted, referring to Judd Apatow, the director of the goofball comedies “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” “We gotta be next to Spielberg and Williams!”

“You got it,” the man said. He obtained the signatures, then scurried away like a soldier ducking enemy fire.

Blanchard opened a soundproof door and walked onto the soundstage, where he took his place at a podium facing the musicians. On a large screen at the back of the stage, a scene from the end of the film began to play: battle-weary black soldiers moved through the cobblestoned streets of Colognora, a tiny hill town in Tuscany near where the 92nd Division, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers (they took the name from the original Buffalo Soldiers, six all-black Army regiments from the late nineteenth century), fought in the Second World War. Nazi soldiers staged an ambush, and Lee captured the ensuing violence with a series of sweeping tracking shots and fast edits that are characteristic of his kinetic visual style. The orchestra played Blanchard’s surging score—a passage heavy on brasses and piercing violins, but in a minor key and with a slow tempo that contrasted sharply with the battle onscreen. Where many filmmakers would have demanded a rousing score to complement the action, Blanchard and Lee had devised music that was unexpectedly elegiac, emphasizing the wasted lives. (In an earlier scene, Lee had paused to show a series of closeups of dead American soldiers lying in a river, their lifeless eyes reflecting the sky, blood flowing from their helmets.) As the battle scene unfolded, Lee got up from the console and hurried to the front of the control room, where he sat at a table that held a small monitor. He moved his face close to the screen as a G.I. spoke his dying words to a fellow-soldier. A trumpet played softly under the dialogue. When the scene ended, Lee leaped from his chair and shouted, “Woooo!”

Blanchard came back into the control room. “Was the brass big enough?” he asked.

“Hell, yeah,” Lee said. He laughed, jumped up and down, and shouted, “God damn!”

The plot of “Miracle at St. Anna” revolves around a bond that forms between one of the Buffalo Soldiers and an orphaned nine-year-old Italian boy, and, in this respect, “Miracle” reflects Lee’s opinion—as he expressed it to me—that love can transcend color. But the movie is not without racial provocations. It is based on a novel by James McBride, who adapted it for the screen, but Lee had McBride add a scene involving Axis Sally—Germany’s version of Tokyo Rose—a woman born in Portland, Maine, who migrated to Germany before the war and, embracing the Nazi cause, broadcast anti-American propaganda over Radio Berlin. In the film, Axis Sally, played by the German actress Alexandra Maria Lara, is shown sitting at a table in front of a swastika, speaking into a microphone. Her words echo over loudspeakers mounted on trucks as the Buffalo Soldiers advance toward the Serchio River: “Welcome, Ninety-second Division, Buffalo Soldiers. We’ve been waiting for you. Do you know our German Wehrmacht has been here digging bunkers for six months? Waiting? Your white commanders won’t tell you that, of course. Why? Because they don’t care if you die. But the German people have nothing against the Negro. That’s why I’m warning you now with all my heart and soul. Save yourself, Negro brothers. Why die for a nation that doesn’t want you? A nation that treats you like a slave! Did I say slave? Yes I did!”

Lee had intercut the speech with reaction shots of the Buffalo Soldiers wincing and even weeping as they advanced. When the scene ended, he clapped his hands, cackled, and said, “Yee, yee, yee!”

Lee told me that he had exhaustively researched the history of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Second World War, but Axis Sally’s speech does not derive from a particular broadcast. Lee said that he had come up with the idea for the speech and asked McBride to incorporate it into the scene. “I suggested to him what to write,” Lee told me, adding that he liked the idea of putting accusations of racism in the mouth of a Nazi sympathizer. “Propaganda with some truth in it,” Lee explained. “Very unsettling to the Buffalo Soldiers.”

The effect was powerful, if not exactly subtle, but such gestures have got Lee into trouble in the past. He has justified his manipulations of reality on artistic grounds. For “Do the Right Thing,” his cinematic anatomy of a race riot, which was shot in the summer of 1988 in the drug- and crime-riddled Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Lee’s crew spent weeks cleaning up a street of crack houses—painting façades, fixing broken stoops—before the filming began, and Lee makes no reference to drugs in the movie, a decision for which he was heavily criticized. Lee responded by saying, “This film is not about drugs,” and by accusing those who challenged him of racial stereotyping. “Drugs is in every level of society today in America,” he told reporters at a press conference at the time. “How many of you journalists saw ‘Working Girl’ or ‘Rain Man’ and questioned where are the drugs? Nobody!”

Such explanations have not satisfied some. “The fact that Spike Lee is a talented guy is inarguable,” Stanley Crouch, the African-American cultural critic who has long been one of Lee’s fiercest detractors, says. “But if you make movies as consistently inferior to the movies of a man like Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese and cry ‘racism’ or imply racism, when your movies are not as successful as theirs are—what is that? On a human level, his comprehension of other people is far more shallow than theirs is, and that’s the basic problem that he’s had from the beginning of his career, the fundamental shallowness that you get from a propagandist.”

Scorsese, however, says that he admires Lee. “I always responded to his work as a fresh, original American voice in cinema—mainstream cinema,” Scorsese told me. “From ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ all the way up to ‘Inside Man’ ”—Lee’s 2006 film about a bank heist and his biggest commercial success to date. “I like the way he tells a story with pictures and sound, which is filmmaking. He actually pushes the medium in narrative storytelling. The way he uses the moving camera, the way he edits films, the use of music, the film stock that he uses—in particular, in one of the best American films, ‘Malcolm X,’ but also in the documentaries. When you look at the list of the work that he’s done—films, commercials, documentaries—the nature of the voice that he is in the entertainment industry in America is quite unique.”

“People think I’m this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage,” Lee complained to me when we first met, in New York last May. His annoyance at this perception is understandable; he can be funny and warm, and even his angriest movies are leavened with humor. Yet the persona he projects, imperious and impatient, can be intimidating. He had invited me to join him at the Jazz Standard to listen to Blanchard, who was playing trumpet with his small jazz combo. He sat through Blanchard’s gig uttering only a few words to me, and gave me a stern glance when I tried to initiate conversation between numbers. Afterward, when some of Lee’s fans gathered to ask for autographs, Lee responded to the smiling face of a white woman from Cincinnati with a glare so unwelcoming that she quickly retreated.

Ernest Dickerson, who has known Lee since they were classmates at N.Y.U. film school, in the early eighties, and who shot all of Lee’s movies up to and including “Malcolm X,” before becoming a director himself, said of Lee, “He’s never suffered fools. You’ve got to bring your best game to him. He looks at everybody with ‘O.K., what’re you doing?’ On ‘Mo’ Better Blues,’ I had to fire most of my camera crew because mistakes were being made. And there’s nothing worse than sitting next to Spike in dailies when the dailies have problems.” Blanchard told me that Lee once became so incensed by the tardiness of a music copyist during the scoring of “Malcolm X” that he hurled a chair across the room and had the copyist fired.

Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee, in Atlanta, Georgia, but his mother, Jacquelyn (who died in 1977, from cancer, when Lee was twenty), gave him the nickname Spike because, she later told him, he was “a tough baby.” Lee is the eldest of six children (he has a half brother, Arnold, from his father’s second marriage), and he has employed several of his siblings on his movie sets. His sister Joie, an actress, has had parts in many of his movies; his brother David is a unit still photographer; and his brother Cinqué is Lee’s videographer, who tapes the behind-the-scenes action on the film sets. Joie and Cinqué co-wrote with Lee his 1994 movie “Crooklyn,” a delicately nostalgic autobiographical account of growing up in Brooklyn, where the family moved when Lee was two years old.

Lee has called his family “very artistic.” Jacquelyn was a high-school teacher of art and African-American literature, and Lee’s father, Bill, played standup jazz bass but also recorded with Peter, Paul & Mary, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Theodore Bikel, Josh White, and Odetta. “My father would take us up to the Newport Jazz Festival,” Lee told me. “Or, if he was playing at the Village Vanguard or the Bitter End, sometimes we could stay up late and go with him.” For a time, Bill Lee was the sole breadwinner, but when electric bass became ubiquitous in popular music, in the mid-sixties, he refused to play it and stopped getting the lucrative studio work that had supported the family. His wife was obliged to return to teaching. “I like the artistic stance,” Lee told me, with an exasperated laugh. “You have a family to support!” But he added, with admiration, “He’s never played electric bass to date.”

Lee’s mother took the children to Broadway plays and to movies, but Lee maintains that he was not like many directors, who say that they knew from childhood that they wanted to make movies. “I loved sports,” he says. “I knew I was never going to play professional sports, but I loved playing and I went to all the games I could afford to.” When Lee was eight, the family moved to Cobble Hill, then an Italian-American neighborhood of Brooklyn. They were the first black family to do so, Lee says. “First couple of days, we got called ‘nigger,’ by some kids,” he told me. “Once they saw that there wasn’t a hundred other black families moving in behind us, like we’re the only one, then it was O.K. and it was never an issue after that.” Most of Lee’s friends from the local public schools that he attended were white. (The family later moved to the middle-class black neighborhood of Fort Greene, to a brownstone where his father, now eighty, still lives.)

After Lee graduated from John Dewey High School, in 1975, he became the third generation in his family to attend Morehouse, the all-black college in Atlanta. In the summer of 1977, after his sophomore year, he returned to New York and searched, unsuccessfully, for a job. David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” serial killer, was terrorizing Manhattan with random shootings, and in July there was a citywide blackout, which lasted twenty-five hours and resulted in widespread looting, arson, and vandalism. Lee, carrying a Super-8 camera that he had been given the previous Christmas, went into the streets to film the chaos. “I just spent that whole summer shooting,” he said.

When he returned to Morehouse for his junior year, he decided to major in mass communications. The program was based at Clark College, nearby, and included print journalism, radio, television, and film. “Once I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, I really started growing up,” Lee says. “I was really focussed.” Eichelberger, his film professor, demanded that his students work fast, requiring them to shoot documentary films on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; edit them on Thursday and Friday; and show them on Saturday and Sunday. Lee became particularly close with two other undergraduate film majors, Monty Ross and George Folkes. “They said, ‘We really want to make some changes, ’ ” Herb Eichelberger recalled. “ ‘We’re tired of these woe-is-me films, the black always being the underdog and never getting even to break even on the silver screen.’ ”

For Lee’s senior project, Eichelberger encouraged him to edit the footage he had shot in the summer of 1977. Lee turned it into a short feature that he called “Last Hustle in Brooklyn.” The film was a mock-documentary that included scenes of New Yorkers trapped in elevators during the blackout and of people looting stores, as well as scenes acted out by Lee’s younger siblings. By then, Lee had applied to the top film schools in the country—the first of Eichelberger’s students to do so—and had been accepted at N.Y.U. At the time, there were only a handful of African-American directors in Hollywood, including Sidney Poitier, Gordon Parks, who directed the “Shaft” movies, and Michael Shultz, who made hits for Richard Pryor. Before that, the most successful black filmmaker was Melvin Van Peebles, who directed the 1970 feature “Watermelon Man,” a pointed comedy about a white man who wakes up black and experiences racism firsthand. A year later, Peebles wrote, directed, and starred in “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” a precursor to the seventies blaxploitation pictures. But Peebles was never embraced by Hollywood and went on to direct only several more low-budget features. “When I told people at Morehouse I was going to film school to become a filmmaker,” Lee says, “they said that I was crazy.”

The N.Y.U. film program is one of the best in the country. (The director Ang Lee was in Lee’s class, Jim Jarmusch was there at the same time, and Joel Coen had graduated from the undergraduate film program a year earlier.) During his first year at N.Y.U., Lee was shown a number of classic movies by his professors, including the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation,” by D. W. Griffith, who pioneered many cinematic techniques still in use today. But the film was notorious, even at the time of its release, for its endorsement of white supremacy and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. (Griffith adapted the film from a novel by Thomas Dixon called “The Clansman.”) Lee felt that his professors put too much emphasis on Griffith’s artistry and not enough on the film’s racist message. “They taught that D. W. Griffith is the father of cinema,” Lee told me. “They talk about all the ‘innovations’—which he did. But they never really talked about the implications of ‘Birth of a Nation,’ never really talked about how that film was used as a recruiting tool for the K.K.K.” For one of his freshman projects, Lee wrote and directed a twenty-minute movie called “The Answer,” about an out-of-work African-American screenwriter who agrees to write a remake of “Birth of a Nation.” The screenwriter ultimately decides that he cannot go through with the project and is attacked by Klan members, who burn a cross in front of his house.

Lee declined to show me any of his student films (“They’re out of circulation!” he said), but among those who saw “The Answer” was Ernest Dickerson. Lee and Dickerson met on the first day of classes at N.Y.U. and were two of only five African-American students at the film school. Dickerson described to me how, at the end of “The Answer,” Lee’s screenwriter turns on his attackers. “There’s a really powerful image at the end,” he said. “Low angle, shooting up the stairs—as the guy is going downstairs, knife in hand, to do battle. It fades out. It was an amazing film.”

“The Answer” was shown at a screening of student films, and some members of the faculty were incensed. Roberta Hodes, a retired N.Y.U. film professor who took part in the debate over Lee’s film, says that some faculty members recommended that he not be invited back for the final two years of the program. After the first year, the school weeded out students who lacked promise. But talent was not an issue with “The Answer,” Hodes says. “I just think it offended everyone,” she told me. “I felt offended, too, I’m ashamed to say.” (She added, “I don’t think he was very much liked. He was very fresh—as we used to say in the olden days—and very aggressive.”) Eleanor Hamerow, another retired N.Y.U. professor, and a former head of the film department, also saw “The Answer.” She said that the problem was not the film’s content but, rather, its overweening ambition. “In first year, we’re trying to teach them the basics, and certainly the idea was to execute exercises, make small films, but within limits,” Hamerow told me. “He was trying to solve a problem overnight—the social problem with the blacks and the whites. He undertook to fix the great filmmaker who made that movie, D. W. Griffith. He was going to teach him a lesson.” Hamerow says that she was among those faculty members who voted to keep Lee in the program, so that he could “go on and learn more.” Both Lee and Dickerson, however, are convinced that it was the film’s content that riled the faculty. “I think they just took offense to the fact that he was calling the film industry on the carpet as having racist policies,” Dickerson says. “It’s almost like they had to grudgingly bring him back.”

Dickerson and Lee frequently went to the movies together at N.Y.U. “The films that always impressed us—that we talked about—were films that burn you, so you don’t forget them,” Dickerson recalled. They counted Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, and Francis Ford Coppola among their favorite directors. Dickerson became Lee’s cameraman, and shot Lee’s final-year project, a forty-five-minute film, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads.” A comic crime caper, the movie was a hit with the faculty—“It was so alive and had such real characters that you usually don’t see that,” Hodes said—and it went on to win a Student Academy Award.

After graduation, Lee took a job at a small film-distribution company in the city and worked on the script of “Messenger,” a semi-autobiographical feature about a bike messenger, but he abandoned the project for lack of funds in 1984. That year, Jim Jarmusch released “Stranger Than Paradise,” a critical and commercial success, by the standards of independent cinema. “Jim Jarmusch was our hero,” Lee told me. “When you’re in film school, you study Scorsese, all these people—but you don’t know them. But when somebody you know, who you saw in class and saw in school, makes it? Then it’s doable. So we were all, like, ‘Yeah, we can do it now!’ ”

In 1985, Lee wrote the screenplay for “She’s Gotta Have It,” about Nola Darling and her three suitors. Shot on the streets of Brooklyn and featuring a star turn by Lee as Mars Blackmon, a bespectacled and geeky would-be lover, the movie not only defied prevailing stereotypes of the Reagan-era inner-city black movie but called to mind Woody Allen’s early romantic comedies, “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan.” To help finance the movie—which cost a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars—he obtained a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and seed money from his maternal grandmother, Zimmie, a frugal woman who “saved her Social Security checks,” Lee says, and had helped to pay for his tuition at Morehouse and N.Y.U. Lee shot the film, with Dickerson as cameraman, in twelve days. Despite the tiny budget and abbreviated shooting schedule, everything about the movie suggested a refined sensibility—from Dickerson’s lush black-and-white camerawork to the sudden explosion of color in a dance number. (“Spike’s love of musicals really contributed to the dance sequence,” Dickerson says. “A lot of people don’t know that Spike is a big fan of Hollywood musicals. Big Vincente Minnelli fan.”) Lee’s jump-cut editing was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless.” “That film, when I saw it in film school, it really showed to me that ‘Who are these people to make up these rules and say you can’t do something?’ ” Lee told me. “Godard’s, like, ‘Fuck that, man, I’m trying this stuff.’ ” Lee’s very funny performance as Mars Blackmon—in an oversized gold medallion and chain, a fade haircut, and huge, puffy Air Jordans—was an unexpected success. “I never wanted to act,” Lee says. “The only reason I was in ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ is that we couldn’t afford to pay anyone else.”

“She’s Gotta Have It” premièredat the San Francisco Film Festival and prompted a bidding war for the distribution rights. It opened in the summer of 1986, with what Lee calls a “marketing gimmick”: for nearly a month, the movie could be seen at only one theatre in America, Cinema Studio, at Sixty-sixth and Broadway. “Every night it was sold out,” Lee recalled. “And I would get there and hand out buttons. Me and my friends were selling ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ T-shirts.” When the film opened in wide release, it made about seven million dollars. The credits announced the film as “A Spike Lee Joint.” Lee told me, “From very early on—not that I was that sophisticated, but, coming from the independent world, I knew that millions and millions of dollars were not going to be spent on the promotion and marketing of my film. So in a lot of ways I had to market myself and market the brand of Spike Lee.”

In 1988, Nike paired Lee’s Mars Blackmon character with Michael Jordan in a series of television advertisements directed by Lee. He eventually directed and co-starred with Jordan in eight Nike commercials, which played around the world during the late eighties and early nineties. “There was a time when more people knew me as that crazy guy in those Nike commercials than knew I was Spike Lee, the director,” Lee says. “She’s Gotta Have It” also earned him the label of “the black Woody Allen.” Lee was not happy with the comparison. “How can you say anybody is the black anybody after one film?” he said to me. “Look, I’m going to be honest,” he went on. “There were some similarities. Both New Yorkers, both from Brooklyn, both loved the Knicks, both kinda small in stature and wear glasses, so. . . . I can see it. But that black Woody Allen thing? I was saying right away, ‘No.’ I was just trying to establish my own identity. Spike Lee.”

On the third day of recording the score for “Miracle at St. Anna,” Lee arrived at the soundstage just before nine o’clock. He was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “Defend Brooklyn!” and he was in an upbeat mood because the Lakers had won the night before. “Any day Boston loses is a great day!” he said. During a break in the session, Lee took Blanchard aside and told him a story in hushed tones, about an encounter he’d had with Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, and Eddie Murphy at the Lakers game. “They were sitting together,” Lee said. “I went to Spielberg, ‘Steven, it’s over with Clint Eastwood.’ Steven laughed and said, ‘I’ll call Clint and tell him in the morning.’ I said, ‘It’s over.’ He said, ‘Good.’ ”

Blanchard had known Lee too long to believe that he had uttered his final word on Eastwood—and told him so. “I don’t see that shit happening,” he said.

“No!” Lee insisted. “It’s done!”

(Eastwood declined to comment for this article.)

As the day wore on, Lee became increasingly irritable, speaking little with his co-workers, and then only in brief, truculent commands. He stood, stretched his neck, and yawned. During a dinner break, when Blanchard and other members of the team sat in the control room talking and eating sushi and sashimi, Lee sat apart, his back to the room, reading the newspaper and picking at some cooked shrimp. He took a small sip from a glass of red wine. Blanchard tried to draw him into conversation, mentioning the comedy “Swingers.” Lee said peremptorily, “I never saw it,” and resumed reading.

A few minutes later, Lee received a call on his BlackBerry from his family in New York. Since 1994, he has been married to Tonya Lewis Lee, a former corporate lawyer who is now a writer and a television producer and the coauthor of “The Gotham Diaries,” a novel about upper-class black women in Manhattan. The Lees have a daughter, Satchel, thirteen, and a son, Jackson, eleven. Ten years ago, they bought a ninety-six-hundred-square-foot town house on the Upper East Side that used to belong to the painter Jasper Johns and, before that, to Gypsy Rose Lee. “The Upper East Side is the last place I wanted to live,” Lee told me. (The family has also lived in Brooklyn and, briefly, in SoHo.) “But we saw this house and said, ‘We getting it!’ The value has gone up four times since.” The Lees also have a home on Martha’s Vineyard, and their children attend private schools on the Upper East Side, a fact that seems to cause Lee some discomfort when he discloses it. He told me that he had always intended his kids to go, as he did, to public schools. (In a 1991 interview, he called private schools “too sheltered.”) “But my wife put the kibosh on that,” he said. Lee balks at being described as wealthy. “It’s not rich rich,” he told me. “Rich is Spielberg. Lucas. Gates. Steve Jobs. Jay-Z! Bruce Springsteen. I’m not complaining. But that’s money. Will Smith. Tyler Perry. Oprah Winfrey—that’s a ton of money. Compared to them, I’m on welfare!”

Jackson Lee was on the phone, telling his dad about a recent Little League game. Lee’s bad mood disappeared as he paced up and down the control room and spoke loudly into the phone. “How’d you do?” he asked. “You slid under the tag? Everyone came and gave you a high five?” Lee asked several more questions about the game, then said, “Tomorrow is your last day of school. Tell Mommy to let you watch the game. Tell Mommy you wanna watch the Lakers kick the Celtics’ butts!” Then Lee lowered his voice. “We have to talk about that grammar stuff when I get back,” he said, before hanging up. “All right. I’m not mad at you. All right.”

“He hurt his arm, so he can’t pitch,” Lee told Blanchard. “We took him to the Knicks’ doctor. He has ‘Little League elbow.’ ”

“Was he throwing curveballs?” Blanchard asked.

“No, he was throwing hard,” Lee said. He sat and again became absorbed in his newspaper. But when the conversation turned to politics he looked up.

“With this election, we’re gonna find out who’s really liberal,” Blanchard, an Obama supporter, was saying to the others. “You got people saying they’re not going to vote for my man because he lacks experience. You know that’s not it!”

“You know, Donna Brazile still hasn’t declared herself?” Lee said, bitterly.

Frank Wolf, the sound mixer, said, “She’s a superdelegate.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Lee said.

“Who’s going to be the Vice-Presidential pick?” Robin Burgess, the session coördinator and Blanchard’s wife, asked.

“As long as it’s not Hillary,” Lee said.

“You know,” Blanchard said in a wondering tone, “we got friends uptown who say they can’t stand Michelle. I mean, what about McCain’s wife?”

“Stepford wife,” Lee muttered.

“I used to like Bill Clinton,” Blanchard said.

Lee shook his head. “They showed their hand,” he said.

Lee has always been intensely interested in electoral politics and believes that the cultural and financial status of African-Americans is dictated by the policies and attitudes of the politicians in power. He blames Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, for fostering a toxic racial climate. Lee was particularly outraged by two violent incidents in the mid-eighties involving the killing of unarmed blacks by white policemen, who were not convicted of any crime. In December, 1986, three black youths were assaulted by a mob of white men wielding a baseball bat and sticks in Howard Beach, an Italian-American neighborhood of Queens, where they had walked to a pizza parlor after their car broke down nearby. One youth was run over by a car as he fled his attackers. Three of the white assailants were convicted of manslaughter in the winter of 1987, but the city remained tense. Within weeks of the Howard Beach verdict, Lee began writing his third feature, a movie that brilliantly compressed race relations in New York—and, by extension, the nation—into a single day on a single city block.

He set “Do the Right Thing” on the hottest day of the summer in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a black neighborhood with a lone Italian-American outpost: Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Frictions between the pizzeria’s white owners and its black customers build until Sal, played by Danny Aiello, demands that a black youth, Radio Raheem, turn off the boom box on which he constantly plays Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.” Raheem refuses, Sal smashes the boom box with a bat, and the ensuing altercation results in the arrival of white police officers. They execute a restraint hold on Raheem and choke him to death. Soon after, Sal’s delivery man, Mookie—played by Lee and until this point the only character who bridged the white and black worlds—throws a garbage can through the pizzeria’s front window and sparks a riot. The movie ends with two quotations: a plea for nonviolence from Martin Luther King—“The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind”—followed by a quite different sentiment from Malcolm X: “I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”

When the movie débuted, at Cannes, in May, 1989, Lee was asked, at a packed press conference, why he ended it with Malcolm X rather than with King. “I think that in certain times both philosophies and approaches can be appropriate,” he said. “But in this day and age, in the Year of Our Lord 1989, I’m leaning more towards the philosophies of Malcolm X.” He added, “When you’re being beat upside the head with a brick, I don’t think that young black America is just going to turn their cheek and say, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for hitting me upside the head with this brick.’ ” The film caused a furor when it opened. The Times convened a panel discussion that included Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, to address “issues raised by the film.” Stanley Crouch’s scathing review in the Village Voice was titled “Do the Race Thing: Spike Lee’s Afro-Fascist Chic,” and accused Lee of immaturity and propagandizing for black nationalism. In fact, Lee is as hard on the film’s black characters for their political apathy as he is on the pizzeria owner, Sal, who is scarcely a one-dimensional race baiter; “Do the Right Thing” is inarguably among the most thoughtful and unsentimental meditations on race relations committed to film. Scorsese calls it “a wonderful film, a tough picture that puts it right out there.” The Times praised it as an “astounding political and moral drama.”

“Do the Right Thing” changed the public perception of Lee. From the “black Woody Allen,” he became a kind of Malcolm X of American cinema. “After ‘Do the Right Thing,’ it was ‘He wants to throw garbage cans and burn down every pizzeria in America,’ ” Lee says. His subsequent films were controversial even when he did not intend them to be. “Mo’ Better Blues,” his next feature, was an attempt, inspired by his musician father, to defy stereotypes about black jazz artists as self-destructive drug addicts. But the movie included two venal Jewish club owners, Moe and Josh Flatbush (played by John Turturro and his younger brother, Nicholas), who exploit the film’s black jazz musicians, played by Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes. Lee says that he was shocked when critics characterized the portrayal of the club owners as anti-Semitic. According to Lee, his lawyer at the time, Arthur Klein, who has since died, told him, “This could really hurt your career. You better write an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.” Lee’s piece, published in the summer of 1990 and titled “I Am Not an Anti-Semite,” was combative. “I challenge anyone to tell me why I can’t portray two club owners who happen to be Jewish and who exploit the black jazz musicians who work for them,” Lee wrote. “All Jewish club owners are not like this, that’s true, but these two are.”

Lee is still angry about the accusations. “They’re, like, ‘So, Spike, are you saying that every single Jewish person is a crook?’ ” he told me. “Get the fuck out of here! That’s crazy.”

When Lee and Dickerson were in film school, they often discussed their ideal movie project. “For both of us, it was to try to do an adaptation of ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ ” Dickerson says. Lee had first read the book in junior high school and later called it the “most important book I’ll ever read,” saying that it “changed the way I thought; it changed the way I acted.” In 1990, Lee learned that the director Norman Jewison was going to make a movie about Malcolm X for the producer Marvin Worth, who had bought the rights to Malcolm’s autobiography. Jewison had worked on the movie for almost a year, securing Denzel Washington for the lead role, digging up F.B.I. transcripts, and writing a script. Lee did not believe that a white director was up to the task—and said so in the press. Jewison told me, “I feel that he had pulled the race card, so I met with him.” According to Jewison, at the meeting Lee said that a white director lacked “the deep understanding of the black psyche” necessary for the project. Jewison agreed to turn the movie over to Lee, who began filming in 1991.

The production was fraught with problems. “We were trying to make a better movie than Warner Bros. wanted,” Dickerson, who was the cinematographer, says. “For the Egypt scenes, Warner Bros.’s attitude was ‘We don’t need to send you guys to Egypt, just go to South Jersey, shoot on the beach, get some place with some sand, and do matte paintings of the pyramids and everything.’ And they wanted a two-hour movie. There’s no way you can condense a man whose life was as complex as Malcolm’s into two hours.” Lee refused to compromise, and eventually went to prominent members of the black community for money to complete the film as he envisioned it. Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, Prince, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan all contributed money to the movie, which ran three hours and included a sequence shot on location in Egypt. The film documented Malcolm’s early castigation of white people as “blue-eyed devils,” but artfully traced the spiritual development that led him to achieve a broader sympathy, even for whites. “Malcolm X” was released in the fall of 1992 to mixed reviews and a disappointing box-office take of about ten million dollars in its first weekend.

Through the rest of the nineties and into this decade, box-office returns for Lee’s films followed a steady downward trend. “Clockers,” Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Richard Price’s novel about a young black drug dealer (played by Mekhi Phifer), took in slightly more than thirteen million dollars at the box office. “Girl 6,” the closest Lee has come to making a light comedy since “She’s Gotta Have It,” took in less than five million. In 1998, he released “He Got Game,” for which he wrote the screenplay—his first since “Jungle Fever.” The movie was an affecting melodrama about a killer (Denzel Washington) who is offered a reduced sentence in exchange for persuading his estranged son, a high-school basketball star, to sign with “Big State University.” It won praise, even from Stanley Crouch, but took in only about twenty million at the box office. “Summer of Sam,” Lee’s bravura re-creation of the dismal summer of 1977—a film that Scorsese calls “excellent,” and which deserved to be a commercial success—also failed to become a hit. In 2000, he wrote “Bamboozled,” a bitter satire about down-and-out African-American actors performing a hit TV show in blackface. The film lashed out indiscriminately at anyone whom Lee perceived to be exploiting black people—including the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger (who appeared as a character called Timmi Hillnigger) and gangsta-rap groups. (An avowed fan of hip-hop, Lee has nevertheless criticized 50 Cent and other rappers for promoting violence in black communities. “I try not to listen to gangsta rap,” he told me. “It’s not helping.”) Lee shot “Bamboozled” on a shoestring budget, with Sony digital handicams, often using up to ten cameras at a time to capture the action. The movie took in just over two million dollars. Lee’s visibility as a feature-film director had shrunk dramatically. “It got to where people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, when’s your next movie coming out?’—and I had one opening the next day,” Lee recalled.

In 1997, Lee criticized Quentin Tarantino, for his use of the word “nigger” in his movies. “I want Quentin to know that all African Americans do not think that word is trendy or slick,” Lee told Variety. Samuel L. Jackson, the star of Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” defended the director, telling reporters at the Berlin Film Festival that the movie was “a wonderful homage to black exploitation films. This is a good film, and Spike hasn’t made one of those in a few years.” (Jackson had appeared in “Do the Right Thing” and, in a stunning performance, played a crack addict in “Jungle Fever.”) Lee responded by telling the Washington Post that Jackson’s support for Tarantino was like a “house Negro defending massa”—one of his favorite taunts to African-Americans against whom he has a grudge. (Lee says that he was misquoted.) He is scathing on the subject of Robert L. Johnson, the African-American billionaire businessman and founder of Black Entertainment Television, who supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy over Barack Obama’s. “Bob Johnson’s relatives, in slavery, were in the house,” Lee told me. “They were house Negroes. ‘Massa, them niggers about to uprise! What we gonna do?’ ” (In an e-mail to me, Johnson wrote, “Spike Lee’s juvenile ranting does not warrant my attention or a response.”)

During this time, however, Lee also made an acclaimed documentary. In 1997, he released “4 Little Girls,” about the 1963 bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, by members of the Ku Klux Klan—an act that helped to galvanize the civil-rights movement. The film is notable for its emotional restraint; its outrage and grief are channelled through interviews with the dead girls’ parents. It was nominated for an Oscar for best feature-length documentary. “There was something about the dignity of those people he encountered when he was making ‘4 Little Girls’ that had a very deep impact on him, and in some way they seemed to help him grow up,” Stanley Crouch told me. “When you got kids yourself and you’re talking to the father of someone whose child was blown up by the kind of people who blew those kids up, and you see that this person is not ranting and raving in some kind of theatrical purported rage of the sort that you see in ‘Do the Right Thing.’ ” (Lee is less restrained in comments that accompany the DVD for “4 Little Girls,” in which he carps about losing the Oscar to “Into the Arms of Strangers,” a documentary about the effort to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis. “When I found out that one of the films—one of the other five films nominated—was a film about the Holocaust, I knew we lost,” he says.)

In 2006, Lee made “When the Levees Broke,” a four-hour documentary for HBO about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. He did not visit New Orleans until almost three months after the storm—he was finishing post-production on “Inside Man”—but ultimately he made eight trips to the city over six months and shot more than a hundred interviews with survivors. The film catalogues the egregious federal response to the crisis, but its chief power is its record of the toll on the city’s residents. (Lee filmed Blanchard tenderly escorting his elderly mother to her house in New Orleans months after the storm. She sobs when she sees that everything has been destroyed by the floodwaters.) Lee was criticized for including the testimony of some New Orleans residents who said that they had heard explosions before the levees gave way, thus lending credibility to conspiracy theorists who believe that the government dynamited the levees, drowning the city’s impoverished Lower Ninth Ward in order to spare wealthy parts of town. Lee argued that it was his “duty” as a filmmaker to present these witnesses’ statements, and pointed out that he included other possible explanations for what they had heard. The film also features an interview with the historian Douglas Brinkley, who calls the bombing an “urban myth.” Even so, on the DVD’s commentary track, Lee said, “Many African-Americans—and I include myself in this group—don’t put anything past the United States government when it comes to black people.”

The success of “Inside Man,” in 2006, marked an upturn in his fortunes. “I got slipped the script,” he told me. “It had been dormant at Imagine Entertainment, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s company. I said I’d like to do this.”

As Grazer recalled, “He said, ‘I want to do this movie and I want to do it now, and I’ll do it really well.’ He was so committed that it was intoxicating.” Grazer wasn’t particularly troubled that Lee had recently been making small movies. “I’d hired directors—great directors—that weren’t at the highest moment of their career,” he told me. “What mattered to me was that in every movie, whether it was ‘Bamboozled’ or ‘Malcolm X’ or ‘Do the Right Thing,’ he always shot good scenes. He always had good taste.” Grazer was more concerned about Lee’s combativeness. “There are executives within the structural establishment that felt, ‘Hey, we’re not sure we wanna hire Spike Lee,’ ” Grazer said. “But I just felt he’d be perfect for our movie.”

Lee was given a forty-five-million-dollar budget for the film, which was shot in downtown New York, with Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Denzel Washington in the lead roles. Lee made the movie look like a hundred-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster, with his signature fluid camera moves, Blanchard’s gorgeous score, and a twisty plot that was a clever deconstruction of the heist film: Owens’s bank-robber character is not robbing the bank after all. Lee also wrote a few race-conscious passages into the script, including one in which a Sikh is taken hostage in the bank. Released by Owens, the turbaned character is set upon by the police, who panic, call him a “fuckin’ Arab,” and haul him away. Lee says that he knew the film was going to be a hit, but he didn’t know how big. It grossed a hundred and seventy-six million dollars worldwide, a record for Lee, and he immediately began planning to shoot two pet projects—one about the life of James Brown, the other about the riots in Los Angeles sparked by the acquittals of the police officers who beat Rodney King.

“But I could not get the financing for those films,” Lee says. “I deluded myself into thinking that I have a little more leeway after my biggest hit.” Instead, Lee decided to try to put “Miracle at St. Anna” into production, but again was unable to secure funding from the Hollywood studios. Eventually, he raised the money from European sources. “RAI Cinema bought the rights for Italy. TF1 International is a French company—they bought the French rights and then sold them to the rest of the world,” Lee said. “And Touchstone Pictures came on last, as American distributor.”

Lee is philosophical about the difficulty he has had funding his latest projects. “The people who can get films made are Spielberg, Lucas, cats like that,” he told me. “Whatever they want to do, they get made. Everybody else? It’s a battle. Woody Allen has not made his last three or four films in England and his last one in Barcelona by choice. He had to go where the financing was.” Even Scorsese, Lee says, has had to adapt to the realities of present-day Hollywood, casting Leonardo DiCaprio in lead roles in order to raise money. “If Leonardo’s in it, it gets made,” Lee said. He added, “The reality is that unless you’re doing a comic-book superhero or some fourth or fifth sequel, it’s hard to get stuff made, especially stuff that’s different.”

Scorsese told me that financial obstacles are not unusual for established directors with a personal vision, like Lee or Robert Altman, or Scorsese himself. “Sometimes these things go in cycles,” Scorsese said. “Particularly if your films are more subjective, more personal points of view. After ‘The King of Comedy,’ I wound up going back to a low-budget independent cinema with ‘After Hours,’ then ratcheting it up just a little bit more with ‘The Color of Money’ and then going back to independent with ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ and then finally getting back into a kind of a fighting shape with ‘Goodfellas.’ So in a way you have to go off and explore. Some people don’t come back.” He added, “It sort of separates the men from the boys, the ones who keep going. And he has kept going and he’s not going to take no for an answer. Which is great.”

In early August, Lee flew to Los Ange les, where he spent a few days overseeing the final color corrections on “Miracle at St. Anna.” (It opens later this month.) When he returned to New York, on August 7th, we met in midtown, on Madison Avenue at Forty-eighth Street. Lee was wearing a white Ralph Lauren sweat jacket with the word “Beijing” across the back and the Olympics logo on the front. “Let’s walk,” he said, and started up Madison, moving at a good pace.

To walk with Lee in midtown Manhattan is to experience the metropolis reduced to a small town. Every species of New Yorker—from homeless people to businessmen in pin-striped suits—recognized and hailed him. Passing cabdrivers shouted, “Spike!” Bicyclists, pedestrians, people waiting at bus stops, elderly white ladies smiled and nodded hello. Lee acknowledged them all with an expressionless nod of the head, or a quickly raised right hand. Two white women smoking in front of a building managed to talk him into posing for a cell-phone photograph, and a nine-year-old African-American boy got Lee to sign a baseball-size rubber ball painted like a basketball. Lee wrote in careful letters, “To Paul, Love Spike Lee.” At Fifty-seventh Street, Lee charged across a red light. As he approached the Niketown store, down the block, Lee noticed that a crowd of young men had collected on the sidewalk. “Sneakerheads,” as Lee calls them, have been known to camp out in front of the stores for up to a week when the company introduces a new shoe. “Yo!” Lee shouted. “I got to find out what this is!” He hurried over.

The kids, some of whom had set up camp chairs, did a double take, then exclaimed in disbelief, “Spike!”

Lee shook their hands. “What’s about to drop?” he asked.

“Tomorrow. Questlove’s Nike Air,” a white kid replied. Questlove is the drummer for the hip-hop band the Roots.

“Say, Spike—when is the new Spi’zike coming out?” another kid asked. Spi’zike is the name of a limited-edition sneaker—a mash-up of several early styles of Air Jordan—released by Nike in 2007 in honor of Lee’s Mars Blackmon commercials. Lee told the kids that a new black-and-gold version was going to be out soon.

“The black-and-gold is out in Europe,” one of the kids said.

“What?” Lee said. “No, it’s not.”

“I got a picture,” the kid said, waving his BlackBerry. He showed Lee a photograph he had taken of the black-and-gold Spi’zike.

“Shit,” Lee said. “I gotta make a call.” He took out his BlackBerry and dialled the number of his contact at Nike. He got voice mail and hung up. “How long you been out here?” he asked the kids.

“Four days,” the kids said.

Lee headed north and then west on Fifty-ninth Street until he got to Mickey Mantle’s, a sports bar and restaurant. He stepped inside, declared the room “too noisy,” and sat down at a small table on the sidewalk. Lee ordered a strawberry virgin daiquiri. A heavyset African-American teen-ager appeared beside the table, carrying a crumpled box of M&M’s. The boy did not seem to recognize Lee. He asked Lee to buy some candy to “support our football team.”

“How old are you?” Lee asked.

“Fifteen, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name’s Tashon.”

“What’s your last name?”

The kid told him.

“Where you living?” Lee said.

“Jersey City.”

“How’d you get over here?

“The train, sir.”

“PATH train?”

“Yes, sir.”

Lee asked what grade the boy was going into, what his grades were like, if he planned to go to college (“I might go to Rutgers”), what position he played, and how tall he was. Eventually, he asked, “You on the straight and narrow?” to which the boy replied, “Yes.” Lee pulled a five-dollar bill from his pocket. “All right,” he said, “take it.” The boy took it and left.

On the evening of Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, Lee had sent me a two-word text message: “Changes everything.” I now asked him what he meant. “Changes the whole dynamic,” he said. “If we have a black President, maybe it will change people’s psyche.” Specifically, he meant African-Americans. He went on, “They don’t have to be shuckin’ and jivin’—doing the tap dance—to make a living. And I mean that ‘tap dancing’ figuratively, not literally, because no disrespect to the world’s greatest tap dancer, Savion Glover.” I asked Lee about the debate in the mainstream press over Obama’s blackness. (Time had run a story in February, 2007, titled “Is Obama Black Enough?” and the question had since been taken up by CNN, CBS News, the Washington Post, and other news organizations.) He snorted.

“It’s ignorance,” he said. “Here’s the thing. I’m not one of these people who’re going to be defined by the ghetto mentality, that you have to have been shot, have numerous babies from many women, be ignorant, getting high all the time, walking around with pants hanging from your ass—and that’s a black man? I’m not buying that. That’s not my definition. Are there some black people like that? Yes. But if one speaks proper English, wears a shirt and a tie—”

Lee was suddenly distracted by someone across the street. In a booming voice, he yelled, “What’s up, Nick?”

Stopped in traffic, in a silver S.U.V. with the driver’s window down, was Nicholas Turturro, who played one of the Jewish jazz-club owners in “Mo’ Better Blues” and has appeared in several of Lee’s other films.

“Yo, buddy! Like the hat!” Turturro shouted, pointing at Lee’s Yankees cap, which featured a pattern of winning pennants.

“What size you wear?” Lee bellowed.

“I got one already!”

“Got one? You gotta get one for your brother! Time is running out!”

Turturro drove off, and Lee resumed talking about Obama’s run for President. “This thing is not by accident,” he said. “I think this thing is ordained—it’s providence. This is a sweeping movement. It’s bigger than him, it’s bigger than all of us. I think this is going to be such a pivotal moment in history that you can measure time by B.B., Before Barack, and A.B., After Barack. That’s what I feel is going to happen.” He went on, “There’s ramifications all over the world. I mean, I know this is a Presidential election for the United States of America, but this thing is worldwide news. It’s not like they rang every door in Berlin to say, ‘Barack’s going to be here,’ for two hundred thousand people to show up. Two hundred thousand can come to see McCain but they’re going to be protesting, and burning American flags and who knows what else?” He laughed. “If we were talking about two boxers, Muhammad Ali would say, ‘He’s too old, and he’s too slow!’ And he would say, ‘I’m too young and too pretty and too fast.’ ” Lee clapped his hands.

In our earlier conversations, I had tried several times to get Lee to say whether he, routinely held up as an exemplar of the angry, activist black artist, felt out of step in the supposedly “post-racial” world embodied by Obama. He had dodged or ignored my questions. But he seemed to offer an oblique answer when I asked if he had thought about making a television commercial for Obama’s campaign. After all, Obama and his wife had gone to see “Do the Right Thing” on their first date, in 1989, and then had discussed Mookie’s act of throwing the garbage can through Sal’s window.

“You gotta be asked to do that stuff,” Lee said. “Look, if they need me, they know where I am. And in a lot of ways they might—” He paused. “You know, that shit could be used against them, too. ‘Spike Lee, the man who said so-and-so and so-and-so. Now he’s doing commercials for—’ ” He shrugged and smiled. “Sometimes you might be a liability,” he said finally. “Just got to lay in the cut.” ♦

2008-09-24T23:45:00.000+03:00

Tyler Perry Launches 34th Street Films
posted on Sep 24, 2008

Tyler Perry has formed 34th Street Films, the L.A.-based a production arm of his Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios that will focus on projects written and directed by outside talent.

Matt Moore, former exec VP of production at Jinks/Cohen, will head the division; Poppy Hanks and Amber Rasberry join him. The trio will work from a Los Angeles office and report to Perry's HQ in Atlanta.

In July, Perry signed a three-year, first-look pact with Lionsgate Films, the studio that has released every Perry film. The deal requires writer-director-producer-actor Perry to deliver at least three films over the life of the contract. Lionsgate will retain a first-look position with 34th Street films as well.

2008-09-23T00:43:00.001+03:00

indieWIRE PROFILE | "Medicine For Melancholy" Director Barry Jenkins

by Eugene Hernandez (September 14, 2008)

"We stopped seeking validation and just went out and made the movie," filmmaker Barry Jenkins explained last week in Toronto, sitting down to chat a bit about his first feature "Medicine For Melancholy." A Toronto International Film Festival Discovery section title, the acclaimed fest circuit film, acquired over the summer by IFC Films, is launching IFP's Independent Film Week on Monday in Manhattan after winning the audience award at theSan Francisco International Film Festival and hitting a number of other fests. A low-budget indie feature set in San Francisco, the film follows two people during the 24 hours after they meet and hook up. It's about, in Jenkins' words, "the naivete of the morning after. Trying to forge an emotional connection from a physical act."

"The movie kind of spun out of my first functional, interracial relationship," Jenkins elaborated, reflecting on the movie on a day last week when he spent hours talking to the press. As the young folks at the center of his story -- Micah (Wyatt Cenac) and Jo (Tracey Heggins) -- get to know each other better the morning after, they ponder Bay Area gentrification, talk class politics, and butt heads over race in a way that feels quite timely. In short, they expose and judge each others identities in ways evolve naturally.

"It's really about economics, it's about status, class," Barry Jenkins added, elaborating his own "post-race" point of view. "I think the movie is really about getting to that point." He spent three weeks writing the script for a film that was inspired, in part, by Claire Denis' 2002 film, "Friday Night" (Vendredi Soir). But, "I am not Claire Denis!" he cautioned. "It could be set in Chicago or New York," he added, but in setting it in San Francisco, he uses the film as a way to explore the city and two of its residents at a particular moment.

A scene from Barry Jenkins' "Medicine for Melancholy." Photo provided by SXSW

"I would love for other filmmakers to be inspired by our film," Jenkins said, reflecting on the fact that "Medicine for Melancholy" would kick-off the IFP events this week. He was inspired by the work of the so-called Mumblecorefilmmakers, namelyChris Wells and Joe Swanberg and their 2006 film, "LOL." After befriending Wells at theTelluride Film Festival, where Jenkins is still an annual staffer, Jenkins admitted that he was rather floored when Wells told him that he and Swanberg had gone and made a low-budget feature.

"I went to film school, I thought I was a decent filmmaker, I just couldn't make films -- nobody would give me the money or the time or the access," elaborated Jenkins, an '03 graduate of Florida State. Fed up with with trying to find the cash to make his own films, Jenkins decided to take the D.I.Y. approach pursued by Wells and Swanberg. Which essentially lead him to the festival home base for the so-called Mumblecore set, Austin's SXSW Film Festival. IFC came knocking after catching up with the film this Spring, tipped by filmmaker (and IFC staffer) Chris Wells.

Now repped by CAA and recently named to Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces in Independent Film, like other emerging filmmakers Jenkins is hoping to work with a larger palette in the future. "I don't think there is a single filmmaker that I've met on the circuit who doesn't want access to better tools," Jenkins added, "All we could afford to do was two people walking and talking."

2008-09-11T19:10:00.000+03:00

Movie Tells Story of First Black Heisman Winner

Half a Century After His Tragic Death, Syracuse's Ernie Davis Makes the Big Screen

By MATT GELB

SYRACUSE, N.Y., Sept. 11, 2008—

The 1961 Heisman Trophy sits alone in a glass case in the middle of the hallway that separates the exercise room from the cafeteria and auditorium in the Syracuse University football wing at Manley Field House.

It serves as a constant reminder of the legacy of Ernie Davis. And the success Syracuse once tasted.

Davis died tragically after becoming the first African-American to win the annual award recognizing college football's most outstanding player. His inspirational story hits the big screen October 10 when "The Express" debuts in theaters around the country.

The movie is a major coup for the university. Syracuse athletic director Daryl Gross was directly involved with preliminary discussions with Universal Studios and helped launch the making of "The Express." He successfully lobbied for Friday's worldwide premiere at the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse instead of Hollywood.

In Need of a Boost

School officials hope that all the attention will serve as an inspiration and public relations boost to a struggling Syracuse team, which lost its season opener 30-10 at Northwestern University and started 0-1 for the fifth straight season.

"There's a sense of urgency for not just us as players, but I think our community, too," senior wide receiver Bruce Williams said. "We don't want this thing to die down. We really want this thing to turn around very soon."

The Syracuse program is in a drastically different state than when Davis led the school to its only national championship in 1959, and even four years ago when the Orange won a share of the Big East title.

But the football team has since lost its prominence, even on its own campus, where attendance is at a 20-year low.

"We haven't been successful with winning in the past few years," senior running back Curtis Brinkley said. "I feel like everybody needs to make a statement."

The opening weeks of the season coincide with the Sept. 12 movie premiere.

The following day, a ranked and heavily favored Penn State team comes to the Carrier Dome to renew a once bitter rivalry. The two schools haven't played one another in 18 years, but met every season except one from 1922 to 1990.

Davis Story Needs Telling

As for Davis' story, it simply needs to be told, athletic director Gross said. After an illustrious collegiate career at Syracuse, Davis succumbed to leukemia on May 18, 1963, at age 23, before he could start his professional career.

The movie title is a play on "Elimira Express," as the running back was called in college. He went to high school in Elmira, N.Y., before going on to win the second-closest vote in Heisman history and the only SU student to earn the award.

The Orange football team watched a private screening last week before the season's devastating home-opening loss to the Universitry of Akron (Ohio), 42-28.

"I'm excited for the movie and to watch," defensive tackle Arthur Jones said. "It's really going to create attention to this program."

Gary Fleder directed the movie, which stars Rob Brown as Ernie Davis and Dennis Quaid as legendary SU coach Ben Schwartzwalder. It debuts in theaters nationally Oct. 3.

Even during the darkest days of Syracuse football, Gross sees the movie as a huge boost to the program.

"It's priceless. Totally priceless," Gross told The Daily Orange recently. "You can count on two hands the number of schools that have had their university in a world motion picture like us. You think about 'Rudy,' 'Glory Road,' 'We Are Marshall.' I saw the movie. It is Syracuse. It's about Syracuse. It's just an amazing, extraordinary, priceless piece of art that the world's going to get to see."

Hollywood Comes to Syracuse

The events on the day of the premiere will bring a taste of Hollywood to the city of Syracuse. Former SU and NFL football stars Jim Brown and Floyd Littleplan to attend the festivities, along with other members of the 1959 national title team, actors from the movie and other prominent alumni.

During halftime of the Penn State game, the school will unveil a statue of Davis in a special ceremony featuring the 1959 players and the actors. The statue will eventually sit in the university's main quad.

And while Syracuse players and coaches are optimistic that the program can turn the corner, even after the deflating first loss, the team's recent performance stands is in stark contrast to the glory days.

"It's really important to get things moving in the right direction," team player Jones, a junior, said. "Coach has told us, 'Just believe.'"

2008-09-09T18:54:00.001+03:00

Miracle at St. Anna
: TIFF press conference diaries Posted: September 07, 2008, 3:03 PM by Mark Medley

The best part of a press conference featuring Spike Lee is you know you’re not leaving the room without a notepad full of quotes. And so it was Sunday morning at the presser for Miracle at St. Anna, his new World War Two epic that chronicles the experiences of the African-American soldiers that comprised the 92nd Division – called the Buffalo Soldiers. Though he started off slowly, Lee rounded into peak form as the hour progressed. The way Lee lectured the room full of journalists it sometimes felt like we were in his classroom at NYU, where he teaches film.

It was, he said, a miracle this film got made. After the success of his last feature, 2006’s Inside Man, he figured it would be easier to secure the funding for his next picture. No luck.

“If you’re not doing a comic book or some TV show made into a movie, it’s hard to get stuff made,” said Lee, wearing a white Barack Obama t-shirt and a crucifix around his neck. “I was very frustrated with Hollywood. And I said ‘F**k it’ and flew to Italy.”

There, he secured the finance thanks to his two Italian producers Roberto Cicutto and Luigi Musini.

“I really believe in miracles now,” said Lee. “This film is a testament to that.”

The film may surprise long-time Lee fans whom may not peg the American director as the type to direct a sprawling war epic (with a good chunk of the dialogue in Italian and German.) Then again, the bank heist drama Inside Man wasn’t typical Lee fare, either.

The movie is an adaptation of James McBride’s novel of the same name. McBride recalled how he was inspired by the sometimes-drunken tales of his Uncle Henry.

“As a kid, I never paid any attention to those stories. They were just old war stories,” said McBride. “But when I grew older and became a writer, I became interested in some of the things he talked about.”

He interviewed two to three dozen veterans of the 92nd Division, and even moved his family to Italy to study the language and further research what Italians went through during the war.

“James McBride wrote a novel that, for an actor, that is a blessing,” said Laz Alonso, who co-stars as Corporal Hector Negron. “If every script I got came accompanied with a book in that detail it would make our jobs so much easier. You could literally see, taste, smell, the period.”

The film co-stars Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, and Omar Benson Miller, and is peppered with cameos by previous Lee collaborators.

Lee just met some of the surviving Buffalo Soldiers while filming a segment for the film’s DVD release. He hopes his film spreads their story to a wider audience.

“They have not gotten their due,” said Lee, getting more animated as he spoke. “And now most of them are dead. It is not a mistake that this film begins with John Wayne and The Longest Day. This is the Hollywood bullshit mythology that excludes plenty of people. You look at John Wayne. What does John Wayne represent? In a World War Two film John Wayne is kicking Nazi ass, in the Pacific he’s kicking Japanese ass, and in the western he’s killing the savage Indians….This film is a rebuttal to the same Hollywood bullshit mythology that demeans other people. And we have to change this shit. We have to change it. We continue putting out these lies again and again and young people growing up have no idea that this stuff even happened.”

There are many different stories, he said, and he hoped this film would spark other untold stories about the war.

“That’s why this whole thing is tied in with Obama,” Lee continued, “because these guys fought not knowing there will be a black president, but they were hoping some day, some day American would deliver on its promise for life, liberty for all American citizens….That’s my tirade for the day.”

The room broke into applause. Prof. Lee didn’t say whether there would be an exam.

2008-09-06T20:01:00.001+03:00

Derek Luke in 'Miracle at St. Anna'

The Spike Lee film revolves around four African American Buffalo Soldiers trapped behind enemy lines.

September 7, 2008

ACTOR Derek Luke complains with ultra-mock seriousness that making Spike Lee's World War II drama, "Miracle at St. Anna," set for release Sept. 26, was like being in the real military.

"You never get a chance to go back to your trailer," says Luke, who knows he'll come up dry in this fishing trip for sympathy. Luke, who plays the key role of 2nd Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps in the movie, has nothing but admiration when he talks about Lee. "He shoots three or four or five cameras at the same time. He makes sure he gets every actor's reaction."

"Miracle at St. Anna," adapted by James McBride from his novel, revolves around four African American Buffalo Soldiers of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division who find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in a small Tuscan village after one of the men risks his life to save a young Italian boy.

Though he worked long days and weeks in Italy on the film, Luke ("Antwone Fisher") says it was a huge honor to be directed by Lee, especially since he got his big break as an actor in "Fisher," which was directed by Denzel Washington, thereby linking him to Lee in a six-degrees-of-separation sort of way. "Denzel has made more movies with Spike than anybody he's worked with. Denzel and Spike are like Bonnie and Clyde."

Lee, he says, "seems like a guy who likes rehearsal. But once you get the rhythm for the rehearsal and a rhythm for the word, then he allows you to improv if, in fact, it fits. If it doesn't fit, you'll hear it quickly."

2008-08-19T22:32:00.001+03:00

BROOKLYN TO HOLLYWOOD

By TRYMAINE LEE

MICHAEL C. MARTIN sat in the back of a musty soul-food joint in Bushwick, Brooklyn, eyeballing two men in police uniforms who were arguing at a table by the front window. The younger man’s voice was angry and rising, hushed only by the growling of a train clawing its way across the elevated tracks outside.

Mr. Martin watched as the men carried their argument into the street, where it quickly escalated into a fistfight with body slams and bloodied knuckles. Passers-by gathered around the two men, some cheering and pumping their fists. Others who stumbled on the scene looked on in disbelief.

Are those police officers fighting? Wait. Is that who I think it is? Is that Richard Gere?

Mr. Martin barely batted an eye.

“Cut! Cut! Cut!” yelled Antoine Fuqua, the director of “Training Day” and now this film, “Brooklyn’s Finest,” shot on location in Brooklyn last month. “Who the hell is this guy in my shot? He does it every time.”

A member of the film crew rushed over to the massive storefront window, glaring into the street searching for the misguided extra. “He’s someone who will never be in the shot again,” the crewman assured the visibly frustrated Mr. Fuqua, who was rubbing the back of his bald head.

A few seconds later Mr. Gere staggered in from the sidewalk, nursing his elbow as he joined Mr. Fuqua to review tape of the scene. Then before long there was silence, and then “Action!” And again Mr. Gere was in the street, in the middle of the block, tussling with an actor probably half his age.

As strange a scene as it was that day in a neighborhood more accustomed to real-life drama, even more extraordinary is the story of how Mr. Martin, a 28-year-old former subway worker from East New York, Brooklyn, came to write “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a gritty thriller starring Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke and Mr. Gere as police officers in a housing project. Mr. Martin, who in his dusty white FUBU sneakers, denim shorts and a short-sleeve, button-up shirt looked that day more like a college senior than a Hollywood writer, is a onetime film student who remains a few credits shy of his degree from Brooklyn College. His most recent job was subway flagger with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; he waved flags and set up warning lights in subway tunnels to warn approaching trains that construction crews were working on the tracks.

The whole movie thing, he said, happened sort of by chance.

In 2005 a car accident left him injured and his 1991 Lincoln Mark VII totaled. While he would need three months of physical therapy to deal with a bulging disc in his back, his obsession focused less on mending than on making some extra cash to buy a new car. Surfing the Web one day he came across a call for submissions in a screenwriting competition. The grand prize was $10,000. So he began to write the first scenes of what he called “kind of an epic”: the intertweaving stories of three police officers who have misplaced their moral compasses and grown to hate themselves a little along the way.

“I didn’t expect ‘Brooklyn’s Finest’ to get made,” Mr. Martin said. “It wasn’t Hollywood overnight. It was, ‘I’m still working my 9 to 5, and I’m still writing, and I’m still trying to make my dream happen.’ ”

Mr. Martin did not win that contest. He came in second, winning copies of IFP newsletter, which offers articles about the independent film scene. But his script got the attention of a few people in the business. Soon he had an agent and a chance to write an episode of “Sleeper Cell,” the Showtime series, since canceled, about terror cells in America and the agents who track them.

About a year after the contest Mr. Martin’s agent submitted the script to Warner Brothers on spec for a job writing the sequel to the urban cult film “New Jack City.” It landed in a pile of scripts on the desk of the producer Mary Viola. She liked it so much that she not only wanted Mr. Martin to do the “New Jack City” project but proposed that the “Brooklyn’s Finest” script be made into a feature-length movie.

Within weeks the project got the go-ahead. Mr. Martin was paid $200,000 for the script with handsome box-office incentives. After Mr. Fuqua came on board, the big-name cast (Wesley Snipes also stars as a drug dealer recently released from prison) quickly signed on, many taking large pay cuts to work on the film, budgeted at about $25 million.

“I’ve been dealing with making movies for 30 years — more than 30 years, almost 35 years — and I’ve worked with a lot of writers who would try to come up with something like this and would fail,” Mr. Gere said a few days after filming wrapped last month. “It’s got such a wonderful structure to it, besides the innate rhythm and nature of it. The structure was a really terrific movie structure. It’s basically three short stories, very tangentially connected, unexpectedly, contrapuntally working together.”

John Langley, a producer on the movie and the creator of “Cops,” the long-running Fox television show, said Mr. Martin had delivered “the most realistic cop script that I’ve ever read.”

“It’s about inner-city problems, it’s about problems in police departments, it’s about their relationship, it’s about drugs, it’s about society,” Mr. Langley said. “He captures something screenwriters in Hollywood aren’t necessarily going to capture: the smell, the taste, the feel, the reality, the sensibility, the environment, all of these things and the layers that you don’t normally get from people sitting around making up scripts.”

For Mr. Fuqua, whose last foray into the world of corrupt cops, “Training Day” (2001), garnered a best actor Academy Award for Denzel Washington, “Brooklyn’s Finest” also offered a chance to exorcise a bitter piece of history. Back in 2004, a month before the scheduled start of filming on “American Gangster,” Universal Pictures scrapped Mr. Fuqua’s vision for the movie at a cost of $30 million. The studio, Mr. Fuqua said on the set of this film, wanted something slick and shiny. (At the time Universal cited creative differences for Mr. Fuqua’s departure amid reports of an escalating budget and the lack of a final shooting script. The movie was later filmed with Ridley Scott as director.)

“I wanted to put it in the ’hood and make it as real and gritty as I could make it,” Mr. Fuqua said. A few days after the shoot in Bushwick the crew on “Brooklyn’s Finest” headed back to the Van Dyke housing projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to capture some of that grit.

The buildings there loom tall, burnt-orange brick and glass jutting from the concrete-covered earth. About 4,410 residents live in the Van Dyke houses’ 23 buildings, all within a few blocks, pressed hard against dozens of other public housing complexes where, like these, hard-working parents and children are stacked on top of one another amid hustlers, whores and killers. Like many of the neighboring communities Brownsville can be a dangerous place where people often still die by the gun, unlike many other parts of Brooklyn.

On this day in July residents gathered along closed-in courtyards, keeping an eye out for famous faces milling around.

“Hopefully them being here shows people that it ain’t as bad as they think it is out here,” said Franklin Quinones, 26, a resident of the Van Dyke Houses.

This is the world that inspired much of Mr. Martin’s vision of the film. His childhood home, where his mother still lives, is just two subway stops away. He grew up in East New York, “in the best part of a bad neighborhood,” which he loved despite the horror stories. A basketball star until a torn A.C.L. derailed those hoop dreams, he caught the filmmaking bug in a film appreciation class at South Shore High School. “It’s all the great art forms rolled in one,” he said. “I wanted to be a part of it.”

He enrolled in the film department at Brooklyn College. He directed and produced a short movie as a class project, but, he said, he was not able to bear taking the final requirements, like a science class, so he took a gig at the M.T.A. nearly five years after submitting an application. But he did not let go of his moviemaking aspirations — or memories of his formative years.

“The wildest thing, more than anything, is that we shoot in these locations that I’ve been to for years and years, passing by most of my life,” he said. “This movie is really just based on everything I’ve kind of seen throughout my life. It’s not an autobiography, but it’s just those places, the people, the sounds and the look.”

The naysayers said that filming in the area would be trouble. City officials warned that crew members could be assaulted, possibly bricked and bottled, and that they’d be cussed at and unwelcome, Mr. Martin and Mr. Fuqua recalled.

“People say: ‘Aw, man, you can’t shoot there. No one’s ever done it. Can’t go in there,’ ” Mr. Fuqua said. “But it’s been fantastic. The people, the kids running around. A few young guys post up hard, sometimes people would lay on the horn a little longer than you’d like, but still and all they really showed a lot of love.”

Before the shoot ended, Mr. Fuqua donated $100,000 of professional camera equipment to four teenagers he selected for a filmmaking program he created.

“Brownsville, we never get none of this,” said Bryan Martin, 16, one of the participants. “We don’t get nothing, no kind of recognition. And a lot of guys don’t get a chance to get out of the neighborhood, so it’s amazing for them to come to us.”

Mr. Martin credited his Brooklyn upbringing and his years working for the city’s transit authority with giving him a breadth of experiences to use in writing the script.

“You grow up in New York, and you work at a place like the M.T.A., you come across a lot of personalities,” Mr. Martin said. “You get a good understanding of people and their differences and the conflicts they have with each other from where they are and their perspectives on life, religion, politics. It all kind of melts together.”

This is a whole new world for Mr. Martin: the stars, the press, the whirlwind of energy and the anticipation of what could be. But he seemed to be settling into his role as a professional screenwriter. Already he’s begun writing the straight-to-DVD sequel to “New Jack City.” And he and his fiancée, Maria, the parents of a 9-month-old-son, Ricardo, are thinking of moving to California.

Still, some of his family haven’t bought into all the hype, he said.

“My grandmother says the funniest thing,” he said. “She says now that I’m a screenwriter, my handwriting must be getting better. And my mother still thinks that being a paralegal is the greatest job possible. Even when I told my mother they’re going to greenlight the movie, that they’re going to start shooting it, she was like: ‘You know what? I got these brochures about being a paralegal. You should check it out.’

“She comes down to the set, and she still says that.” Mr. Martin laughed. “I think she just wants me to be grounded.”

2008-05-23T16:11:00.002+03:00

Wed May 21, 2008 9:24am EDT

SPIKE LEE RIPS COENS AND EASTWOOD AT CANNES

By Eric J. Lyman

CANNES (Hollywood Reporter) - Spike Lee is in Cannes to promote a new film, but he couldn't resist taking a few swipes at some fellow directors, including Joel and Ethan Coen and Clint Eastwood.

Speaking about his World War II drama "Miracle at St. Anna," Lee said that, unlike the Coens, he was respectful in the way he portrayed death.

"I always treat life and death with respect, but most people don't," Lee said at a news conference Tuesday. "Look, I love the Coen brothers; we all studied at NYU. But they treat life like a joke. Ha ha ha. A joke. It's like, 'Look how they killed that guy! Look how blood squirts out the side of his head!' I see things different than that."

Speaking about the casting for his tale of four black American soldiers in Tuscany, Lee said that black actors appear in war films too infrequently.

"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," he said. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

Lee said that "St. Anna" is in the final stages of postproduction, with an October 10 release date likely -- exactly one year after shooting started. He said the film is likely to premiere at a festival the month before, either Venice or Toronto.

The filmmaker also said Tuesday that he is starting work on a documentary about basketball great Michael Jordan, set for release in early 2009. Lee and Jordan starred in a series of ads for Nike in the late 1980s and early '90s.

2008-04-22T15:37:00.000+03:00

Sylvia Fay/Lee Genick & Associates Casting will be holding an open call for the feature film “Brooklyn’s Finest” directed by Antoine Fuqua, starring Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke and Ellen Barkin.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 from 10:00am until 12:30pm and then from 1:30pm until 3:30pm. The call will be held at the Church of the Holy Trinity, 316 E. 88 St., betw. 1st and 2nd Ave. SAG open call policies apply. You MUST bring your paid up SAG card and 2 NEW 8x10 photos with resumes attached. Actors who have previously registered with Sylvia Fay should send 2 photos/resumes to Sylvia Fay/Lee Genick & Associates Casting, 71 Park Ave., NYC 10016

CONVERSE Enlightenment

2008-03-04T02:12:00.001+03:00

Click to Play

Spec Commercial by Ed DuRante

2008-02-14T00:01:00.004+03:00

blackclassicmovies.com list of top 100 black films
http://www.blackclassicmovies.com/top100chrono.html

2008-01-25T00:14:00.001+03:00

St. Clair Bourne Memorial

To All of Saint's Family, Friends, Colleagues and Admirers

By now you are probably aware of the shocking news of St.Clair's
sudden passing.

Early morning, on December 15th, just before he was to be released
from the hospital following the successful removal of a benign tumor
from the surface of his brain, he developed blood clots, which
traveled to his lungs.

We all remain heartsick and know that you share our grief and
distress. The warmth and support that has been extended by so many
has been essential to our retaining some balance in these
circumstances. Saint's ashes were interred with those of his parents
at the Cypress Hills Cemetery on Friday, the 28th of December.

If you have internet access, you may wish to "Google" St.Clair
Bourne. You will be astounded at the immense outpouring of grief and
emotion about Saint's death. There have been numerous newspaper
articles and internet and blog postings concerning his stature
within, and contributions to, the documentary filmmaking community
and African-American social and political life.

St. Clair's passing is particularly mourned by his devoted sister
Judith L. Bourne of St. Thomas, U. S. Virgin Islands, numerous
cousins and other relatives both in the USA and in Antigua, West
Indies, dear and faithful friends Tinoa Rodgers and Faith Childs,
former wives and continued close friends Sylvia Azure Bourne and Dr.
Linda Miller, and a vast host of colleagues, associates, partners,
protoges and friends.

A Memorial Service will be held at 7:00 pm on the 25th of January
2008 at The Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Drive, Manhattan, with a
reception following.

A small group of family members, Saint's closest friends, and a
couple of his oldest and closest colleagues are involved in the
planning of this celebration of his life.

Despite his accomplishments, Saint's financial circumstances were
difficult and many of you have asked how you can contribute to this
event. Contributions should be made payable to Judith L. Bourne with
a note in the memo line for the St. Clair Bourne Memorial and mailed
to Saint's long time accountant and friend:

Barry Kornblum
Pomerantz and Company
245 Fifth Avenue, Ste. 2203.
New York, NY 10016

Judy Bourne is also working on establishing a fund or other not-for-
profit entity to continue some of Saint's mentoring and community
nurturing activities.

Thank you

St. Clair Bourne Memorial Planning Committee

2008-01-13T21:58:00.001+03:00

FIRST SUNDAY directed by David E. Talbert

Reviewed by Kam Williams

Crooks Conspire to Rob Church in Demeaning Minstrel Show

When a movie resuscitates this many offensive African-American stereotypes, you half expect somebody to be passing out watermelons and barbecuing ribs right in the lobby of the theater. I had problems with virtually every aspect of First Sunday, starting with its basic premise. The plot revolves around a couple of petty thieves, Durell (Ice Cube) and LeeJohn (Tracy Morgan), who hatch a plan to rob a house of worship after overhearing that its congregation had had finally collected enough money to break ground on a new church.

It's bad enough that these creepy heathens wouldn't hesitate to steal from the Lord, but what's worse are their reasons for needing the money. Durell is so far behind in child support that his ex, Omunique (Regina Hall), is threatening to move from Baltimore to Atlanta with their young son (C.J. Sanders) unless her deadbeat baby-daddy comes up with $17,342. Meanwhile, LeeJohn is on the run from Rastafarians because of a black market business deal gone bad.

By now, you might have noticed that some of the characters have strange names. LeeJohn explains that he got his because his mother was a tramp who had been sleeping with two men at the time she got pregnant, and she didn't know whether the father was Lee or John. Omunique's is pronounced "I'm unique" and is no doubt a throwback to 19th Century minstrel shows when white men sporting similarly silly-sounding names appeared in blackface as caricatures of African-Americans, invariably portraying them as some combination of lazy, cowardly, stupid, immoral, criminal and buffoonish.

Besides reviving ridiculous, minstrel-like monikers, First Sunday is a crass coon show which resuscitates the outlawed genre's general themes and demeaning dialogue. Most guilty in this regard is Katt Williams in his capacity as Rickey, the First Hope Community Church's flamboyant choir director.

Rickey is an ignoramus given to blurting out inane non-sequiturs which fail to further the story and whose only apparent purpose is to make the audience laugh out loud. For example, there's a court room scene where a judge (Keith David) sitting on the bench calls the defendants "miscreants." Rickey's response is to sass the jurist by asserting that they're not miscreants but African-Americans," the joke being that he obviously doesn't have a clue what the word means.

He repeatedly employs makes malapropisms, such as confusing "affecting" with "infecting." While being held hostage, he's cowardly ("This isn't even my church. I just saw this on MySpace."), he feints, and generally behaves like a buffoon ("I'm gonna need therapy!").

The performances of co-stars Tracy Morgan and Ice Cube aren't any better as the self-hating antics as the bumbling burglars. In sum, if you still like to laugh at the sight of a black man in a dress, at lines about nappy hair ("Your hair looks like an S.O.S. pad!') and at African-Americans pretending to be mildly retarded, you're apt to find First Sunday hilarious.

A cringe-inducing, cinematic tribute to the Golden Age of Minstrelsy!

2008-01-05T21:39:00.000+03:00

DANNY GLOVER INTERVIEW : "The Honeydrippers" directed by John Sayles

*Born on July 22, 1946, Danny Lebern Glover was the eldest of five children raised in San Francisco by James and Carrie Glover, both of whom were postal workers.

After graduating from George Washington High School, he attended San Francisco State University where his progressive political perspective was forged as a member of the Black Student Union.

He developed an interest in acting in his late twenties, which is when he started studying at the Black Actors’ Workshop in San Francisco. Danny’s screen debut came in Escape from Alcatraz in 1979, though he found his breakout role as Moze opposite Sally Field’s Oscar-winning performance in Places in the Heart.

His most notorious outing arrived in 1985 as Albert in Steven Spielberg’s screen adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Color Purple. However, he is likely to be best remembered for the four buddy flicks he made with Mel Gibson during the run of the Lethal Weapon franchise. Plus, he has handled title roles as Nelson Mandela in Mandela, as Boesman in Boesman and Lena, and appeared in everything from Witness to Predator 2 to The Rainmaker to Beloved to The Royal Tenebaums to Manderlay to Shooter to Dreamgirls.

Danny enjoys his best role in years in his latest film, Honeydripper, a historical drama set in the Jim Crow South. The movie has him re-teamed with iconoclastic director John Sayles and complemented in this endeavor by a very talented ensemble cast which included Charles S. Dutton, Mary Steenburgen, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Stacy Keach, Keb’ Mo’, Sean Patrick Thomas and Yaya DaCosta.

Here, Mr. Glover talks not only about Honeydripper but about his ongoing commitment to the downtrodden and the disenfranchised.

Danny Glover: Hey, Kam, how’re you doing?

Kam Williams: Okay, and you?

DG: Good! Good!

KW: Thanks so much for the time. I really appreciate it.

DG: Oh, you’re welcome.

KW: So, what interested you in the script of Honeydripper?

DG: Oh, man, it always starts with the story. This story was just so compelling, plus the period was fascinating, and I liked the way in which John Sayles, the director, was able to integrate the music with all the changes that were happening during that period. So, there’s not only the musical dynamics of it, and using music as a metaphor in some way to talk about change, the piano being superseded by the electric guitar and rock music etcetera, but also the way in which John has layered the story, and layered the characters. They have their own histories which reflect a much broader history of the changes which were about to occur.

KW: What I appreciate about this film is how it recaptures a slice of African-Americana from a period during which black people’s existence was denied by the mainstream culture. As a child of the Fifties, I remember how people would yell for everybody to come when you just saw any black face on television.

DG: Absolutely! And the images then on TV were stereotypes and buffoons. And the images of Africa were of Tarzan. So, I just think that there’s a way in which this film, in some sense, takes another step in terms of presenting people in real time in real life. And as we reflect upon that, we see the embodiment of not only the musical dynamic and changes that occurred within that period of time, but also we see the emergence of the social changes and the political changes that were happening as well.

KW: The musical aspects of Honeydripper resonated with me because I grew up in a black community with a lot of jazz greats: Count Basie, Ella, Lena Horne, Lester Young, Fats Waller, Oliver Nelson, Billie Holiday and others, during a time when their music was being eclipsed in popularity by newcomers to the neighborhood like James Brown. It was an interesting dynamic to observe.

DG: Where’d you grow up?

KW: In St. Albans, New York in the late Fifties.

DG: Then you saw it happen during a different period but, yeah, you hit on the way all forms of music indigenous to black people have resonated, whether it’s blues, or jazz, or gospel music, how that forms a foundation and resonates in our lives. My dad was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1919, at this moment in time when all this stuff was happening around music. And his life reflected that movement of music. So, music becomes something of a barometer for looking at the world and for looking at our situation through the music itself.

KW: I spoke to John Sayles the other day, and find it interesting that this is his third film with an African-American ensemble, along with Brother from Another Planet and Sunshine State.

DG: What I think is so wonderful about John is his historical relevance and reverence. You see, John really feels that, yeah, individuals may mark a moment, but things really happen with the collective movement of people. So, he’s able to identify, in his movies, this unique transition from the individual, as an individual lives his life, to what his life manifests in terms of the collective movement among a people as well. That’s unique, because he achieves this without being didactic, expository or rhetorical.

KW: So, tell me a little about your character in Honeydripper, Tyrone “Pinetop” Purvis.

DG: He’s an independent black businessman trying to save his business. First of all, this was a rarity in the South that we know in 1950. That’s one aspect. Hey, countless, young African-American men were trained in the navy or the army about radio. Here’s a guy who takes that technology and uses it as part of his artistic expression. How many men is he representative of? John gives him a back story, and one that is consistent with the historical evolution. And then my daughter [played by Yaya DaCosta] who decides that she has aspirations outside of the constraints and limitations that are placed upon young black girls in the South. She wants to go to beauty school… She wants to travel…She wants to see this… She wants to see that. These are little revelations which are manifestations not only of an individual’s identity and personality but are also reflective of a collective movement of people.

KW: One of your movies, Manderlay, was #1 on my Ten Best Independent Films List for 2006. That picture, directed by Lars von Trier, had a fascinating premise and was set in the 1930s on a plantation in Alabama where slavery never ended. Despite the micro-budget, I found the film fascinating and extremely well done.

DG: Well, let’s say that, in substance, Manderlay is a movie is about democracy. Then we have to ask, “What is democracy? What does it mean? What are its elements? How do you digest it in real terms? In real terms?” My character asks, “What does this mean to me?” All you have to do is read W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk” to get a picture that he paints through twelve parables about situations directly after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the end of Reconstruction in the South. There’s an interesting dynamic when we look at it, because there were places in the South in the Thirties that were almost unchanged since the end of slavery. So, my character talks about the idea of safety, and the idea of democracy. What were we all to do? We didn’t know. Here you had an institution that subjugated and determined a people’s sense of themselves for 250 years, and all of a sudden they’re set free. What does that mean? That’s the main issue we never deal with in this country. We’re never capable of dealing with the psychosis, the neurosis and all the pathology around that. Everybody’s afraid to talk about slavery. We never speak about it freely. Nobody wants to talk about it, neither the victims nor the perpetrators. That’s why we’re so incapable of dealing with this whole issue around race.

KW: That’s why I appreciated Honeydripper. It tackles some sensitive social issues in a serious fashion, like how innocent black men used to be sentenced to chain gangs in the South to be exploited for free labor. Ordinarily, movies make light of it, such as that comedy Life, starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence. There, they treated blacks’ second-class status as a fait accompli and as something to joke about. That’s supporting the status quo, not challenging it.

DG: Exactly. Supporting it, rather than questioning it and bringing to the world’s attention the real impact on us of various transgressions. These feelings and these emotions are repeated, because history is not merely individual stories, but it’s a collective story as well.

KW: Well, I’m very eager to see the biography of Toussaint L’Overture you’re going to direct, starring Don Cheadle, Mos Def and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

DG: We’re trying to put it together and get it done, baby. It’s an important part not only of our history, of people from the African world, but of everyone’s history. It’s something that we hope will punch some holes in the Empire narrative.

KW: There are almost no other black actors who have reached the prominence that you have who have remained very vocally and actively committed to progressive political causes. Where do you find the strength to persevere?

DG: Well, the way in which artists’ careers suffered 55 years ago because of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s draconian measures and very Fascistic process of attacking creativity and their imaginations. Back then, unions were larger and more powerful. Social movements and ideological struggles were much more prominent, and a part of the social discourse. It doesn’t happen in the same form now, but today there are other subtle ways in which they attack the credibility of artists like Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

KW: When you mention the House Un-American Activities Committee, it makes me think of Paul Robeson who was from Princeton, which is where I live. He was blacklisted back then.

DG: We owe so much to Paul. He is definitely one of my heroes. Right at the top with Harry [Belafonte].

KW: Are you ever concerned about the toll that your activism might take on your career?

DG: No. I tell people, “You can’t tell me who I can talk to. You can’t tell me what I can talk about. You can’t pick my friends. And in a democracy, you can’t tell me that I can’t talk about real issues.” They attacked us for being against the war, even though everybody’s against the war now. Today, a cat who’s in favor of the war is an anomaly. My critics have taken to attacking my relationships, but they have nothing to say about the substance of what I’ve had to say about the state of education, or about what’s happening with working people and in New Orleans. They don’t want to talk about that.

KW: Yeah, they’ve been condemning you for your relationship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

DG: Look here. Here’s a man who has African blood in him with whom I share things in common, such as how we feel about poor people. How come I can’t talk to him? How come he can’t be my friend? How come he can’t be my brother? Because you say he can’t? Because you don’t like him?

KW: Let me ask you just a couple more questions. The Columbus Short question. Are you happy?

DG: Yeah, I’m happy. I’m a grandfather, and I’m in love with him. He’s almost four and he’s my running partner. I’m trying to insert myself in his life every way I can. And he knows it.

KW: And the Jimmy Bayan question. Where in L.A. do you live?

DG: I live in San Francisco in the Haight-Asbury district. I grew up in the Haight-Asbury.

KW: Thanks again for the time, Danny. Keep giving them hell and the best of luck with this film.

DG: Thank you, baby. Bye now.

2007-12-13T19:30:00.000+03:00

Comrades,
So.... Somebody out there please tell me I have the wrong information.
I just heard that the next flick from OUR STORIES is once again written and directed
by a Caucasian.... Please tell me this not happening again!
Yours in the struggle,
Ed DuRanté

2007-12-12T01:33:00.001+03:00

A Film With a Fresh Face and an Uptown Flair:
"Push" by Sapphire

By Jake Mooney for the New York Times

I thought I knew where I was headed this week for my interview with Gabourey Sidibe, the just-discovered star of “Push,” a film based on a novel by the same name, that is now being shot in the city. I would end up being a few minutes late, though, because the address for the set, 210 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn, didn’t make sense.

Then I realized movie magic was happening inside a building better known as the drab home of various city government licensing bureaus and property records.

Some empty offices in the building had been converted into the equally drab alternative high school where much of the film’s action takes place, but the period grime (the story is set in the 1980s) felt real.

Anyway, a lot of movies are made in New York City these days, thanks in part to incentives from city government. This one happens to have some more organic connections to the city too.

First of all, the harrowing 1996 book it is based on is set in Harlem. Its author, Sapphire, was a City College graduate and city resident — in Harlem for a long stretch — who worked on “Push” at an “urban writers colony” near Astor Place.

On top of that, the director and co-executive producer, Lee Daniels, works out of East Harlem; his company’s headquarters is there.

Gabourey Sidibe is from uptown too, on 135th Street. She was only cast in the film, her first, a few months ago, and she is still getting used to all the attention. Still, she told me, she knew how big the film could wind up being — and how many people the book had touched — when she was shooting not far from there, at 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue.

People kept walking up to the set, she recalled, and excitedly asking, “Is this ‘Push,’ the book?”
SapphireSapphire, the author of the novel “Push.”

Adding to the excitement is the fact that the movie has some pretty big stars, including the comedian and actress Mo’Nique in a not-at-all-funny role, and another acting debut by the singer and songwriter Lenny Kravitz. To get a sense of where Ms. Sidibe stacks up, famewise, look no farther than this link to a Whudat.com preview. Not even a publicity photo.

But another of the film’s executive producers, Sarah Siegel-Magness, said that after a long nationwide search to fill the lead role, having Ms. Sidibe turn up at a New York casting was like a gift.

“We’re so lucky to have been handed her on a platter, because she’s just nothing you could ever find in Hollywood,” Ms. Siegel-Magness said. It seems appropriate, for this production, that they found her in Harlem instead.

For anyone curious for a first look at Ms. Sidibe, the film company has posted one of her early auditions, reading for the part of Precious Jones, an illiterate single mother of her father’s child, who has just learned that she is H.I.V. positive. (Please note that the clip is emotionally powerful and contains some very unsafe-for-work language and themes.)

(As I note in Sunday’s Dispatches in The City section, Ms. Sidibe’s mother, Alice Tan Ridley, is a singer who sometimes performs in the Times Square subway station, and you see and hear her perform on YouTube.)

2007-12-10T00:55:00.001+03:00

http://www.dirtylaundrythemovie.com/