Word: blacking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...loved sports. But Lee's parents were creative people who exposed their children to the arts, instilling in them a deep appreciation of culture. His father Bill Lee, a bass violinist who played with Odetta, scores all his films. His mother, who nicknamed Shelton Jackson Lee "Spike," taught black literature until her death in 1977. Reared in a home where there was a long tradition of education, Lee credits his family with being the major influence in his life...
...director's fascination with cinema blossomed at Morehouse, where he was the third generation of Lees to attend the all-black college. During the summer of 1977, Lee made his first film: he drove around Brooklyn and Harlem the day after the New York City blackout and filmed the looting. Even then, Lee's cinematic eye was drawn to the absurdity of events that unfolded around him. "In a lot of ways it was funny to me, like Christmas," he says. "People were walking out of stores with color...
...enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In his first year there, he had the temerity to parody D.W. Griffith's classic The Birth of a Nation in a 20- minute student film that took the great director to task for his portrayal of blacks in the Old South. He went on to win a student director's Academy Award for his thesis, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, about a Brooklyn barber who is torn between legitimacy and petty crime. After graduation, he began work on a drama about a young black bicycle...
...cool strategic thinker, a shrewd businessman and cunning marketer. He plans each detail of his productions down to the last frame, in part, says Ross, to counter the racial stereotype that blacks are slipshod businessmen. His marketing sense extends beyond his proven ability to reach an audience; he has cultivated a brand awareness of himself. Making a movie isn't enough, he says. "We're up against the giants trying to hold our own." Stacks of Do the Right Thing T shirts were poised ready for distribution before the film opened. A journal chronicling the making of the film, which...
Back in Brooklyn, Lee is at home. When he was honored last month by the Black Filmmaker Foundation, Lee pledged allegiance to his home borough and teasingly swore never to join Hollywood's "black pack," whose members include Eddie Murphy and director Robert Townsend. Lee's next picture, the story of a jazz musician who must balance his career and love life, will also be shot in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Hollywood holds little allure for the man who rides around on a twelve-speed Peugeot bicycle (he doesn't have a driver's license) and considers a relaxing evening "going...