![]() ![]() I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.” It is on this quote that the film closes. Martin Luther King in favor of non-violence, stating, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind,” countered by Malcolm X’s “I am not against violence in self-defense. The film, which explores the black underclass, ends with two quotes, the first by Dr. What bubbles up is not mozzarella but the bad feelings hidden beneath. Nobody wins when oppressive heat and Raheem’s radio causes a meltdown in Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. Somebody is going to get killed and it’ll probably be us.”ĭo the Right Thing takes up the message. One month later, after a 25-year-old black man died in police custody, one black woman told The New York Times, “This is crazy. The Amsterdam News, favored by a black readership, likened the handling of the Central Park rape to the Scottsboro boys, who were falsely convicted and nearly executed for the rape of a white woman in Alabama 50 years ago. The alleged black gang rape of a white Wall Street woman this April in Central Park angers whites, smears blacks, and triggers Donald Trump to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for reinstatement of the death penalty (yet there was no such out cry when Michael Stewart and Eleanor Bumpurs-blacks to whom Lee dedicates his film-died at the hands of NYC police in separate controversial incidents). Lee’s film comes at a time when New York City is a racial tinderbox. Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson once again stood loyally behind the lens while the director’s brother, David Lee, shot more of the enigmatic stills we saw in Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It.īill Nunn in Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) The Antioch Baptist Church served as canteen, where lunch on some days consisted of ribs and assorted Louisiana hot sauces.įor his role as Mookie, the meandering young black man who is the film’s pivotal character, and who cares less about his girlfriend and young son than getting paid, Lee donned a fade-out flat top and a gold tooth. ![]() A pizza parlor was erected, murals painted, the street cleaned up, a block party thrown and the shoot was under way. Sets were reconstructed from gutted buildings behind the film’s Korean fruit stand stood an empty shell. With them, he also cleared the block of three crack houses. To pave way for the production, Lee rejected the usual police surveillance from the Mayor’s Office of Motion Pictures and instead installed members of the Fruit of Islam. It was shot in Bed-Stuy using an almost all-black crew (a rarity in the film industry) during a record breaking heatwave. While Spike Lee’s previous films looked at the under- and crosscurrents of male/female and light/dark-skinned black interactions, in his third feature, Do the Right Thing, Lee takes a magnifying glass-under-a-hot-sun look at black/white relations and the result-no surprise-is fire.ĭo the Right Thing stars Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Danny Aiello, John Turturro, Richard Edson, and Lee veterans Joie Lee, Bill Nunn Sam Jackson and Giancarlo Esposito, along with newcomer Rosie Perez. It’s the hottest day of summer in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where the only thing hotter are people’s tempers and a ghetto blaster not only rocks the house but burns it down. Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be…. What we got to say, power to the people, no delay, Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp Our freedom of speech is freedom of deathįrom the heart it’s a start a work of art Spike Lee will be honored by Film at Lincoln Center at the 46th Chaplin Award Gala. ![]()
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