ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 7, 1997 TAG: 9703070023
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED THE ROANOKE TIMES LEXINGTON
Movie director Spike Lee had a lot of say Wednesday night at W&L - including something about the irony of speaking in Lee Chapel.
Filmmaker Spike Lee glanced over his shoulder at the sarcophagus of Robert E. Lee, smiled and shook his head before rising to speak to an overflow crowd of mostly students Wednesday night at Lee Chapel on the campus of Washington and Lee University.
He couldn't let it pass. In fact, the audience would have been disappointed had he done so. "Part of my ancestors probably built this place," he said, removing his New York Mets cap. "They just didn't get paid for it."
Lee, with "She's Gotta Have It," "Do The Right Thing," "Mo' Better Blues," "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and "Clockers," to his credit, among other movies, had a little to say about the symbolism of his visit to the final resting place of Gen. Lee - and lots of other subjects.
Directing his comments mostly to students with moviemaking dreams, Lee, 39, said luck has "a lot to do with it," but that timing is important too. It certainly was with his own route to success.
Had his breakthrough film about a single woman's sexual conquests, "She's Gotta Have it," which was released in 1986, come out even two years later, "the reaction would have been much different" because of the explosion of the AIDS epidemic in the late '80s, he said.
But the movie, produced for $174,000, made more than $8 million and brought Hollywood knocking on Lee's door. He had expected that kind of reaction years earlier to his award-winning New York University student film about a Brooklyn barber shop.
"I waited by the phone, and I waited by the phone," Lee recalled. "And then the phone got cut off."
The trick now, he said, is to keep one foot in the independent film world, where smaller budgets make filmmaking a more streamlined and enjoyable process, and one foot in Hollywood, where the big money is.
He likened making a big-budget film to "moving an elephant up a hill," in contrast to his two most recent movies, "Girl 6," about a phone sex operator, and "Get On the Bus," about the Million Man March. Both were made on small budgets, and "Bus" was made solely with the financial backing of a group of successful, black men - among them well-known sports and entertainment figures.
"There is a symbolism," Lee said, "to these men coming together to finance the film." Because of the subject matter, it would have been "problematic" for white investors to be involved, he said. "The march was about self-reliance."
But Lee was hard to pin down on political questions like those that have been raised in the controversy over fellow black filmmaker John Singleton's recent film, "Rosewood." Critics have lambasted the film because it creates a fictional, black character (played by Ving Rhames) who saves the day - and for portraying white people in the film as uniformly evil.
Lee urged students to see the movie and judge for themselves, pointing out that the character played by Jon Voight is, ultimately, sympathetic.
Lee said there are some movies that white directors just should not touch, although he conceded that Oliver Stone might well be able to do justice to the story of Martin Luther King. It has been rumored that Stone is making such a film.
Black directors are held to a higher standard, though, he said, adding, "No black director would be allowed to shoot one foot of film on the Holocaust."
Questions from the star-struck audience of more than 1,000 brought some pretty snappy, vintage Spike responses:
On "ebonics": "I don't be liking ebonics. I be thinking it be really stupid."
On the black community's response to the AIDS epidemic in inner-cities: "We've been slower to mobilize than everybody else because African-Americans are highly homophobic."
On the Internet (where Lee has three, five-minute films available for downloading) as a new medium for film : "It's a great medium for short films. There's no place for short films to to be seen."
On the future of filmmaking: "Films are becoming more regional than they've ever been, and that's because of technology. The technology's made the medium accessible to everyone."
On the portrayal of African characters in white films: "Cleopatra did not look like Elizabeth Taylor."
Lee's latest projects are a feature-length documentary on the deaths of four black girls in a 1963 Birmingham, Ala., church bombing; an advertising campaign for the Holyfield-Tyson rematch; and a film on baseball player Jackie Robinson.
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB