Spike Lee

Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee (born March 20, 1957) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. 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. His films have featured breakthrough and acclaimed performances from actors such as Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez, Delroy Lindo and John David Washington.

Lee's 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. He has won numerous accolades for his work, including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, a Student Academy Award, a BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, two Emmy Awards, two Peabody Awards, the NAACP's President's Award, and the Cannes Grand Prix. He has also received an Academy Honorary Award, an Honorary BAFTA Award, an Honorary César, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. Lee's films '' Do the Right Thing'', ''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".

Early life

Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Jacqueline Carroll ( Shelton), a teacher of arts and black literature, and William James Edward Lee III, a jazz musician and composer. Lee has three younger siblings, Joie, David, and Cinqué, each of whom has worked in many different positions in Lee's films. 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.

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. 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.

In 1985, Lee began work on his first feature film, ''She's Gotta Have It''. The black-and-white film concerns a young woman (played by Tracy Camilla Johns) who is seeing three men, and the feelings this arrangement provokes. The film was Lee's first feature-length film, and launched Lee's career. Lee wrote, directed, produced, starred and edited the film with a budget of $175,000, he shot the film in two weeks. When the film was released in 1986, it grossed over $7 million at the U.S. box office. ''New York Times'' film critic A.O. Scott wrote that the film "ushered in (along with Jim Jarmusch's '' Stranger Than Paradise'') the American independent film movement of the 1980s. It was also a groundbreaking film for African-American filmmakers and a welcome change in the representation of blacks in American cinema, depicting men and women of color not as pimps and whores, but as intelligent, upscale urbanites."

In 1989, Lee made perhaps his most seminal film, '' Do the Right Thing,'' which focused on a Brooklyn neighborhood's simmering racial tension on a hot summer day. The film's cast included Lee, Danny Aiello, Bill Nunn, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez, John Turturro, Martin Lawrence and Samuel L. Jackson. The film gained critical acclaim as one of the best films of the year from film critics including both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert who ranked the film as the best of 1989, and later in their top 10 films of the decade ( for Siskel and for Ebert). Ebert later added the film to his list of ''The Great Movies''.

To many people's surprise, the film was not nominated for Best Picture or Best Director at the Academy Awards. The film only earned two Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Spike Lee's first Oscar nomination, and for Best Supporting Actor for Danny Aiello. At the Academy ceremony Kim Basinger, who was a presenter that evening, stated that ''Do the Right Thing'' also deserved a Best Picture nomination stating, "We've got five great films here, and they are great for one reason, because they tell the truth, but there is one film missing from this list because ironically it might tell the biggest truth of all and that's ''Do the Right Thing''". The film that did win Best Picture was '' Driving Miss Daisy'', a film that focused on race relations between an elderly Jewish woman (Jessica Tandy) and her driver ( Morgan Freeman). Lee said in an April 7, 2006, interview with '' New York'' magazine that the other film's success, which he thought was based on safe stereotypes, hurt him more than if his film had not been nominated for an award.

1990s

After the 1990 release of '' Mo' Better Blues'', Lee was accused of antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League and several film critics. They criticized the characters of the club owners Josh and Moe Flatbush, described as " Shylocks". Lee denied the charge, explaining that he wrote those characters in order to depict how black artists struggled against exploitation. Lee said that Lew Wasserman, Sidney Sheinberg, or Tom Pollock, the Jewish heads of MCA and Universal Studios, were unlikely to allow antisemitic content in a film they produced. He said he could not make an antisemitic film because Jews run Hollywood, and "that's a fact".

In 1992, Spike released his biographical epic film ''Malcolm X'' based on the '' Autobiography of Malcolm X'', starring Denzel Washington as the famed civil rights leader. The film dramatizes key events in Malcolm X's life: his criminal career, his incarceration, his conversion to Islam, his ministry as a member of the Nation of Islam and his later falling out with the organization, his marriage to Betty X, his pilgrimage to Mecca and reevaluation of his views concerning whites, and his assassination on February 21, 1965. Defining childhood incidents, including his father's death, his mother's mental illness, and his experiences with racism are dramatized in flashbacks. The film received widespread critical acclaim including from critic Roger Ebert ranked the film No. 1 on his Top 10 list for 1992 and described the film as "one of the great screen biographies, celebrating the sweep of an American life that bottomed out in prison before its hero reinvented himself." Ebert and Martin Scorsese, who was sitting in for late ''At the Movies'' co-host Gene Siskel, both ranked ''Malcolm X'' among the ten best films of the 1990s. Denzel Washington's portrayal of Malcolm X in particular was widely praised and he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Washington lost to Al Pacino ('' Scent of a Woman''), a decision which Lee criticized, saying "I'm not the only one who thinks Denzel was robbed on that one."

His 1997 documentary ''4 Little Girls'', about the girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. In 2017, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

2000s

In 2002, Lee directed ''25th Hour'' starring Edward Norton, and Philip Seymour Hoffman which opened to positive reviews, with several critics since having named it one of the best films of its decade. Film critic Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list on December 16, 2009. A. O. Scott, Richard Roeper and Roger Ebert all put it on their "best films of the decade" lists. It was later named the 26th greatest film since 2000 in a BBC
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