Kevin Lally on Film

In 1989, I was happy to see my name in newspaper ads proclaiming Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing as the best picture of the year. A modern classic set in my home borough of Brooklyn, it’s one of the most dazzling, vibrant and provocative films of the 1980s. Nine years later, I got the chance to speak to the prolific Lee about his 12th feature, He Got Game. I’m anything but a basketball buff, but I tried not to let that get in the way of our phone conversation. Eight years later, I finally got to meet Lee in person, at his production office in a converted firehouse in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn—you can read that interview here. Lee continues to be a major force in cinema, finally winning an Oscar for his screenplay for BlacKkKlansman in 2019 and an honorary Oscar in 2016. Here’s my first encounter with this pioneering American filmmaker.

Moviegoers know Spike Lee as one of the most important directing talents to have emerged in America over the last dozen years. But basketball watchers will more readily identify another side of Spike—the devoted New York Knicks fan whose excitable presence courtside at Madison Square Garden is often a show in itself.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Spike Lee has finally made a film about his beloved sport. But Touchstone Pictures’ He Got Game is no starry-eyed salute—it’s a characteristically serious examination of the world of a teenage basketball prodigy and the social influences swirling around him as he confronts a heady future. Lee’s 12th feature film unites him for the third time with Denzel Washington, who stars in the atypically gritty role of Jake Shuttlesworth, a convict temporarily released from prison to try to persuade his estranged son Jesus, a hotly pursued high-school player, to sign with the Governor’s alma mater. Making his screen debut as Jesus is Ray Allen of the Milwaukee Bucks, who co-stars with Milla Jovovich, Rosario Dawson, Ned Beatty, and such Lee veterans as Lonette McKee, Bill Nunn, Roger Guenveur Smith, Hill Harper and Zelda Harris.

Allen had never acted before, but Lee and his production team were confident they had made the right move. Interviewed by phone while traveling through New York City, Lee declares, “We made the choice early on that for this film to be successful—we knew what Denzel was going to do, that’s a given—the pivotal role was going to be Jesus. And it would have been a disaster if we had tried to cast an actor—no matter how good they might be, they’re not gonna have NBA skills. A lot of people might have thought it was a risk, but we all thought it was a much greater risk to cast an actor and hope they could play basketball than cast a ballplayer and hope they could act. We made a list of all the guys in the league who we felt still looked young enough that people would believe they were in their senior year of high school, and we started to call them to see who was interested and who wasn’t. And Ray Allen, thank God, came through. We felt there was gonna be somebody that could give us a realistic performance, someone who might not even have acted in his life. We were confident that, with our ace acting coach, Susan Batson, we could get the job done.”

What was it about Ray Allen that landed him the role? “Ray is still very youthful,” Lee notes. “He’s handsome, he’s innocent, and he can play ball. Plus, he was determined that he was gonna give the best performance possible. He submitted himself to eight weeks of coaching prior to the commencement of principal photography, five days a week, eight hours a day. He said it was harder than his basketball training camp.”

As for Washington, Lee tones down his matinee-idol image by giving him cheap duds, an unkempt Afro, and a fiery temper. “Denzel told me, ‘Spike, I’m gonna get raw in this film.’ And he did,” says Lee.

Jaggedly edited to match the various forces buffeting both Jesus and his father, He Got Game is an indictment of the role money and avarice play in the lives of poor but athletically gifted young African-Americans. Everyone in the film wants a piece of Jesus and his future riches: his Uncle Bubba, who craves some payback for taking in the boy; his girlfriend Lala, who’s eager for him to skip college and join the pros; a swarm of agents and college recruiters; and, of course, his father, who is experiencing his own pressure from the powers-that-be. Complicating matters dramatically is the fact that Jake accidentally killed his wife, and he and his son haven’t spoken since that tragic mistake.

Lee says his film reflects “the big business that sports has become. Sports is not just relegated to the sports pages, you see it on the financial pages, the entertainment pages. It’s always been like that, though. Even back in the 1920s, there was a big stink about Babe Ruth making more money than the President. There’s that famous line: ‘Yeah, but I had a better year than he did.’ It’s not anything new, but it’s blown up a hundredfold.”

The situation is not being helped by today’s college basketball environment, says Lee. “I really feel, and I’ve said this many times, that the NCAA needs to be overhauled, struck to the ground and rebuilt back up, brick by brick. I feel they’re not looking out for the best interests of the athletes—these guys are being exploited, they should receive a stipend. They’ve [the NCAA] got to come into the 20th century—and I say that knowing that we’re two years from the millennium.”

He Got Game culminates in a one-on-one showdown between Jake and his son, a contest to determine both men’s immediate futures. “They were playing hard,” Lee recalls. “Let me tell you the story. In the script, Jesus is supposed to beat his father eleven-nothing. But Denzel was determined, he was like: ‘Fuck the script, I gotta score at least a basket.’ And Ray is like: ‘Hey, the script says I’m supposed to beat him eleven-zip—well, he ain’t gonna score.’ So they were going at it, toe to toe. And D was happy because it was a moral victory—he scored five baskets, not just one. And Ray was upset that this guy scored on him at all.

“We did four takes. The only thing that was choreographed was the final basket where it’s point game and Jesus has to knock his father down the way his father knocked him down when he was younger. Other than that, we had the cameras placed and we just threw the ball up and said: Go at it. And Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait fits great there.”

In fact, one of the most distinctive elements of He Got Game is its generous use of the music of Copland, one of the century’s most celebrated American composers. (In the past, Lee has collaborated with jazz composers Terence Blanchard and his own father, Bill Lee.) “I’ve always been a huge admirer of Copland’s music,” Lee affirms. “He is one of the giants of American music. And his music is very cinematic. He’s done scores, he won an Oscar for The Heiress, he did Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, Our Town. If you listen to a lot of other composers—when I hear John Williams, I hear a lot of Aaron Copland. And the cues really fit.”

It may seem incongruous to find the sometimes controversial Mr. Lee working for Walt Disney, but he’s more than happy with that fit, too. “I love it. They really know how to market. I have a great relationship with Joe Roth. I have a first-look deal with Columbia and they chose not to do this film. We sent the script to Joe and he said, ‘How much?’ We gave him the price, and he snapped it up right away. We’ve developed a great relationship, and it feels wonderful to have a national TV spot three months before the movie comes out. In recent years, people would walk up to me a week before my opening and say, ‘When’s your next movie coming out?’ because there was just no awareness.”

It’s a little difficult now to remember what the movie terrain was like for African-American filmmakers before Spike Lee scored a sleeper hit in 1986 with his risqué low-budget comedy about a woman juggling three men, She’s Gotta Have It. The success of that film, and later the highly acclaimed, exhilarating and chilling Brooklyn neighborhood mosaic Do the Right Thing, inspired an exciting new wave of black filmmakers including John Singleton, Reginald and Warrington Hudlin, Albert and Allen Hughes, Bill Duke, Mario Van Peebles, Kasi Lemmons, Darnell Martin, Rusty Cundieff and Lee’s former cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson. “The landscape was barren,” Lee recalls. “It was Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor and that was it. And Michael Schultz was the only African-American director working.” Lee agrees that She’s Gotta Have It was a groundbreaker, but hastens to credit Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle as another film that helped usher in “the so-called black wave.”

Quickly, the Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-raised Lee established himself as a distinctive voice in American movies, with outspoken films like School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever and the searing biopic Malcolm X. Asked if having an individual voice is a help or a hindrance in such a commercially driven business, Lee responds, “I don’t think it’s a liability at all. That’s what any artist wants—you want your voice to be heard, apart from the wilderness. Not everyone’s going to agree with what you have to say, and that’s perfectly alright, too.”

Lee’s films since Malcolm X—Crooklyn, Clockers, Girl 6 and Get on the Bus—have been consistently provocative, but box-office disappointments. He feels Crooklyn and Clockers are particularly underrated. “Especially Clockers. One of the reasons I was hesitant to do the film when Martin Scorsese asked me was because I felt it was coming on the tail end of the hip-hop, shoot-’em-up, drug movies. Even though it was the antithesis of those types of films, it was not perceived that way, so it really didn’t get the audience we felt it should have gotten.”

But overall, Lee is happy with his career trajectory. “Thank God we’ve yet had to take a film just for the money. A lot of people get stuck—they’ve got this big house, and they gotta do work that they don’t want to do. I’ve been very fortunate that it’s not happened to me yet.”

Lee had some unexpected industry recognition this year when his first documentary feature, 4 Little Girls, earned an Academy Award nomination. His heartbreaking account of the 1963 church bombing that killed four young girls in Birmingham, Alabama, failed to win the Oscar, but Lee declares, “The nomination has nothing to do with how we felt about the film, or why we made it. [The experience] was very satisfying. I have a great partner in HBO—they financed 4 Little Girls 100 percent and we’re looking forward to doing the next one.”

With a new interest in documentaries to accompany his dramatic output, Lee continues to grow as an artist while being amazingly prolific. “There was a year where I didn’t do a film,” he notes. “I caught up by doing two in one year. We’ve done 12 in 12 years. What that means, I’m just building up a body of work, it’s as simple as that.”

Lee intends to start his next feature this summer, but claims he doesn’t know the subject yet. “Gotta think quick,” he quips, and somehow we suspect Spike Lee will deliver.

(Photo © Brooklyn Nets)