Word: worked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Seen during the Canadian part of the current tour, Scotch Symphony, Balanchine's musings on La Sylphide, worked best with Yelena Pankova, 25, as the sylph. A springy dancer blessed with a high, light jump, she seemed to grasp the choreographer's oft repeated injunction: respond to the music and "don't think -- do" the steps. Senior ballerina Galina Mezentseva tried to make a romantic story out of this plotless work and as a result looked...
...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 I get is peace of mind, sanity. I have control over my work. That outweighs everything else," he says. "So I don't get invited to Hollywood parties. So I'm not on the Hollywood circuit. So I don't own a home in Beverly Hills. So Barbara Walters doesn't include me in her specials. I don't give a s about all that...
...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...
...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 messenger but was forced to abort the project when financing fell apart. Though he says it was the most painful period in his career, the resilient director turned around and started working on another script. Using some of the same actors, he filmed...
...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," says former Columbia Pictures President David Picker, who worked with Lee on School Daze...