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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
In a wide-ranging interview, our most audacious filmmaker blasts gangsta rap, hails the Original Kings of Comedy and talks about his scorching blackface farce, "Bamboozled."
Oct 26, 2000 | "As the most prominent black director in the American movie industry," critic Terrence Rafferty once wrote about Spike Lee, "he probably feels as if he were sprinting downcourt with no one to pass to and about five hundred towering white guys between him and the basket."
This was in 1989, at the time of "Do the Right Thing." A dozen years later, Lee hasn't tamped down his provocative public blend of cockiness and earnestness. Yet he has displayed new sides to his creative personality.
He checked his tendency to showboat and extended his powers of empathy for the heartbreaking 1997 documentary "Four Little Girls," about the Civil Rights-era bombing of a black church in Alabama. And a gift for expressing undiluted joy suffused his 1997 book "Best Seat in the House: A Basketball Memoir" (written with Ralph Wiley) and exploded on-screen in his hit comedy-concert film, "The Original Kings Of Comedy."
In that film, four black comics -- Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac -- take the stage in spiffy ties and jackets and prove that grass-roots comedy can be devastating when presented with old-fashioned style. The movie builds to multiple crescendos of earthy parody and farce. It climaxes with Bernie Mac's audacious chronicle about life with his sister's disruptive kids: Everything that W.C. Fields suggested about the horrors of living with children Mac makes painfully and uproariously explicit. Along the way, these four musketeers don't just entertain two sold-out crowds at the Charlotte Coliseum -- they involve them in riffs, ad-libs and entire musical numbers.
The absence of that organic connection between performer and audience is part of what Lee bemoans in his prickly new movie. "Bamboozled" takes place in the lily-white corporate halls of our mainstream media. It begins with Damon Wayans reading a dictionary definition of satire and ends with a montage of black and white minstrelsy from the dawn of Hollywood through its heyday.
The title comes from a Malcolm X speech: "You've been had. You've been took. You've been hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, run amok." Wayans plays Pierre Delacroix, the one black executive in a fledgling, WB-like network. Jada Pinkett-Smith plays his smart, well-meaning assistant, and Michael Rapaport his repulsively crude boss.
The network chief orders him to deliver a show as black as Amos 'n' Andy; Delacroix decides to produce the most monumental racial throwback he can think of -- "Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show," starring tap-dance wonder Savion Glover and comic veteran Tommy Davidson as a pair of prancing plantation darkies named Mantan and Sleep 'N' Eat. Delacroix hopes that he will be fired and the show will be a cautionary flop. Instead it boomerangs into a hit -- and wounds the soul of every character.
"Bamboozled" has received wildly diverse reviews, and I thought it far more effective as a conversation piece than as a movie. Luckily, Lee was visiting San Francisco and willing to talk all about it -- even when I admitted that the movie lost me. A couple of days after we spoke, Lee announced that he had made a deal with Studios USA (the company behind the enduring hit "Law and Order") to develop TV series of his own.
It's fascinating that you've had "The Original Kings of Comedy" and "Bamboozled" coming out so quick ...
Back to back!
Were issues surrounding black entertainers percolating in your mind, or is it just happenstance that the films came out this way?
"The Original Kings of Comedy" fell out of the sky. We had shot "Bamboozled" already and I was approached by Walter Latham and David Gale/MTV Films, who asked me: Would you want to direct this?
"Bamboozled" protests the paucity of blacks in mainstream media, while "The Original Kings of Comedy" shows that talented black performers can operate beneath the radar of mainstream media and still be huge.
The gatekeepers were not paying attention. I mean, the Original Kings of Comedy were selling out arenas, not little dumpy comedy clubs; they were filling 20,000 seats. And they still weren't even being reviewed. They were totally ignored.
