Spike vs. Clint
June 06, 2008 6:31 PM
You might be forgiven if these days Spike Lee is reminding you of "Buggin Out" -- the character played by Giancarlo Esposito in Lee's "Do The Right Thing," who famously inquired of Danny Aiello's "Sal" about why there weren't any African-Americans on the "Wall of Fame" in Sal's Pizzeria.
At Cannes, Lee criticized Clint Eastwood for not featuring any African-American fighting men in his two World War II pictures.
He was specifically referring to "Flags Of Our Fathers," about the four soldiers who raised the flag over Iwo Jima in the iconic photograph, and "Letters From Iwo Jima," about the Japanese soldiers who fought there.
"Clint Eastwood is a great film maker and I respect his work, and he did two films about Iwo Jima back to back, and there was not one black soldier in both of those films," Lee said. "Add the running times of both films, that's about four hours. ... Many veterans, African-Americans who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood for not even having one, but Clint Eastwood is a great director and that was his vision. His vision of Iwo Jima: Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that you know. I have a different version."
Lee's version, "Miracle at St. Anna," is about four African-American soldiers who get trapped in an Italian village.
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No "soldiers," per se, were actually on Iwo Jima at all -- only Marines -- but more to the point there weren't many African-Americans on Iwo Jima at the time of the flag being raised.
The military was segregated; It's estimated that around 900 of the 250,000 Americans who came ashore were African-American -- members of the 8th Ammunition Company.
Los Angeles Times entertainment writer Tim Rutten made that historical note and said that "looking back over Eastwood’s directorial career –- including his Oscar-winning films 'Unforgiven' and 'Million Dollar Baby' -– there’s probably no filmmaker of similar stature in Hollywood history who has so unself-consciously created central roles for actors who just happened to be African American."
Rutten called Lee's charge "bilge."
Eastwood was slightly more feisty in his response.
"A guy like him should shut his face," Eastwood told the Guardian, taking Lee's bait. "Has he ever studied the history?"
Eastwood recalled that Lee "was complaining when I did 'Bird' [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker], 'Why would a white guy be doing that?' I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead, he was making something else."
There were African-Americans on Iwa Jima, he acknowledged, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is 'Flags of Our Fathers,' the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate. ... I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90 percent black, like 'Bird,' I use 90 percent black people."
Lee responded to Eastwood today in an interview with ABC News' Sheila Marikar.
"First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation, either," he told ABCNEWS.com. "He's a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn't personally attack him. And a comment like, 'A guy like that should shut his face' -- come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there."
"If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima, and I'd like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist," he said. "I'm not making this up. I know history. I'm a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II. Not everything was John Wayne, baby."
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Eastwood is currently working on "The Human Factor," starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in a tale about how Mandela used a campaign to have South Africa host the 1995 Rugby World Cup as a chance to unite his country.
- jpt
