Spike Lee

Say Shelton Jackson Lee and someone would be excused for thinking that an overzealous good ol' boy from down South (way down South) was reliving dreams of Confederate glory through his son.

Say Spike Lee and it is a different picture entirely, one that may just include a courtside shot of the New York Knicks and a short black man leaping up and down, screaming as the game heads down the stretch.

That would be the filmmaker and owner of the '40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks' imprint, the name coming from an unfulfilled promise of property to freed slaves. But instead of waiting on a pledge Lee has put hitched his plough to the brace of films, starting with his first feature film, She's Gotta Have It, in 1986.

Made on a budget of under US$200,000, it pulled in over US$7,000,000 in the U.S. alone.

But before the features and the causes came the studies for the kid born on March 20, 1957, and nicknamed 'Spike' by his mother, Mary (yup, his mother is Mary Lee and his father is Bill). He moved to Brooklyn, New York, as a child, and after John Dewey High School, he attended Morehouse College. He did film courses at Clark Atlanta University and after earning a BA in Mass Communications from Morehouse, went to the Tisch School of the Arts, at New York University. But that was not before making his first film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn, while at Morehouse.

Today we take a look (a reflection on, really) at Jungle Fever, made in 1991, where Lee was not satisfied to make a 'boy- meets-girl-movie', instead infusingthe interracial drama with the attendant tensions that happen only in Uncle Sam's land. And this was before OJ went driving on the freeway.

Next week: More on Spike and another of his joints.

- M.C.