![]() Once a novice who received critical acclaim for his early independent films, today, Lee, who’s 66, is an iconic film-maker known for producing some of the richest, most pointed critiques of American social life. Music, as the Sinatra anecdote illuminates, is one of the most important tools that propels Lee’s creative ethos forward (consider the opening sequences for many of his movies and documentaries). This story underscores a crucial detail about the mind and passions of Spike Lee: he has an unyielding commitment to being in conversation with masters of other crafts. So I hand-wrote a 10-page letter.” Ultimately, he got the rights. ![]() Of his final plea to Sinatra, Lee told me: “I don’t type. In Lee’s mind, both were crucial to telegraph the film’s two emotional conflicts: the salacious affair between a married, middle-class Black man in Harlem and a single, working-class Italian American woman in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn and the family drama of a drug-addicted son at the height of the crack epidemic. He’d already gotten Stevie Wonder onboard to write new songs for the soundtrack, and he saw Sinatra’s music as a nice juxtaposition. He told me that when he began writing Jungle Fever, he had a specific soundscape in mind, one that would establish the texture of a subversive film about interracial relationships in a post-civil rights era. ![]() Lee apologized and, for weeks, begged for a way to make amends. “You disrespected my father,” Tina told Lee, by his own account. Lee was trying to negotiate the rights with Sinatra’s daughter, Tina, who at the time handled the music legend’s business affairs.
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