Word: directors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
After graduating from Morehouse in 1979, Lee 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...
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...
...relying on an all-star cast is that it rarely melds into a stylistically consistent ensemble. Big-name actors tend to resist direction or, if willing to cooperate, prove unable: they lack stage training and technique for the classics or succumb to the heebie-jeebies of stage fright. Director Harold Guskin, a noted acting coach, has coaxed his players into charm and clarity in telling myriad tales of mistaken identity, most of which turn on the interchangeability of gender. Mastrantonio lacks the requisite androgyny but is otherwise faultless. Woodard, one of four black leads chosen in admirably color-blind casting...
...National Organization for Women will mount ballot initiatives and may bring lawsuits in states whose constitutions contain privacy provisions that might extend to abortion. They will also try to demonstrate their political power at the polls. "America's political landscape will never be the same," says Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights Action League. "To politicians who oppose choice, we say, 'Read our lips. Take our rights. Lose your jobs...