RSSEastwood Smacks Down Loudmouth Spike Lee
J.J. Jackson* | June 9, 2008
Spike Lee is one of those folks still fighting against the old south and a pre-1865 America. He is filled with a lot of disdain for anyone that he arbitrality decides is not good enough for him. One man he should know better than to pick on however is Clint Eastwood.
Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. “Has he ever studied the history?” he asks, in that familiar near-whisper.
The “he” is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood’s movie and told reporters: “That was his version. The negro version did not exist.”
Eastwood has no time for Lee’s gripes. “He 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.” As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “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.”
…
Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. “A guy like him should shut his face.”
Spike Lee is just looking for media attention. Frankly his movies are, in general, terrible and he needs some way to get his name out in the media. Taking on other people in Hollywood is the way he sees that he can do this since his own movies rarely warrant more than a blurb in the papers.
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Apparently Spike Lee is still shooting his mouth off at Clint in Rd3 now. Funny. Because he started it by saying something stupid. Bit some reason it doesn’t surprise me that he can’t just keep his loud mouth shut.