All about Spike Lee

Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee (born March 20, 1957) is an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated American film director, producer, writer, and actor, noted for his films dealing with controversial social and political issues. He also teaches film at New York University and Columbia University. His production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983.

Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Jacqueline Shelton, a teacher of arts and black literature, and William James Edward Lee III, a jazz musician, and composer. Lee moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York when he was a small child. The Fort Greene neighborhood is home of Lee’s production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, and other Lee-owned or related businesses. As a child, his mother nicknamed him “Spike.” In Brooklyn, he attended John Dewey High School. Lee enrolled in Morehouse College 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 College. He then enrolled in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He graduated in 1978 with a Master of Fine Arts in Film & Television.

Lee’s thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, was the first student film to be showcased in Lincoln Center’s New Directors New Films Festival.

In 1985, Lee began work on his first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It. With a budget of $175,000, the film was shot in two weeks. When the film was released in 1986, it grossed over $7,000,000 at the U.S. box office.

 

She’s Gotta Have It would also lead Lee down a second career avenue. After marketing executives from Nike saw and liked the movie, Lee was offered a job directing commercials for Nike. What they had in mind specifically was pairing Lee’s character from She’s Gotta Have It, the Michael Jordan-loving Mars Blackmon, with Jordan himself as their marketing campaign for the Air Jordan line. Later, Lee would be a central figure in the controversy surrounding the inner-city rash of violence involving Air Jordans. Lee countered that instead of blaming manufacturers of apparel, “deal with the conditions that make a kid put so much importance on a pair of sneakers, a jacket and gold”. Lee, through the marketing wing of his production company, has also directed commercials for Converse, Jaguar, Taco Bell and Ben & Jerry’s.

Lee’s movies have examined race relations, the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime and poverty, and political issues. Many of his films include a distinctive use of music.

Lee’s film Do the Right Thing was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1989. Many people, including some in Hollywood, such as Kim Basinger, believed that Do the Right Thing deserved a Best Picture nomination, but the movie didn’t get the nomination, and “Driving Miss Daisy” won Best Picture that year. According to Spike in an April 7, 2006 interview with New York Magazine, this hurt him more than his film not receiving the nomination.

His documentary 4 Little Girls was nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Academy Award in 1997.

On May 2, 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honored Spike Lee with the San Francisco Film Society’s Directing Award. He was most recently named the recipient of the next Wexner Prize.

Miracle at St. Anna: Another Spike Lee film scrutinize

 This time Spike Lee has directed a phenomenal movie that represents us in a war that many of us realized that we ever existed in or ever received credit for. This movie created a lot of controversy by the parties and countries involved and the buzz around Hollywood before the movies’ release was that it was going to be an historic movie and we will want to see it. But once again many of us choose not to be part of that history or didn’t care for it.

We certainly did not expect other races to go out and see a Spike Lee movie were the main characters are black. I also noticed that this movie did not get your usual big to do promotion and perhaps that may be one reason most of us did not know anything about it, but once this movies makes its way to DVD, I highly recommend you all take a look at it. It’s a part of history that was ignored and a part of history that all of us need to know about.

Here’s the complete story from Timesonline.co.uk

It is a story that underpins Italy’s postwar democracy: the honor lost under Benito Mussolini was regained through the struggle of the partisans and their help for the Allies. Now the partisans are fighting for their reputation after a new film by the director Spike Lee which, they say, insults the memory of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War.

Miracle at St Anna retells the story of the massacre of 560 civilians – including women and children – in August 1944 by SS troops as they retreated northwards in the face of the Allied advance.

The film, which highlights the role of African-American soldiers in the war, suggests that antifascist partisans indirectly caused the atrocity by taking refuge in the village and then abandoning the residents to their fate.

It even shows a partisan named Rodolfo collaborating with the Nazis. This runs directly counter to the accepted Italian version of events, which is that the slaughter was not a reprisal but an unprovoked act of brutality and that the hunt for partisans was a pretext.