Good Monday Morning POU!
This week we’ll be covering the filmography of Spike Lee. Specifically the films that were both written and directed by Spike.
His first film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn, was completed while he was an undergraduate at Morehouse College in 1977.
In the short act, Spike Lee’s brother, Chris, plays the part of a boy who steals a pair of shoes, and his father Bill , is a witness of the theft, declares that the opportunism manifested by members of the African-American community , during the black out was the result of 400 years of subjugation. The blackout occurred in the summer of 1977 in New York , showing some people looting the shops of Harlem , and some street dancers performing in the ‘ hustle , a style of dance that fashion that summer.
The short was never screened since Lee has never asked permission for the music included in the soundtrack .
Spike’s second film, which almost got him kicked out of film school was The Answer in 1980. The plot of the film is a black screenwriter is hired for $50,000 to rewrite Birth of a Nation.
Lee describes “The Answer” in a discussion with Pharell Williams, calling Griffith’s movie “one of the most racist films ever” — it’s credited with leading to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in America; this and other negative reactions prompted Griffith to make “Intolerance” in response — and describing how it almost got him kicked out of school. “At NYU they showed the film, talked about the great innovations that D.W. Griffith came up with…well, they never talked about how this film was used as a recruiting tool for the Klan and was responsible for black people getting lynched,” he says.
“The faculty took it like I was attacking the father of cinema, so they kicked me out.” Someone stopped this, however: “Someone said, ‘We can’t kick him out because we gave him an assistantship for next year already.’ I worked in the equipment room, and I was the hardest worker in there, so they rewarded me for that…If the evaluations had come first, before the assistantship, I’d have been kicked out of school!”
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads is a 1983 independent film by Spike Lee. Lee submitted the film as his master’s degree thesis at the Tisch School of the Arts.
Lee’s classmates Ang Lee and Ernest R. Dickerson worked on the film as assistant director and cinematographer, respectively. The film was the first student film to be showcased in Lincoln Center‘s New Directors New Films Festival. Lee’s father, Bill Lee, composed the score. The film won a Student Academy Award.
The film is set in a Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn barbershop where customers come to hang out, discuss various issues, and get a haircut. The manager, Zack, took over after Joe was killed by a gangster who used the shop as a front for a numbers racket. Zack wants to keep the shop legitimate but the gangster wants to continue the deal he had with Joe.