Word: filming
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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...
...named by Lee for the never realized proposal for every freed slave after the Civil War), a renovated three-story firehouse in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, Lee is relaxed working with a coterie of close friends, many of whom go back to his days in college and film school. Those who know him say he is usually quiet, sometimes temperamental. "Spike is warm, but if you expect him to say, 'You look so wonderful,' you can forget it," says Ross, who is co-producer of Do the Right Thing. "At the same time, he will throw two Knicks...
...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 Lee writes for each production as a text for aspiring filmmakers, is published simultaneously with the movie's release. Although he doesn't particularly enjoy acting, Lee says, he stars in his pictures because he knows it will draw moviegoers. Even...
...ability to market his own films gives Lee an edge when he deals with Hollywood. Still he approaches it with distrust and stubbornness. "I have a script, and they know I have final say. They know there are things I'm going to demand. If they want to do the film, these things have to be met, or else we don't do it." But Lee is in a precarious position: he needs the power, muscle and money of a major studio to market and distribute his films, while still protecting his work. "He is fighting for his creative life...