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Spike Lee Influential African American Director
1957-

What’s the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters? Mine are real.
—SPIKE LEE

Spike Lee

I have a big problem with Norman Jewison directing The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That disturbs me deeply. It’s wrong with a capital W. Blacks have to control these films. Malcolm X is one of our most treasured heroes. To let a non-African-American do it is a travesty.” This is what Spike Lee told the New York Times when Warner Brothers announced its plans for the retelling of the life of the famous civil rights leader. Lee’s remarks sparked attention and controversy once again. He was bold and direct, not only with his words but with his approach. For in typical Spike Lee fashion, when he heard about the plans for Jewison to direct the film, be didn’t approach Warner Brothers with his pitch that the directing job should go to him instead; he went directly to the media with a statement that he knew would be not just heard but echoed and reechoed as others responded. In the 1980s he had become the most recognized black American filmmaker, intent on portraying the true grit of the African American experience—-whether by taking on tough, controversial topics in his films or with his own tongue when speaking to the media.
Born on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia, as Shelton Jackson Lee, the future filmmaker was nicknamed “Spike” by his mother, Jacquelyn, because of his toughness. His father, Bill Lee, was a jazz musician; later he would write the scores for many of his son’s movies. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1959. When it came time for college, Lee chose Morehouse College, the black school that his grandfather and father had both attended, majoring in communications. This was followed by graduate work in film at New York University.
Lee graduated from NYU in 1982. At the same time that he was employed at cleaning and shipping film for a movie distribution house in 1984, he was scavenging for money for his own first film after graduation. Determined, Lee worked with others on preproduction for the film but finally stopped the project due to lack of sufficient funds, even though more than $100,000 had been raised.
Lee’s next venture began a year later with a severely restricted budget of $175,000 that put him in excessive debt. He wrote, produced, directed, edited, and costarrcd in his film She’s Gotta Have It, It was a black-and-white work that was filmed in just one location with a small cast and edited in Lee’s apartment on rented equipment. Island Pictures agreed to distribute it, and the film drew large crowds of blacks as well as unanticipated art-house groupies, grossing more than $7 million. An easy comedy, it confronted stereotypical male/female relationships and machismo. The film also brought Lee an array of fans for his role as the comic figure Mars Blackmon, who would later appear in Nike television commercials but never again in a movie. As for the critics, they responded nearly equally with both sharp critiques and hardy applause. Yet despite the naysayers, the film prompted the birth of more realistic filmmaking by and about blacks, which came to be termed “New Jack Cinema.”
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