Word: spikes
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These days his subject matter is grittier, but Spike Lee is still fighting to make movies on his own terms. Paramount Pictures, Lee claims, asked him to tone down the ending of Do the Right Thing, his incendiary new film about race relations, so the 32-year-old director took his picture to Universal rather than subdue the race riot in his final scene. Fiercely independent, Lee writes, directs and produces his films to prevent others from "meddling." He doesn't have an agent, publicist or manager, but the trade-offs of independence are worth it. "What...
With his spindly legs, goatee and black New York Knicks cap, Spike Lee looks more like a cartoon character than the creator of the most controversial film of the summer. He is lean and wiry -- 120 lbs. tightly wound around a 5-ft. 6- in. frame. His hip, distinctively New York style has made him a familiar pop-culture image: stone-washed jeans, a Nike T shirt, a leather Public Enemy medallion around his neck, an ear stud and black Nike Air Jordans, practically his trademark since he appeared with basketball star Michael Jordan in Nike...
...passion for filmmaking, not racial anger, however, that drives the director. "Spike has an appreciation, a love and an inherent understanding of cinema," notes Barry Brown, who worked on editing Lee's films for the past four years. Lee's cinematic preferences run the gamut, from Hector Babenco's Pixote and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets to musicals such as The Wizard of Oz and West Side Story, a taste inherited from his mother. Lee, who has been called a "black Woody Allen," says he admires Scorsese's work. But suggest that he has been cinematically influenced by others...
...movies; he 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...
...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 tickets on your desk and say, 'I can't make the game tonight...