Spike Lee
Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee (born March 20, 1957) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and author. His work has continually explored race relations, issues within the black community, the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime and poverty, and other political issues. Lee has won numerous accolades for his work, including an Academy Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a BAFTA Award, and two Peabody Awards. He has also been honored with an Honorary BAFTA Award in 2002, an Honorary César in 2003, and the Academy Honorary Award in 2015.
Spike Lee
- Director
- producer
- writer
- actor
1977–present
2
- Joie Lee (sister)
- Cinqué Lee (brother)
- David Lee (brother)
- Malcolm D. Lee (cousin)
His production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, has produced more than 35 films since 1983. He made his directorial debut with She's Gotta Have It (1986). He has since written and directed such films as School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo' Better Blues (1990), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Crooklyn (1994), Clockers (1995), 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), Chi-Raq (2015), BlacKkKlansman (2018) and Da 5 Bloods (2020). Lee also acted in eleven of his feature films. He is also known for directing numerous documentary projects including the 4 Little Girls (1997), the HBO series When the Levees Broke (2006), the concert film American Utopia (2020), and NYC Epicenters 9/11→2021½ (2021).
His films have featured breakthrough performances from actors such as Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez, Delroy Lindo and John David Washington. Lee's films Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled, Malcolm X, 4 Little Girls and She's Gotta Have It were each selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[1][2][3] He has received a Gala Tribute from the Film Society of Lincoln Center as well as the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize.[4][5]
Early life and education
Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Jacqueline Carroll (née Shelton), a teacher of arts and black literature, and William James Edward Lee III, a jazz musician and composer.[6][7] Lee has five younger siblings, three of whom (Joie, David, and Cinqué) have worked in many different positions in Lee's films; a fourth, Christopher, died in 2014.[8] His youngest sibling is half-brother Arnold. Director Malcolm D. Lee is his cousin. When he was a child, the family moved from Atlanta to Brooklyn, New York. His mother nicknamed him "Spike" during his childhood. He attended John Dewey High School in Brooklyn's Gravesend neighborhood.
Lee enrolled in Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, where he made his first student film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn. He took film courses at Clark Atlanta University and graduated with a B.A. in mass communication from Morehouse. He did graduate work at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in film and television.[9]
Career
1980s
In 1983, Lee premiered his first independent short film titled, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. Lee submitted the film as his master's degree thesis at the Tisch School of the Arts.[10] Lee's classmates Ang Lee and Ernest R. Dickerson worked on the film as assistant director and cinematographer, respectively. The film was the first student film to be showcased in Lincoln Center's New Directors New Films Festival. Lee's father, Bill Lee, composed the score. The film won a Student Academy Award.
Academic career and teaching
In 1991, Lee taught a course at Harvard about filmmaking. In 1993, he began to teach at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Graduate Film Program. It was there that he received his master of fine arts. In 2002, he was appointed as artistic director of the school.[56] He is now a tenured professor at NYU.[57]
Commercials
In mid-1990, Levi's hired Lee to direct a series of TV commercials for their 501 button-fly jeans.[58] Marketing executives from Nike[59] offered Lee a job directing commercials for the company. They wanted to pair Lee's character, Mars Blackmon, who greatly admired athlete Michael Jordan, and Jordan in a marketing campaign for the Air Jordan line. Later, Lee was asked to comment on the phenomenon of violence related to inner-city youths trying to steal Air Jordans from other kids.[60] He said that, rather than blaming manufacturers of apparel that gained popularity, "deal with the conditions that make a kid put so much importance on a pair of sneakers, a jacket and gold".[60] Through the marketing wing of 40 Acres and a Mule, Lee has directed commercials for Converse,[61] Jaguar,[62] Taco Bell,[63] and Ben & Jerry's.[64]
Personal life
Marriage
Lee met his wife, attorney Tonya Lewis Lee, in 1992, and they were married a year later in New York.[87] They have two children.[88][89]
When asked by the BBC whether he believed in God, Lee said: "Yes. I have faith that there is a higher being. All this cannot be an accident."[90] Lee continues to maintain an office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but he and his wife live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.[91]
Sports
Spike Lee is a fan of the New York Knicks basketball team, the New York Yankees baseball team (although he grew up a New York Mets fan[92]), the New York Rangers ice hockey team, and the English football club Arsenal.[93][94] One of the documentaries in ESPN's 30 for 30 series, Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks, focuses partly on Lee's interaction with Miller at Knicks games in Madison Square Garden. In June 2003, Lee sought an injunction against Spike TV to prevent them from using his nickname.[95] He claimed that because of his fame, viewers would think he was associated with the channel.[96][97] In March 2020 Lee and the security team at Madison Square Garden had a disagreement over which entrance to use to see New York Knicks. Lee stated he would not attend the rest of the games for the season.[98][99]
Controversies
At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Lee, who was then making Miracle at St. Anna, about an all-black U.S. division fighting in Italy during World War II, criticized director Clint Eastwood for not depicting black Marines in his own World War II film, Flags of Our Fathers. Citing historical accuracy, Eastwood responded that his film was specifically about the Marines who raised the flag on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima, pointing out that while black Marines did fight at Iwo Jima, the U.S. military was racially segregated during World War II, and none of the men who raised the flag were black. He angrily said that Lee should "shut his face". Lee responded that Eastwood was acting like an "angry old man", and argued that despite making two Iwo Jima films back to back, Letters from Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, "there was not one black soldier in both of those films".[116][117][118] He added that he and Eastwood were "not on a plantation".[119] Lee later claimed that the event was exaggerated by the media and that he and Eastwood had reconciled through mutual friend Steven Spielberg, culminating in his sending Eastwood a print of Miracle at St. Anna.[120]
Lee has been criticized for his representation of women. For example, bell hooks said that he wrote black women in the same objectifying way that white male filmmakers write the characters of white women.[121] Rosie Perez, who was in an acting role for the first time as Tina in Do the Right Thing, said later that she was very uncomfortable with doing the nude scene in the film, saying, "I had a big problem with it, mainly because I was afraid of what my family would think...It wasn't really about taking off my clothes. But I also didn't feel good about it because the atmosphere wasn't correct."[122] Subsequently, Perez stated that Lee had offered an apology, and the two maintained their friendship.[123]
Over the course of his career Spike Lee has defended Woody Allen, Michael Jackson and Nate Parker, all of whom have been accused of sexual misconduct.[124][125][126][127][128]