Spike Lee

At 67 years old, Spike Lee has this physical status:

Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee (born March 20, 1957) is an American film director, producer, writer, 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 Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1998), The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), 25th Hour (2002), Inside Man (2006), Chi-Raq (2015), and BlacKkKlansman (2018).

Lee also took starring roles in ten of his films. Lee's films have explored race relations, colorism in 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, 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.

Early life

Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Jacqueline Carroll (née 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.

Personal life

Lee met his wife, attorney Tonya Lewis Lee, in 1992, and they were married a year later in New York. They have two children.

Spike Lee is a fan of the New York Knicks basketball team, the New York Yankees baseball team (although he grew up a New York Mets fan), the New York Rangers ice hockey team, and the English football club Arsenal. One of the documentaries in ESPN's 30 for 30 series, Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks, focuses partly on Lee's interaction with Miller at Knicks games in Madison Square Garden.

In June 2003, Lee sought an injunction against Spike TV to prevent them from using his nickname. He claimed that because of his fame, viewers would think he was associated with the channel.

When asked by the BBC whether he believed in God, Lee said: "Yes. I have faith that there is a higher being. All this cannot be an accident."

Lee continues to maintain an office in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, but he and his wife live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

In May 2020, Lee published a three-minute short film, NEW YORK NEW YORK, on Instagram that was later featured on the city's official website.

Lee celebrated Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election with champagne amid a crowd on the streets of Brooklyn. Photos and videos went viral on Twitter.

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Career

Lee's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads premiered in 1983. Lee defended the film as his master's degree thesis at the Tisch School of the Arts. Ang Lee and Ernest R. Dickerson, Lee's classmates, served as assistant director and cinematographer on the film as well as editor and cinematographer. The film was the first student film to be shown in Lincoln Center's New Directors New Films Festival. Bill Lee, Lee's father, wrote the score. The film was nominated for a Student Academy Award.

Lee started making She's Gotta Have It! in 1985, when he began filming on his first feature film, She's Gotta Have It! The black-and-white film portrays a young woman (Johns) who is seeing three men and the resentment that this situation breeds. Lee's first feature-length film and launched Lee's career launched the film. Lee wrote, produced, directed, produced, starred, and edited the film with a budget of $175,000. When the film was released in 1986, it grossed over $7 million at the US box office. A.O. Wilson, a film critic, and the New York Times newspaper critic A.O. Scott portrayed the film as "ushered in (along with Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise) the 1980s American independent film movement. It was also a pioneering film for African-American filmmakers and a welcome change in black representation in American cinema, showing both male and female of color not as pimps and whores, but as conscious, upscale urbanites."

Do the Right Thing, Lee's most seminal film, concentrated on a Brooklyn neighborhood's simmering ethnic tension on a hot summer day. Lee, Danny Aiello, Bill Nunn, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Rosie Perez, Martin Lawrence, and Samuel L. Jackson were among the film's cast members. Both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who rated the film as one of the year's finest films, and later in their top ten films of the decade (No. 10) received critical acclaim. Siskel and No. 6 are out of luck. Ebert earned 4 stars on the charts. Later this year, Ebert 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 received two Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay, Spike Lee's first Academy Award nomination, and Best Supporting Actor for Danny Aiello. Do the Right Thing's founder, Kim Basinger, a host on the evening, said that they have five great films to choose from, and that for one reason, they are outstanding, but there is one film missing from the list because, ironically, it will reveal the most truth of all, and that's Do the Right Thing. Driving Miss Daisy, a film that emphasized racial relations between an elderly Jewish woman (Jessica Tandy) and her driver (Morgan Freeman), was the film that did not win Best Picture. Lee said in an interview with New York magazine on April 7, 2006 that the other film's success, which he believes was based on safe stereotypes, upset him more than if his film hadn't been nominated for an award.

Lee was accused of antisemitism by the Anti-Defamation League and several film commentators following the 1990 release of Mo' Better Blues. Josh and Moe Flatbush, the club's owners, were chastised for their nicknames, which they referred to as "Shylocks." Lee denied the charge, saying that he created those characters in order to highlight how black artists struggled against exploitation. Lew Wasserman, Sidney Sheinberg, or Tom Pollock, the Jewish heads of MCA and Universal Studios, are unlikely to endorse antisemitic material in a film they produced, according to Lee. "I can't make an antisemitic film because Jews rule Hollywood, and that's a lie."

Spike released Malcolm X, based on Malcolm X's Autobiography, starring Denzel Washington as the renowned civil rights king in 1992. Malcolm X's life includes the following events: his criminal life, his arrest, conversion to Islam, his ministry as a member of the Nation of Islam, his marriage to Betty X, his reflection on whites, and his assassination on February 21, 1965. In flashbacks, defining childhood experiences, including his father's death, his mother's mental disorder, and his experiences with racism are all dramatized. Critic Roger Ebert rated the film No. 1 in the United States, giving it a wide-ranging critical appreciation. The film ranked 1 on his Top ten list for 1992, and his description of it as "one of the finest screen biographies" honoring the sweeping of an American life in which prison bottomed out before its hero reimagined himself. Malcolm X was one of the best films of the 1990s by Ebert and Martin Scorsese, who were in mournance for late At the Movies co-host Gene Siskel. Denzel Washington's portrayal of Malcolm X in particular was highly praised and he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Washington lost to Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman), a decision that Lee resigned: "I'm not the only one who believes Denzel was robbed on that one."

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

Lee produced Edward Norton's 25th Hour and Philip Seymour Hoffman's film, which attracted critical notice, with many commentators since being named one of the best films of the decade. On December 16, 2009, film critic Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list. All the best films of the decade" lists were compiled by A. O. Scott, Richard Roeper, and Roger Ebert. In a BBC poll of 177 commentators, it was later rated as the 26th best film since 2000. The film was also a financial success, grossing almost $24 million against a $5 million budget.

Denzel Washington, Jodie Foster, and Clive Owen, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Willem Dafoe, and Christopher Plummer appeared in Inside Man, a 2006 film starring Denzel Washington, Chris Moore, Tom Watson, and Christopher Plummer. Given that it was a studio heist thriller, Lee's film was an odd one. The film was a critical and financial success, earning $186 million off a $45 million budget. Empire chose four actors out of five for the film's conclusion, "It's certainly a Spike Lee film, but not so much Spike Lee Joints." Despite this, he has delivered a fast, agile, and often masterful take on a well-worn genre. Lee excels (perhaps beyond himself) thanks to some slick camera work and a cast in cracking form. It's not always a bad thing to play it straight.

Spike Lee was honoured with the San Francisco International Film Festival's Directing Award on May 2, 2007. He was awarded the Wexner Prize in 2008. He received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 2013, one of the highest awards in the American arts worth $300,000.

Lee received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2015 for his contributions to film. At the private Governors Awards ceremony, colleagues and long collaborators Wesley Snipes, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson presented Lee with the award.

In the video game NBA 2K16, Lee conceived, wrote, and produced the MyCareer story mode. Lee returned to form in the late '90s with Chi-Raq, a musical drama film. The film is a modern-day retelling of Aristophanes' ancient Greek play "Lysistrata" and explores the challenges of race, sex, and violence in America. Teyonah Parris, Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, Nick Cannon, Nick Cannon, Dave Chappelle, Wesley Snipes, John Cusack, and Samuel L. Jackson appeared in the film. In November, Amazon Studios unveiled the film in select cities. Chi-Raq has received generally favorable reviews from critics. "Chi-Raq is as timely topical and thrilling as it is wildly uneven," the film's critic says, and it includes some of Spike Lee's best, sharpest, and all-around amusing late-period work on Rotten Tomatoes.

BlacKlansman, Lee's latest film set in the 1970s centered around Ron Stallworth's assassination of the Ku Klux Klan. The film premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it took home the Grand Prix and opened the following August. "BlacKlansman delivers bitingly trenchant commentary on current events in North America, drawing out some of Spike Lee's hardest-hitting work in decades along the way." Lee was invited to attend a Directors Roundtable interview hosted by The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite), Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me? Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born) and Bradley Cooper (A Star is Born). It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director (Lee's first ever nomination in this category). Lee received his first national Academy Award in the category Best Adapted Screenplay. When asked by journalists from the BBC if the Best Picture winner Green Book offended him, Lee replied, "Let me give you a British answer, it is not my cup of tea." Many journalists in the industry pointed out that the 2019 Oscars with BlacKlansman competing against eventual winner Green Book resembled the 1989 Oscars, with Lee's film Do the Right Thing losing out on a Best Picture nomination over eventual winner Driving Miss Daisy.

On Netflix, Lee's Vietnam war film Da 5 Bloods was released. Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Chadwick Boseman appeared in the film. On June 12, 2020, the film was released around the world. A group of elderly Vietnam War veterans returning to the country in search of the remains of their fallen squad leader's body as well as the treasure chest's buried while serving there. The film was originally planned to premiere out of theatre at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, before releasing in theaters in May or June before Netflix's subscription was accessed. The film received a high score in the wake of widespread critical reception, with the critical consensus statement "Fierce energy and aspiration course through Da 5 Bloods" coming together to fuel one of Spike Lee's most popular and impactful films" being 92% based on 252 reviews. The film has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating "universal recognition."

Lee's next project will be a film based on Pfizer's erectile dysfunction treatment treatment, Viagra. He had signed an overall deal with Netflix to produce and produce newer films in the most recent.

Academic career and teaching

In 1991, Lee taught a filmmaking course at Harvard. He began teaching at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York City in 1993. He received his master of fine arts from it. He was named as the school's artistic director in 2002. He is now a tenured professor at NYU.

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