I kept in loose contact with Spike over the next year or so. I remember meeting with him about a movie idea I had called Empire, a Motown roman à clef that never went past the treatment stage. As I said, in early 1985 I was still living in Queens and about to move to Fort Greene, when I (literally) received a wake-up call from Spike, and we reconnected.
At the time of my move I was knee-deep in the music business. Hanging with Spike reawakened two old passions. One was attending basketball games. From my childhood into my college years I had attended a lot of games at the Garden, mostly the Knicks, but also my alma mater, St. John’s University. But as a young adult, my Billboard gig had filled my nights with concerts, nightclubs, and industry soirees.
To my amazement, Spike, who was working at an independent film distributor in the Village, and lived in a cramped two-room hovel, actually had Knicks season tickets. Years before he became the city’s most identifiable Knicks fan, Spike was dropping several Gs to see a squad going down in flames due to a knee injury to star (and Fort Greene native) Bernard King. His seats were in nose-bleed territory, up in section 308, just ten rows from the cheapest seats in the 400s; their saving grace was that they were situated at midcourt, so you had a panoramic, albeit distant, view of the court.
Before every game Spike would stop at a candy shop in front of MSG, get a mint milk shake, and then sit celebrating brief moments of Knicks competence, but more often cursing the ineptitude of referees and coaches. The passion for the game that would make him an (in)famous fan was already much in evidence.
The year the Knicks won the draft rights to Georgetown’s Pat-rick Ewing, number one in the NBA draft, I bought my own season tickets. I managed to sit in the same section as Spike, about two rows behind him. For the next twenty years, through lousy teams and two runs to the NBA Finals, I held on to those tickets. Like Spike I’d move from my original seats, though obviously never as close to the court as my friend. Still, because of his example, the Knicks became one of the most enduring financial commitments of my life.
Spike, as everyone now knows, is an intense sports fan. Yet in all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen Spike hoist a jumper, toss a football, or swing a bat. Guys who grew up with him in Fort Greene said Spike used to play sports, but no one could testify to his competence at any game. What they all agreed, however, was that when they played, Spike always somehow positioned himself in a leadership role. He’d be the guy who drew up plays in touch football or made the lineups in softball. It seemed his most memorable athletic quality was his desire for leadership.
That was one of the qualities that bonded me to him. Back at the Amsterdam News I’d spent a lot of time around the embryonic black independent film scene. Spike reignited my interest in film and the dynamics of race in cinema. I remember seeing Kurosawa’s epic Ran with him up on the East Side. As a Christmas present, he gave me the film’s poster, which I still have. Later we went to the first screening of Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple in Times Square, a film whose style and content outraged him.
When Spike was impressed, as with Ran, his speaking voice was deliberate and slightly hushed, and had a herky-jerky rhythm that allowed you to see his mind gathering his thoughts. When he was irritated, as with Purple, accusation and criticism tumbled like cereal out of a box, as his voice swelled with disdain. Spike’s third gear was more mysterious. He could be deadly quiet, and then, out of the blue, pop up with a question, receive a response, and then disappear back into his cocoon.
Later, when Spike went on his publicity tour for She’s Gotta Have It, I’d get calls from journalist friends around the country wondering if they’d offended Spike, ’cause he’d give monosyllabic answers as he gazed at them sleepy-eyed. One exasperated writer in Philly told me of Spike sitting, slumped over a table, responding to questions with all the deliberate speed of a 78 rpm recording. I’d just chuckle, knowing that the agitated intensity he displayed when angry, or the cool confidence he had on the set, was as much a part of him as this somewhat frustrating slow-motion effect. Thankfully that element of Spike’s personality has receded with time, a very fortunate evolution for unsuspecting reporters.
Of course, I can’t describe young Spike without his playfulness. The man’s always had a wicked sense of humor that included gentle ridicule, bad puns, and inspired silliness. He’d see two girls walking together and say, “Lez be friends,” and chuckle at his own bad joke. Or he’d pull out some crazy 1940s slang like “rooty patootie,” or talk in that high-pitched voice that would eventually become Mr. Mars Blackmon.
Spike was also, like any young bachelor, quite interested in women. Not that he was a ladies’ man. He could be funny, but in those early days he seemed more awkward than charming around women, though he did know quite a few attractive young women through NYU and the interviews he did before writing She’s Gotta Have It. For that script he interviewed a wide range of young women about their attitudes toward sex and men, a document he shared with me. Even better, I met a lot of Spike’s female friends, and was able to introduce quite a few to the joys of listening to Miles’s Sketches of Spain while sprawled out on my living room carpet.
I first saw the landmark film on the bulky old editing machine that, along with a huge Michael Jordan poster, dominated Spike’s tiny apartment. How do you sum up your first glimpse of history? Well, first you realize you haven’t seen anything like it before.
Sitting on a little chair, staring into a little screen, I knew immediately that Nola Darling and her three lovers were fresh characters. These black people, collectively and as individuals, hadn’t been in any films I’d ever seen. Even Spike’s take on Mars, an early B-boy, was more fun than what had been presented to date in early rap/ break-dancing flicks like Breakin’.
Moreover, Ernest Dickerson’s black-and-white photography and magical framing made black people look as gorgeous as I’d ever seen them onscreen. No one had shot the streets of my Brooklyn as Dickerson had (and would again in Do the Right Thing.) Unlike the serious black independent shorts and documentaries I’d written about at the Am News, She’s Gotta Have It was sexy and funny, and had a kind of willful artistry that made me smile. Over the next few months I harassed friends and moneyed acquaintances to come out to Brooklyn to see this magical film.
I became such a believer, I invested in the film myself, using cash I still had from the Michael Jackson bio. So I took a risk, putting a few thousand in She’s Gotta Have It, and in Spike’s vision. The odds were stacked high against him. Yes, he’d made an innovative film on no money, with the aid of a crew of gifted friends. But he had no contacts in the business, and at the time, there was absolutely no precedent for a black indie filmmaker of his generation getting a commercial release. Not since Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which he’d gotten made under the guise of a porno flick, had a film taken an African American director from nowhere to stardom. Despite my enthusiasm, there was no expectation that this little sex comedy would alter that history.
Spike knew better. At least, he acted as if he did. It’s hard to articulate Spike’s aura of confidence, because he rarely did. He was not one for fiery speeches or cocky pronouncements. He communicated his confidence in a number of other ways. Early on Spike gave me a film book that accompanied Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, and talked about wanting to do a similar book for She’s. The man didn’t have a finished film, much less a distribution deal, and he wanted to shop a book. It seemed crazy, but at his request, we did a long interview about the film and his influences.
Spike’s confidence also manifested itself in his unwillingness to compromise on creative issues. I got a major hit-making record producer to come out to Myrtle Avenue to see the film on Spike’s editing machine. Then Spike and the producer came back over to my downstairs office to talk turkey. Afterward I found out that the chief topic of conversation was the jazz score by Spike’s father, Bill. The record producer, like many early viewers, thought the score either limit
ed melodically or too old-fashioned for such a contemporary feature. Spike stuck by his father and his vision. It wouldn’t be the only time. Many record labels circled around She’s once heat began to build, but Spike didn’t allow a lucrative deal to ruin his movie with a hit-driven soundtrack.
The prickly shoot-yourself-with-your-mouth side of Spike would also pop up during the battle to sell the film. He had a screening of She’s at a library on Fifty-third Street, across from the Museum of Modern Art. A white Jewish potential investor had come down to see the film and meet Spike. After the screening someone in the audience asked him about Spielberg directing The Color Purple.
I knew Spike hated Purple, but I was hoping he’d come up with some politic answer, and then move on. Instead he launched into a heated assault on Spielberg in particular, and on white directors doing black material in general. The investor was turned off by Spike’s diatribe, which almost seemed his intention, as if he wished to see if the man had the proper constitution to do business with him. It was this kind of perceived race baiting that led many of his later critics to label Spike a racist, or memorably, “an Afro-fascist.”
One of the challenges for any black person is negotiating his or her relationship with white power. I’d seen my mother work on the New York City Board of Education, a highly bureaucratic, totally political institution, for over twenty years and slowly move up its ranks by being a good teacher and making alliances across racial lines. My mother was a natural leader, so other teachers, white as often as black, gravitated toward her, building a support network she often tapped in to. In my adult life I’d seen that while white institutions could be unthinking, even brutal, toward black aspirations, individual whites, either through genuine friendship or political philosophy, could be crucial allies. So while I never lost sight of racism, it became a huge part of my personal development to take whites as they came, not expecting racism or prejudice from them. And even if it was there, not to overreact, but remember it and exact revenge when I could. Institutional racism was easy to scream about, but working around a prejudiced gatekeeper took more thought and was much easier if you had white allies. These truths should seem self-evident, but, coming from Brownsville and working in the eighties, it took me a while to get comfortable in the majority white situations I found myself in. Over time I took in stride the fact that many of my most determined champions and close collaborators aren’t black.
So while Spike never bit his tongue on race, I never had the sense that he hated white people, judging by his long-term working relationships with She’s editor Barry Brown; producer’s rep John Pierson; producer Jon Kilik; his attorney, Martin Garbus; and many other long-standing white business partners. What made Spike mad was an American history that, close white friends aside, failed to indict white supremacy, a topic that marks his mature work as much as his floating camera shots marked his earlier.
In most successful public careers there are defining moments when that person enters the cultural consciousness. For Spike that was the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. He’d already sold She’s to Island Films, after a successful screening at the San Francisco festival, so much of the pressure was off. He came into 19 Willoughby with six mock-ups of the poster, including the one that ended up in movie houses around the country. I threw in my two cents on which one I liked (the one he used!), and then gave Spike a couple of hundred dollars to spend in France on himself. It was probably the last time Spike Lee ever needed a loan.
By the time Spike came back from Europe, the game had changed forever. As “the black Woody Allen,” he was a media sensation, and was smart enough to use that initial acclaim to build a massive career. Suddenly black nerds were chic. No longer were the only black American role models athletes, musicians, hustlers, or activists. The bookish gal, the scholarly teen, the wannabe historian, the dedicated cinephile, while praised during black history month, had rarely been icons. Spike’s visibility changed that. A whole generation of filmmakers (John Singleton being the most obvious example) and smart, not streetwise, talents found in Spike a role model for success. His feisty public presence has been a necessary antidote to simplistic visions of what black success can and should be.
When She’s opened in June 1986, Spike had an amazing party at the Puck Building on Lafayette Street in Soho. Throughout the selling of She’s there had been a lot of parties. Often they were sneaker jams, at which folks threw down on old funk and fresh hip-hop. I had one at 19 Willoughby after a screening at the Film Forum. But this party was special, and damn near historic. In the main ballroom of the Puck Building, a long room with slick wood floors, twenty-foot-plus-high ceilings, and white columns, DJ Reggie Wells set up at the far end and threw down with Prince, Michael Jackson, classic James Brown, and new jack swing. Filmmakers, painters, rap stars, actresses, and fly folks danced hard in celebration, not just of Spike, but of themselves. It was as if She’s was a signal that our generation had arrived, and we heeded the call by partying like Purple Rain extras. And there was Spike, cackling at some joke, dancing his skinny butt off and walking around with a look of deep amusement, gleefully enjoying the present and putting a nice down payment on the future.
JOKES AND SMOKE
About two years after Spike’s premiere party, I was sitting in 19 Willoughby reluctantly waiting on a visitor I didn’t necessarily want. A woman I’d been futilely trying to date had arranged for me to meet with a comedian pal of hers who wanted help writing a screenplay. I’d met the dude a few times before. Once was downstairs at Nell’s, a hip Manhattan nightclub, where we got into an argument about music. Another time, out in LA, we found ourselves at a party both wearing Beverly Hills Cop II crew jackets—he’d actually been in the movie, I’d borrowed my attorney’s jacket to cut the nighttime chill. Either way it was a touch awkward, and suggested the poor fashion sense we both had circa 1988.
My point is, we weren’t friends, and his career was such that the idea of working with him wasn’t that exciting. The comic in question had done funny things: His desire for “one rib” in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka was a classic bit; he’d been funny on Eddie Murphy’s Comedy Express on HBO. But the general perception among my black entertainment peers was that Chris Rock wasn’t all that funny.
Besides, I was busy. I’d recently concluded my eight years at Billboard, and was focusing on novels, more long-form nonfiction, and a screenplay that would end up as the Halle Berry vehicle Strictly Business. So when this skinny, dark brown young man with a high-top fade began using his slender fingers to describe his movie, I really needed convincing. He didn’t do it.
Chris had a high-concept idea: a rap Spinal Tap. Cool. But it quickly became apparent that he didn’t have much else. Well, I had things to do, stories to write, etc. So I figured the best way to get him out of my house was to give him an assignment he wouldn’t complete. I told Chris not to call me until he had the name of the movie, the name of the characters, and a few other simple but important details (like a plot, for example). Chris had put so little thought into this pitch that it was almost disrespectful, so I figured some homework would end this charade.
What I soon found out was that Mr. Rock was a counterpuncher. Challenge the man, and he’d rise to the occasion. So a day later he called me with the title, Cell Block Four, or CB4, and a series of crazy MC names inspired by N.W.A. and the emerging West Coast gangsta rap scene. To my surprise, I liked the idea, and more important, I enjoyed Chris, who was smarter and more observant of life’s absurdities than I’d realized. Over the course of several months he’d stop over and we’d watch Airplane, Meet the Ruttles, The Naked Gun, and other parody flicks. I had no idea that those early sessions would yield not just an actual Hollywood-financed movie but a long-term friendship.
When he first came to my house, Chris was a long way from being the funniest man in America. He was still living at home with his mother in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a household superficially and fictionally known to America today via his sitcom, Everybody Hates Chris. The
reality, when I met him, was way edgier than his hit show. His father, Julius, had been dead just a few years. He had a half brother in jail. His other brothers were either in school or struggling to get their bearings in the world. His mother, Rose, almost as tart and as sharp-witted as her comic son, was just coming to terms with life as a widow. In fact, the whole family was still very much in mourning, Chris included. The burden of being the chief money earner and de facto head of the Rock household was very present in his life.
It didn’t help that his career had kind of stalled. After befriending Eddie Murphy at a New York comedy club, Chris had appeared in Beverly Hills Cop II, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and several Miami Vice episodes, along with some comic specials and in clubs nationwide. But unlike other members of Eddie’s “black pack” (Arsenio Hall, Robert Townsend, Keenan and Damon Wayans), Chris’s talent seemed more limited, and his prospects had dimmed.
In 1990, Chris was basically living on the road, doing unglamorous gigs in the stand-up world. He worked at comedy chains such as the Funny Bone and the Laugh Factory. He traveled to frigid midwestern towns that had comedy clubs right near the strip clubs and not far from the bowling alley. It was (is) a lonely world of Holiday Inns, commuter airlines, and McDonald’s Happy Meals. I remember him calling me from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, up in Canada. I tried to imagine Chris, with his fade haircut, red leather jacket, and jeans with holes in the knees amusing a club full of Canucks. “I’m a professional comedian,” he told me that night, and that was absolutely true.
What Chris wasn’t yet was an artist. His sets were incredibly erratic, swinging between the kind of raunchy pussy jokes common in the emerging hip-hop-influenced comedy clubs and really edgy material set at an abortion rally. The abortion rally bit was on the surface a sex joke premised on the ease of picking up women at an abortion rally (“Cause you know they’re fucking”), but it was a dangerous one. You could hear an intake of air in comedy clubs whenever Chris said “abortion rally,” and a surprised sense of relief when the punch line came, as if they were as happy for Chris for avoiding comic catastrophe as they were amused by the joke itself.
City Kid Page 19