He's Got To Have It His Way

By JEANNE McDOWELL

As producer, director and writer of the homecoming-queen coronation ceremony in his senior year at Morehouse College, Spike Lee had a vision. He imagined a sophisticated beauty pageant, reminiscent of the old Hollywood musicals he loved. Rather than the usual lineup of leggy girls scantily clad in slinky dresses, he pictured beribboned beauties in floor-length ball gowns. Lee failed to anticipate the outrage of campus males when they learned they would be deprived of the show of flesh that was traditionally part of homecoming. A group ganged up on the young producer, threatening to beat him up. But Lee stood firm. "In the end he did it his way," recalls Monty Ross, a friend from Lee's college days and vice president of his production company, 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks. "It was Spike's vision that won out."

These days his subject matter is grittier, but Spike Lee is still fighting to make movies on his own terms. Paramount Pictures, Lee claims, asked him to tone down the ending of Do the Right Thing, his incendiary new film about race relations, so the 32-year-old director took his picture to Universal rather than subdue the race riot in his 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 stuff."

With his spindly legs, goatee and black New York Knicks cap, Spike Lee looks more like a cartoon character than the creator of the most controversial film of the summer. He is lean and wiry -- 120 lbs. tightly wound around a 5-ft. 6- in. frame. His hip, distinctively New York style has made him a familiar pop-culture image: stone-washed jeans, a Nike T shirt, a leather Public Enemy medallion around his neck, an ear stud and black Nike Air Jordans, practically his trademark since he appeared with basketball star Michael Jordan in Nike ads.

But his expressive style of dress belies an air of self-containment. Lee is serious and taciturn, especially around strangers. No one will ever accuse him of ingratiating himself to reporters; a question that bores him is likely to be answered with a yawn and roll of his eyes. But press the right button, and he engages like an assault rifle, his words ricocheting off familiar targets. He rails against New York Mayor Ed Koch: "He's a racist. Hopefully my film will force a couple of votes, and Ed won't be around for long"; Walt Disney: "Snow White, Song of the South? I hated that stuff. That's the difference between me and Steven Spielberg"; even Michael Jackson: "Cutting off his Negroid nose, I think that's sick. It's self-hatred."

But beneath the arrogance he wears like a badge of honor is the deeper, profound racial anger that fueled Do the Right Thing. "Racism usually erodes self-confidence. It seems to have triggered his," observes actress Ruby Dee, who plays Mother Sister in Do the Right Thing. The Howard Beach incident, in which a black man died after being chased onto a freeway by a white mob -- an expression in Lee's mind of a double standard inflicted on blacks -- inspired the film. Even the controversy that erupted over his use at the end of the film of a Malcolm X quote condoning violence in the name of self-defense reflects the pervasiveness of that double standard, he argues. "We're not allowed to do what everyone else can. The idea of self-defense is supposed to be what America is based on. But when black people talk about self-defense, they're militant. When whites talk about it, they're freedom fighters." Why is black life less sacred than white life? he asks. Why do blacks need the "stamp of approval" of whites to feel affirmed? Why are his films lumped together as black, when each one examines a distinctly different aspect of the human condition? Looking for racism at every turn, he finds it.

Lee's own personal conflict is far more subtle than simple black and white. "I want to be known as a talented young filmmaker. That should be first," he says. "But the reality today is that no matter how successful you are, you're black first. You know what Malcolm X says: 'What's a black with a Ph.D.? A nigger.' Why should I spend my time and energy getting around that. I know who I am, and I'm comfortable with that . . . It's difficult because I don't have the luxury white filmmakers have. Hollywood makes 500 films a year. How many of those are black films? On the one hand you want to be yourself, on the other hand you can't turn your back on black people. We're torn."

In each of his films, Lee stirs the social pot. His first success, She's Gotta Have It, in 1986, explored sexual stereotypes with the tale of a liberated young black woman who refuses to give up her three lovers. School Daze, Lee's 1988 musical, examines the tensions between light- and darker- skinned blacks on an all-black college campus; it evoked the ire of some blacks, who charged him with airing the race's dirty laundry in public. With Do the Right Thing, Lee has produced his most provocative film yet.

It is a 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 and he jumps. "I don't try to emulate anyone -- especially Woody Allen."

Back in 1976, during his sophomore year at Morehouse, Lee picked up a Super- 8 camera for the first time. As the oldest of five children growing up in a middle-class section of Brooklyn, he wasn't particularly interested in movies; he loved sports. But Lee's parents were creative people who exposed their children to the arts, instilling in them a deep appreciation of culture. His father Bill Lee, a bass violinist who played with Odetta, scores all his films. His mother, who nicknamed Shelton Jackson Lee "Spike," taught black literature until her death in 1977. Reared in a home where there was a long tradition of education, Lee credits his family with being the major influence in his life.

The director's fascination with cinema blossomed at Morehouse, where he was the third generation of Lees to attend the all-black college. During the summer of 1977, Lee made his first film: he drove around Brooklyn and Harlem the day after the New York City blackout and filmed the looting. Even then, Lee's cinematic eye was drawn to the absurdity of events that unfolded around him. "In a lot of ways it was funny to me, like Christmas," he says. "People were walking out of stores with color TVs."

After graduating from Morehouse in 1979, Lee enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. In his first year there, he had the temerity to parody D.W. Griffith's classic The Birth of a Nation in a 20- minute student film that took the great director to 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 She's Gotta Have It in a rented restaurant attic over twelve days, editing in his studio apartment. The 1986 picture, produced on a shoestring budget of about $175,000, raised mostly from friends and family, plus an $18,000 grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, made about $8 million at the box office and catapulted Lee out of obscurity and into the spotlight.

In the serene editing room at 40 Acres and A Mule Filmworks (named by Lee for the never realized proposal for every freed slave after the Civil War), a renovated three-story firehouse in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, Lee is relaxed working with a coterie of close friends, many of whom go back to his days in college and film school. Those who know him say he is usually quiet, sometimes temperamental. "Spike is warm, but if you expect him to say, 'You look so wonderful,' you can forget it," says Ross, who is co-producer of Do the Right Thing. "At the same time, he will throw two Knicks tickets on your desk and say, 'I can't make the game tonight. Why don't you go?' " On the set, he is serious and organized, his directorial style, hands-off. "His touch is so light you don't even know it's there, yet it is," notes actor Ossie Davis, who plays Da Mayor in Do the Right Thing.

Lee is a cool strategic thinker, a shrewd businessman and cunning marketer. He plans each detail of his productions down to the last frame, in part, says Ross, to counter the racial stereotype that blacks are slipshod businessmen. His marketing sense extends beyond his proven ability to reach an audience; he has cultivated a brand awareness of himself. Making a movie isn't enough, he says. "We're up against the giants trying to hold our own." Stacks of Do the Right Thing T shirts were poised ready for distribution before the film opened. A journal chronicling the making of the film, which Lee writes for each production as a text for aspiring filmmakers, is published simultaneously with the movie's release. Although he doesn't particularly enjoy acting, Lee says, he stars in his pictures because he knows it will draw moviegoers. Even his appearance in ads for Barneys and the Gap clothing stores has helped attract a mainstream following, though Lee rejects the notion. "Black people spend money at Barneys and the Gap just like everyone else," he snaps.

The ability to market his own films gives Lee an edge when he deals with Hollywood. Still he approaches it with distrust and stubbornness. "I have a script, and they know I have final say. They know there are things I'm going to 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.

Back in Brooklyn, Lee is at home. When he was honored last month by the Black Filmmaker Foundation, Lee pledged allegiance to his home borough and teasingly swore never to join Hollywood's "black pack," whose members include Eddie Murphy and director Robert Townsend. Lee's next picture, the story of a jazz musician who must balance his career and love life, will also be shot in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Hollywood holds little allure for the man who rides around on a twelve-speed Peugeot bicycle (he doesn't have a driver's license) and considers a relaxing evening "going to a Knicks game, where the Knicks are winning in a nail biter, and I have two seats on the floor." If Do the Right Thing is a financial success, Lee will be playing in another league. Future movies will bring bigger budgets, probably accompanied by pressure for more control from the big studios anxious to protect their investments. Independence may be harder to retain. "Then the fights will come," says the director. Spike Lee is ready.