March 16, 2010 - 1:29 pm
By Borys Kit and Jay A. Fernandez
CAA is now in the Spike Lee business, signing the director for representation. Lee had been at WME.
The director, whose last feature was the 2008 war drama “Miracle at St. Anna,” has lately been spending his time in the TV world. Last year he made “Passing Strange” for PBS and a Kobe Bryant documentary for ESPN Films, and he is currently working on a documentary about New Orleans.
June 22, 2008 - 9:46 pm
By Steven Zeitchik
Maybe it’s the recent move to studio pictures like “Inside Man” and “Miracle at St. Anna,” or just the general stylized intensity of his work, but we’d sort of forgotten how strong a documentarian Spike Lee really is. At Silverdocs, where we spent a dizzing few days taking in all manner of nonfiction novelty and nobility, we also caught a Q&A Lee gave after he received the Charles Guggenheim award, the fest’s equivalent of a lifetime achievement prize.
We’d forgotten, for instance, how startling “When the Levees Broke” and “Four Little Girls” really are — no other doc director working today can combine testimony, images and a sense of historical urgency in quite the same way. But the one that really brought it all back is his 2002 Showtime short “We Wuz Robbed.” The quick cuts between the various Gore staffers describing that fateful 2000 election night was as artful and jolting as HBO’s recent “Recount,” the Danny Strong docudrama that was solid but which took a lot more years and film to basically tell the same story.
Unfortunately, not all of Lee’s work resonated. Auds watched a ten-minute promo reel of “St. Anna,” and the movie just didn’t compel in the same way. It had the urgency, but a it too much of it, ladling on the melodrama in a way that certain wartime pictures do. It’s going to be very interesting to see if Lee’s indie-feature skills translate to a big wartime epic the way they did in a bank-heist movie like “Inside Man.”
Lee also revealed some good bits about upcoming projects. Get ready for the year-in-the-life Michael Jordan docu at Cannes and the day-in-the-life Kobe pic on ABC/ESPN at the start of the ‘08 season (if only there were some Knick players worthy of a day-in-the-life-docu; heck, we’d settle for ten seconds).
And speaking of drama, the director is one of those interview subjects that makes people in the audience pity the interviewer– in this case the Denver Post’s Lisa Kennedy — at least until said questioner realizes that a)his orneriness is no reflection on you b)you may as well stay on the topics close to his heart because those are the only ones he’s going to talk about anyway. Kennedy didn’t get anywhere with subjects like the difference between helmng fiction and docs. But Lee was by his standards downright gregarious when he got onto Barack Obama and a certain other black filmmaker.
After saying “there’s no if” on Obama and he was already making his hotel reservations for the inauguration, Lee said, “It changes everything, so its going to be BB and AB, Before Obama and After Obama. Some folks need to get used this because they’re still clinging.”
And then he took a dig at Tyler Perry for what he apparently feels is, er, derivative, filmmaking. After saying Lee couldn’t make a Martin Luther King film because “I can’t do everything – I’ve got to leave something for Tyler Perry” he then added an extra poke, in what may be the world’s first crypto-poetic dig, that he’d been in Perry territory long before the playwright-turned-brand. ”I made the movie. (It was called) ‘Bamboozled.’ Coonie buffoonery.”
Now that’s nonfiction gold.
April 8, 2008 - 5:27 pm
var config = new Array();config["videoId"] = 1494899896;config["lineupId"] = null;config["videoRef"] = null;config["playerTag"] = null;config["autoStart"] = false;config["preloadBackColor"] = “#FFFFFF”;config["width"] = 286; config["height"] = 277; config["playerId"] = 1119669402; createExperience(config, 8); After reading Leslie Simmons’ Risky Biz posting covering Spike Lee’s Behind the Lens acceptance speech March 26 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, we dug up the video of Spike giving his take on the role of African-Americans in Hollywood.
From the dearth of African-American-made films in the overseas market to the upcoming presidential race, Spike tells it like it is.
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March 27, 2008 - 9:41 pm
By Leslie Simmons
Spike Lee did what Spike Lee does best Wednesday night: push the envelope.
The filmmaker was honored with Chrysler’s sixth annual Behind the Lens award at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel ballroom, and after an evening of tributes from actors — many of whom, like including Rosie Perez, Savion Glover and Laurence Fishburne, have Lee to thank for their career — and stirring performances by trumpeter Terence Blanchard, Lee gave a thank you speech that quickly tuned into much more.
He started with financing difficulties for indie films. “I took my ass on a plane to Europe and got the financing for this film,” Lee said of his latest joint, the World War II drama “Miracle of St. Anna.” “So, as Malcolm (X) said, the struggle is far from over.”
Lee later introduced his Italian producing partners in the film, Luigi Musini and Marco Valerio Pugini, who were sitting far back in the corner.
“Don’t get the wrong idea with them being in the corner,” he joked. “When I was disgusted about not getting the financing for James Brown or the L.A. riots, I went to Italy.”
Those two projects, he pointed out, had budgets of less than $60 million, below the price tag for many films these days.
After doing a bad Italian impression of the two producers telling him they’ll help finance the film, Lee said, “It’s a miracle this film got made.”
Lee continued on what he called his “little tirade,” addressing the African-American industryites in the audience and telling them it didn’t matter what kind of car they drove or how big their houses are, “we’re way behind in film,” adding “None of them look like you. The only black guy I see is the brother man at the security gate.”
He joked that the studios are “sneaking black faces” into the board room to make it look like they’re integrated, but what they’re really doing is plucking blue-collar workers and dressing them up for the meeting. “Then you leave and they kick their asses back to the mail room,” he quipped.
January 14, 2007 - 11:15 pm
 At the AFI lunch on Friday, Spike Lee (whose Inside Man was named one of the ten best films of 2006) confessed that two actors who WILL NOT star as James Brown in his planned biopic are Jamie Foxx, who showed off his musical chops in Ray and Dreamgirls, and that film’s Eddie Murphy. Hmmm. I couldn’t get him say who he is considering…
January 10, 2007 - 11:08 pm
 Who should play James Brown? IGN asks the question, now that Spike Lee is prepping a movie about the recently departed Godfather of Soul.
So who could sing, dance, and inhabit this formidable character?
I vote for Eddie Murphy or Jamie Foxx. The other names:
Samuel L. Jackson
Derek Luke
Geoffrey Wright
Terrence Howard
Mos Def
Andre Benjamin
Cuba Gooding, Jr.
Who’d we leave out?
September 14, 2006 - 1:07 pm
Spike Lee’s four-hour Katrina doc "When the Levees Broke" has shown up on YouTube in 26 parts. 
BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin notes:
This documentary was incredible, masterly, historically important work,
and I know many who don’t subscribe to HBO want to see it. The very
moment HBO makes it available on DVD or purchaseable digital video
download, I will eagerly be there with credit card in hand. I wish
they’d done so already. (via BB)
— posted by Sheigh
Update: I just talked to a spokeswoman for HBO docs who said she doesn’t know when a "Levees" DVD will be available, "Maybe later this year or next year." She noted that there are lots of tricky rights and clearance issues with the movie.
The situation reminds me of Downhill Battle’s "call to download" the 1987 PBS series "Eyes on the Prize" which has been tied up in clearance hell for years now. We wrote about the Downhill Battle effort in early 2005 in the story Eyes’ campaign spurs new civil disobedience.
Update 2: HBO had the "Levees" clips removed from YouTube on Friday (9/15). Try Googlevideo.
September 1, 2006 - 10:20 am
When Uni released Inside Man this spring, the studio seemed to keep the heist thriller’s politically outspoken director well away from the promotional effort. Instead, the emphasis was on the charms of Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster.
But with a political doc to promote, Lee can say whatever he wants, and he’s back in characteristic form. While at the Venice Film Festival presenting the European premiere of "When the Levees Broke: A Requeim in Four Acts," Lee took direct aim at the incompetence of George Bush and his administration:
"(Bush) returned to New Orleans on August 29 to do a couple of lame, bogus
photo opportunities to say that New Orleans is being rebuilt, that it’s
on the way back. Do not believe this. Much of New Orleans looks like it
did the day after Katrina hit," said Lee. Full story. [posted by Sheigh]
August 20, 2006 - 1:50 pm
 You can count on one thing: Brooklyn filmmaker Spike Lee is NEVER dull. That’s partly because he’s fearless, opinionated and outspoken—to a fault. He’s also an excellent documentary filmmaker. He took a crew to New Orleans to examine the conditions post-Katrina: When the Levees Broke airs August 21-22 on HBO. I’ll be watching. Salon’s Cynthia Joyce weighs in; so does Texas critic Joe Leydon. And New York Magazine can’t get enough of the city’s angriest auteur.
[Photo by Charlie Varley]
April 7, 2006 - 1:55 pm
Sheigh looks into Spike Lee’s videogame commentary in “Inside Man” and talks to Lee’s long-time composer Terence Blanchard about the score and his use of a Bollywood song to open and close the movie.
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