Two years later, Lee was ready to go bigger. box office-an astounding feat for an indie. It also grossed more than $7 million at the U.S. The film went on to win an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature, and another directing award at Cannes. Over two weeks, he and Dickerson, with whom he’d ultimately collaborate on seven films, shot, in stark black-and-white, a hip, sensual romantic-comedy called She’s Gotta Have It. After graduating, he followed his passion to New York University’s film school, and in 1985, he raised $175,000 to make his first feature film. While attending college in the South, Lee made his first film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn. It was all well and good to make art-his dad’s career effectively drove that lesson home-but Lee understood at a young age that it took money for the show to go on. As a kid, Lee handed out fliers for his dad’s shows, learning early the importance of wooing a crowd. The son of an arts and literature teacher and a jazz musician, Lee was born in Atlanta, but his family moved to Brooklyn three years later.
It was out of this milieu that a young film student named Spike Lee rocketed to fame. Writers like Greg Tate and Lisa Jones were breaking new stylistic ground jazz masters such as Branford and Wynton Marsalis revitalized an older musical style and a comedian named Chris Rock started performing jokes honed on the still-mean streets of brownstone Brooklyn. By the mid-1980s, artists like Run-DMC and Public Enemy were bringing a distinctly urban sound to the airwaves. Rap, then still fighting for air time on radio and MTV, was rumbling out from block parties. The tragic event was just the latest in a long string of racially charged incidents that polarized New York’s neighborhoods.Īt the same time, the five boroughs were undergoing an artistic renaissance. Escaping from his pursuers, Griffith had run into the street and was killed by a car. A few weeks prior, Griffith and some friends had been beaten up and chased from a local pizza parlor by a group of white men. Two days after Christmas the previous year, more than a thousand people had taken to the streets of the Italian-American enclave of Howard Beach, Queens, outraged by the death of a young black man named Michael Griffith. Lee wanted to make his name, but he wanted to do more than that: He wanted to make a film that would make America look in the mirror. If it failed, he risked becoming just another young filmmaker chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine. In fact, it would cost every ounce of creative and cultural capital Lee had amassed in his short career. The script would be his most ambitious yet-a multiracial, intergenerational ensemble set in his home borough of Brooklyn on one hot summer day. But on that flight, the tireless director was already plotting out a new project, furiously scribbling on a yellow legal pad. With just one film in release-the previous year’s She’s Gotta Have It-his brash, sexy, unapologetically political sensibility had made him one of America’s most recognizable auteurs. It was 1987, and they were headed to Los Angeles to do postproduction work on Lee’s second feature film, School Daze, a raucous musical comedy about life at an all-black college in the South.Īt the moment, the 30-year-old Lee was everywhere: from Knicks games to Nike commercials. Spike Lee and his cinematographer Ernest Dickerson huddled on a plane.
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