The phenomenon of Spike Lee continues with this revealing and engaging look at his outstanding career, his creative process, and the screenplay for his dynamic movie Do The Right Thing. Spike Lee burst full formed into the screen world with his award-winning, commercially successful independent film She's Gotta Have It. In the few short years following this stellar debut he has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the film industry and in American popular culture. This book reveals Spike Lee as a Hollywood iconoclast and gifted visionary and takes us though the dramatic sequence of events that brought the movie Do The Right Thing to fruition. It is a testimonial to his developing genius, written in the stingingly funny and informed language of Spike Lee.

Since his first feature movie, She's Gotta Have It (1986), gave him critical and commercial success, Spike Lee has challenged audiences with one controversial film after another. Lee has made a broad range of movies, including documentaries (4 Little Girls), musicals (School Daze), crime dramas (Clockers), biopics (Malcolm X).

A collection of essays on Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Freiburg, course: Hauptseminar The Rise of the Entertainment Industry, language: English, abstract: Throughout their history in the United States, African–Americans had never been in charge of their own image. When in Kentucky in 1928, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, a white man who performed in black-face "Jim Crow", a song that he had heard before in the South from a black performer, a new genre was born: the minstrel show, a white imitation of black culture. In his movie Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee confronts us with the question, if these racist nineteenth century depictions of African Americans still exist today in contemporary popular media. In this case we have to ask the question of responsibility for these representations: In the 1990s 340 billion dollars had been spent on media and entertainment in the United States. The entertainment industry today has become the fastest increasing factor of economy. Since the 1970s television is the largest and most influential entertainment medium in North America and occupies a crucial space in practices of everyday life, "where important social encounters and cultural transformations are possible." The concept of ‘seeing is believing’ obviously is a major factor here." A majority of Americans only came to know and understand the American racial order through media representations of the black ethnic other. This research paper will try to give some proof of the historical continuity of the stereotypical racist representations of African Americans from the days of minstrelsy and vaudeville until today.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Freiburg, course: Hauptseminar The Rise of the Entertainment Industry, language: English, abstract: Throughout their history in the United States, African-Americans had never been in charge of their own image. When in Kentucky in 1928, Thomas "Daddy" Rice, a white man who performed in black-face "Jim Crow", a song that he had heard before in the South from a black performer, a new genre was born: the minstrel show, a white imitation of black culture. In his movie Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee confronts us with the question, if these racist nineteenth century depictions of African Americans still exist today in contemporary popular media. In this case we have to ask the question of responsibility for these representations: In the 1990s 340 billion dollars had been spent on media and entertainment in the United States. The entertainment industry today has become the fastest increasing factor of economy. Since the 1970s television is the largest and most influential entertainment medium in North America and occupies a crucial space in practices of everyday life, "where important social encounters and cultural transformations are possible." The concept of 'seeing is believing' obviously is a major factor here." A majority of Americans only came to know and understand the American racial order through media representations of the black ethnic other. This research paper will try to give some proof of the historical continuity of the stereotypical racist representations of African Americans from the days of minstrelsy and vaudeville until today.

Spike Lee's challenging film Bamboozled (2000) is often read as a surface level satire of blackface minstrelsy. Careful analysis, however, gives way to a complex and nuanced study of the history of black performance. This book analyzes the work of five men, minstrel performer Bert Williams, director Oscar Micheaux, writer Ralph Ellison, painter Michael Ray Charles, and director Spike Lee, all through the lens of this misunderstood film. Equal parts biography and cultural analysis, this book examines the intersections of these five artists and Bamboozled, and investigates their shared legacy of resistance against misrepresentation.

This career-spanning monograph is a visual celebration of Spike Lee's life and career to date. Featuring hundreds of never-before-seen photographs by David Lee, Spike's brother, this book includes behind-the-scenes, insider images that underscore his creative process, and his significant impact on the culture at large. Print run 15,000.