He also has sometimes turned away from his usual films to direct more traditional Hollywood fare like the crime thriller "Inside Man" (2006) - one of his greatest box office successes. ![]() Lee has made various other commercials and music videos over the course of his career. The success of "She's Gotta Have It" catapulted Lee to unexpected stardom - he made a series of black and white Air Jordan ads for Nike, in character as Mars Blackmon and co-starring NBA legend Michael Jordan, that changed sports marketing forever. Today, Lee - a fixture at New York Knicks games - is respected as a director of films with wide appeal that depict American society and culture with razor-sharp clarity. That allows him to tell the stories as he sees them, blending human relationships with social themes and dark humor. Lee remained outside the usual Hollywood glare, mindful of maintaining control of his own marketing, distribution and editing. In the decade in between, Lee established himself as a force to be reckoned with, producing films that often had a political bent like "Do The Right Thing," "Malcolm X" and "Jungle Fever." "From the start, he was a good storyteller," says Eichelberger, who thought Lee's career would be focused on documentaries, given his keen powers of observation of society around him.īut Lee would only embrace that format in 1997 with "4 Little Girls" - the Oscar-nominated story of the racially motivated bombing of an African-American church during the US civil rights movement. "He would come with all kinds of ideas about doing films and making certain kinds of approaches to a situation." He kept to himself but I called him the idea man," recalls Herbert Eichelberger, an associate professor of film at Clark Atlanta University whom Lee calls his mentor. John Canada Terrell, one of his co-stars in the movie, described Lee as a "very strange cerebral kind of cat." He even acted in that first film, taking the supporting role of motor-mouthed Mars Blackmon, one of the main character's three suitors. The black-and-white feature was his breakout moment. In the hot summer of 1985, Lee filmed "She's Gotta Have It" in two weeks in Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. He took film classes at Clark Atlanta University and earned his Master's, focusing on film and television, from New York University. Lee - a small man with a piercing gaze from behind his round glasses - graduated from Atlanta's Morehouse College, a historically black, all-male school, with a communications degree. He was primarily raised in Brooklyn, which is home to his production company 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. Lee - born Shelton Jackson Lee in Georgia on Ma- was the son of a jazz musician father and an English teacher mom. Michael Genet, an actor and screenwriter who penned the script for Lee's 2004 comedy "She Hate Me," says Lee "opened the doors for everybody who's come after him."Īfrican-American director Ryan Coogler "couldn't be who he is today with 'Black Panther' without Spike Lee doing what he did," Genet adds. Lee has inspired other black directors for decades. "Six words: 'Black man infiltrates Ku Klux Klan'," Lee told CBS News earlier this month of the film pitch. Oscar nominee Adam Driver plays his white partner, who acts as his proxy for the actual undercover operation. John David Washington, son of Denzel, stars as that cop, Ron Stallworth. "BlacKkKlansman" is a searing yet sometimes hilarious broadside against racism with the stranger-than-fiction true story of an African-American police officer who managed to infiltrate the highest levels of the Ku Klux Klan. He paid tribute to his grandmother, who "lived to be 100 years young, who was a Spelman College graduate even though her mother was a slave." It was a rousing impromptu address, delivered from the stage at Hollywood's Dolby Theatre, during which Lee spoke of slaves forced to carry out back-breaking work from dawn until dark. ![]() Our ancestors were stolen from Mother Africa and bought to Jamestown, Virginia, enslaved," he said, referring the first documented Africans to come to the first English settlement in the Americas, in 1619. For more than 30 years, Spike Lee has captivated audiences - and sometimes angered them - with his provocative, frank depictions of black America infused with his signature mix of entertainment, activism and rage.Īnd for the first time, that work has earned him a competitive Oscar as the 61-year-old Lee picked up the prize for best adapted screenplay on Sunday for his incendiary race drama "BlacKkKlansman."
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