Muzing New Hoods, Making New Identities Film, Hip-Hop Culture.docx

Muzing New Hoods, Making New Identities: Film, Hip-Hop
Culture, and Jazz Music
Author(s): Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
Source: Callaloo, Vol. 25, No. 1, Jazz Poetics: A Special Issue
(Winter, 2002), pp. 309-320
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300430 .
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MUZING NEW HOODS, MAKING NEW IDENTITIES
Film, Hip-Hop Culture, and Jazz Music
by Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
We make our lives in identifications with the texts around us
everyday.
Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film Music
The medium of film has communicated, shaped, reproduced and
challenged
various notions of black subjectivity in 20th century America
since D.W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation appeared in 1915. Writing in 1949, Ralph
Ellison argued that Birth of
a Nation "forged the twin screen image of the Negro as bestial
rapist and grinning, eye-
rolling clown-stereotypes that are still with us today" (Ellison
275). Such depictions
in cinema had already existed in print media; and they have
persisted in all mass-
mediated contexts in varying degrees throughout the century.
Film, however, has
provided a most salient medium for the visual representation of
African American
subjects. If, as Manthia Diawara has argued, the camera is, "the
most important
invention of modern time," then it becomes an even more
powerful tool when its
technology is combined with the powers of music. Indeed, when
filmmakers combine
cinematic images and musical gestures they unite two of our

most compelling modes
of perception: the visual and the aural.
Below I consider two films produced during the Age of Hip
Hop: Spike Lee's Do
the Right Thing (1989) and Theodore Witcher's Love Jones
(1997).1 On an immediate
level, I am interested how music shapes the way we perceive
these cinematic
narratives individually; how music informs the way audiences
experience their
characters, locations, and plots. But I am also making a larger
argument for how the
musical scores of these films are sites for the negotiation of
personal identity and self-
fashioning on the one hand, and the making and negotiation of
group identity, on the
other. Both of these activities inform "meaning" in important
ways. Jazz music, in
these films generally serves as a foil to hip hop music, which
the directors use as the
primary musical index for the black "authentic" subject. While
the use of jazz in these
three films may be comparatively minor, a discussion of it is
instructive about the
developing meanings of various black musical styles.
Below, I address several questions with regard to this cinematic
function of music
in hip-hop film. What role does musical discourse play in
cinematic representation?
If one of the primary thrusts of black cultural production has
been the resistance to

Callaloo 25.1 (2002) 309-320
CALLALOO
and countering of negative black stereotypes forwarded since
Birth of a Nation, how
does the musical score of the film participate in this agenda?
How does the score, in
fact, score or artistically (re)invent a black cinematic nation?
The musical scores of Do
the Right Thing and Love Jones provides excellent examples of
the fluidity and
contestation embedded in the notion "black identity," a topic
that had become such
a compelling one for theoretical, political, and artistic reflection
in the late 20th
century. Before moving to the music in these films, I need to
address an important
topic raised in most discussions of them: the degree to which
they accurately portray
an "authentic" black cultural experience.
Keeping it Reel: Diversity, Authenticity,
and the Hip-Hop Muze
Hip hop culture has taken on the profile of a cottage industry
because of aggressive
corporate commodification. The postindustrial decline of United
States urban cen-
ters, a downward turn that ironically spawned hip hop's
developments, has been co-

opted by corporate America and represented as a glossy, yet
gritty complex of music
idioms, sports imagery, fashion statements, racial themes,
danger, and pleasure.
While history shows us the persistence of the exploitation of
African American
culture in the United States, hip hop represents an exemplary
case in this regard. As
the historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes, "few employment
opportunities for African-
Americans and a white consumer market eager to be entertained
by the Other, blacks
have historically occupied a central place in the popular culture
industry" (Kelley 46).
Kelley argues further that
Nike, Reebok, L.A. Gear, and other athletic shoe conglomerates
have profited enormously from postindustrial decline. TV com-
mercials and print ads romanticize the crumbling urban spaces
in which African American youth must play, and in so doing
they have created a vast market for overpriced sneakers. These
televisual representations of "street ball" are quite remarkable;
marked by chain-link fences, concrete playgrounds, bent and
rusted netless hoops, graffiti-scrawled walls, and empty build-
ings, they have created a world where young black males do
nothing but play. (44)
The omnipresence of such imagery in the media has made a
strong impact on notions
of "authenticity" in African American culture. And moreover,
music and musical
practices continue to play a crucial role in the creation, re-
negotiation, and critique of
the authenticity trope.

The intersection of hip hop musical practices and film serves as
a cogent example.
Hollywood in the early 1990s presented young fans with films
like New Jack City, Boyz
N the Hood, Strictly Business, and Juice, among others. Taken
together, these films have
helped to create a highly recognizable hip-hop mode of
representing a one dimension-
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al black youth culture. As filmmaker Spike Lee notes, these
"inner-city homeboy
revues" created a world in which "all black people lived in
ghettos, did crack and
rapped" (quoted in Gates 12). As thematic heirs of the 1970s
blaxploitation genre of
film, the 1990s' version has been dubbed "rapsploitation" or as
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
has labeled it, "guiltploitation." Gates uses the latter term to
characterize what he sees
as a key message underlying many of these films: ambiguity
about upward mobility.
His observations about class status and black mobility are worth
noting:
The politics of black identity, and the determined quest to
recon-
cile upward mobility with cultural "authenticity," is a central
preoccupation of these films. If genuine black culture is the

culture of the streets, a point on which the blaxploitation films
were clear, how can you climb the corporate ladder without
being a traitor to your race? What happens when homeboy
leaves
home? A new genre-guiltsploitation-is born. (Gates 12)
Gates sees this trend as directly linked to the attitudes and
backgrounds of the
filmmakers. Rapsplotiation of the early 1990s occurred, in part,
because of an emer-
gence of young, black, college-educated, and middle class
directors. Gates argues that
these autuers did not choose to close "the gulf between the real
black people behind
the camera and the characters they've assembled in front of it"
(Gates 13).
Beyond this underlying class status tension, critics have also
raised questions with
respect to gender issues in these films. Feminist critics such as
Valerie Smith, Michele
Wallace, bell hooks, Wahneema Lubiana, and Jacquie Jones,
among others, have
noted that the perceived "realness" of the rapsploitation film
genre is also real hostile
to black women. But the class-based and feminist critiques of
these films are some-
times difficult to articulate because of the compelling nature of
the film experience
itself and what Smith has identified as a documentary impulse.
Michele Wallace, for
example, admitted: "The first time I say John Singleton's Boyz
N the Hood [1991], I was

completely swept away by the drama and the tragedy. It was
like watching the last act
of Hamlet or Titus Andronicus for the first time. When I left the
theater, I was crying
for all the dead black men in my family"(Wallace 123). Upon
subsequent viewings,
however, Wallace noticed the strain of misogyny running
throughout much of the
film. She perceived that Boyz and other films like it seemed to
be saying that the dismal
social conditions depicted in these films were due to character
flaws in the women.
Valerie Smith has argued that a documentary impulse
authenticates these films
with claims that they represent the "real." They achieve this
documentary aura
through an uncritical use of various aural and visual markers of
"real" black living
conditions, reproducing stereotypical ideas about African-
Americans. The bound-
aries separating fact and fiction, truth and artistic invention
become blurred. Smith
notes that critics, reviewers, and press kits assure audiences that
these black male
directors were "endangered species" themselves and are thus "in
positions of author-
ity relative to their material" (Smith 58).
While the importance of film cannot be dismissed, we should be
careful to
recognize the difference between cinematic entertainment and
the "truth" of lived

311
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experience. There does not exist a one-to-one homology
between lived experience and
representations of such in film. At the same time, we should
keep in mind that the
same social energy that sustains ideologies like misogyny and
other forms of discrim-
ination also circulates in the narratives of these films. In other
words, these directors
didn't invent the misogyny, but they help to reproduce it. In this
sense, they-perhaps
unconsciously-kept it real, as the saying goes.
Writer Lisa Kennedy has argued that the complex of money,
narrative, and
pleasure bound up in film experiences makes them
"extraordinarily powerful." Film,
she writes, is how America looks at itself." Nonetheless, she
warns us against
confusing the "individual vision" of an artist like a filmmaker
with "the" collective
reality of a group of people. Despite this warning, the dialogic
interplay among "real"
lived experience and film narratives (and for that matter,
television shows news
programs, independent documentaries, print media, and music)
remains an impor-
tant fact of late-twentieth century life. In the case of film, "the
real lives of people are
substantiated by their reel lives" (Kennedy 110).

And as I will argue over the next few pages, the nexus of "reel
life" and music and
musical practices have import on the topic of black music and
meaning. What
interests me here is not so much the critique of monolithic
representations of black
class status and life expectations represented in these films. (As
we shall see, the film
Love Jones does this more than adequately.) Nor do I want to
question Hollywood's
capital driven fixation on exploiting this topic. Rather, I want to
explore film as one
way to enter into an analysis of the intersection of black
identity and musical practice.
As writers, directors, producers, and composers work together
to create convincing
characters and story worlds for audiences, they do so with the
help of musical codes
that circulate and in some ways create cultural knowledge, in
the present case, about how
"blackness" is experienced in the social world at that historical
moment in question.
What's the Score? Functions of Music in Film
Before turning to the specific films in question, it is necessary
to provide a brief
overview of how music in cinema works generally. Broadly
speaking, music works to
enhance the storyworld of the film; it deepens the audience's
experience of the
narrative and adds continuity to the film's scene by scene
progression, providing
what Claudia Gorbman calls the "bath of affect" (Gorbman 6).
Anahid Kassabian argues

that the study of music in film should not be an afterthought to
what might be considered
the more important areas of plot and characterization: "Music
draws filmgoers into
a film's world, measure by measure. It is ... at least as
significant as the visual and
narrative components that have dominated film studies. It
conditions identification
processes, the encounters between film texts and filmgoers'
psyches" (Kassabian 1).
The music in contemporary Hollywood films divide into two
broad categories. The
first is the composed score, which consists of music written
specifically for the film.
The second type is the compiled score: songs collected from
sources that often
preexisted the film. According to a Kassabian, these two modes
of musical address are
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designed to generate different responses from the perceiver. The
composed score, she
argues, is usually associated with the classical Hollywood score
and encourages "assim-
ilating identifications," that is, it helps to "draw perceivers into
socially and histori-
cally unfamiliar positions, as do larger scale processes of
assimilation" (Kassabian 2).

The scoring techniques of the classical Hollywood cinema can
achieve this end
because of their unconscious familiarity to filmgoers: They
have become naturalized
through constant repetition. With few exceptions, the musical
language of 19th-
Century Romanticism forms the "core musical lexicon" of
American films. Music's
cultural and cinematic work depends on its ability to signify an
emotion, a location,
a personality-type, a frightening situation, and so on. The
specific musical language
of 19th-century Romanticism works well in this function
because it has been used in
this way repeatedly since the 1930s. This repetition has
produced a desired result in
film scores, since as Gorbman notes, "a music cue's
signification must be instantly
recognized as such in order to work" (Gorbman 4).
We can experience the hallmarks of these scoring techniques in
the classic Holly-
wood film, In This Our Life.2 As the opening credits roll in this
black & white film, we
hear Max Steiner's familiar orchestral strains typical of films
during this era. The
string section bathes the soundscape with sweeping melodies
and a Wagnerian
orchestral lushness that signals to the audience intense emotion
and melodrama.
Throughout the film, orchestral codes sharpen our perception of
characters' interior
motivations, propel the narrative forward, and help to provide

smooth transitions
between edits. During the plot exposition of the film, for
example, we met the vixen
Stanley, played by the inimitable queen of melodrama Bette
Davis.
Although the other characters' dialogues have revealed some of
her less than
desirable personal qualities, the orchestral strains of the score
reveal to the audience
much more than mere plot exposition could ever suggest. In her
first appearance,
Stanley drives up to the house with a male passenger. Viewers
hear an ominous
sounding minor chord that is scored in the lower registers of the
sounding instru-
ments. As it turns out, the male passenger is her sister's
husband, a man with whom
Stanley is having a torrid affair. After a brief dialog between
the two reveals Stanley's
manipulative personality-underscored, of course, with
melodramatic orchestral
passages-the score transitions into animated rhythmic gestures
that dissolve into an
ascending pizzacato string passage as Stanley leaves the car and
bounds up the steps
into the family's spacious Victorian home. The music has helped
to situate us in the
plot and to identify with its characters despite our own subject
positions, which may
or may not be quite different from those depicted in the film.

The compiled score, a staple feature of many Hollywood films
since the 1980s,
brings with it "the immediate threat of history" (Kassabian 3). It
encourages perceiv-
ers to make external associations with the song in question and
these reactions become
part of the cultural transaction occurring between the film and
its audience. Compiled
scores produce what Kassabian calls "affiliating
identifications." The connections
that perceivers make depend on the relationship they have
developed with the songs
outside of the context of the film experience. "If offers of
assimilating identifications
try to narrow the psychic field," Kassabian argues, "then offers
of affiliating identi-
fications open it wide" (Kassabian 3). The discussion that
follows will explore how
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such distinctions bear on the interpretation of music in hip hop
film, a body of cinema with
obvious and strong associations with a genre of music with a
discreet history unto itself.
Both the classic and compiled scores' relationship to the story
world of the film can
be divided into two primary modes of presentation: diegetic and
nondiegetic music.

Diegetic (or source music) is produced from within the
perceived narrative world of
the film. By contrast, nondiegetic music, that is, music
produced from outside the
story world of the film serves the narration by signaling
emotional states, propelling
dramatic action, depicting a geographical location or time
period, among other
factors. Most of the music in a film fits into this category.
Another kind of musical address in film blends the diegetic and
nondiegetic. Earle
Hagen calls this type of film music source scoring. In source
scoring the musical cue
can start out as diegetic but then change over to nondiegetic.
This kind of shift usually
occurs concurrently with a change in the cue's relationship to
onscreen events, most
likely with the narrative world and the musical score
demonstrating a much closer fit
(Kassabian 44-45). With these ideas about music in film in
mind, I turn now to Spike
Lee's now classic film Do the Right Thing.
Do the Right Thing
As I stated above, Griffin's Birth of a Nation stands as the
symbolic beginning of
American cinema, providing a grammar book for Hollywood's
historic (and unques-
tionably negative) depiction of black subjects. Likewise, Spike
Lee's Do the Right Thing
(hereafter DTRT) may be viewed as a kind of Ur-text for black

representation in the
so-called ghetto-centric, New Jack flicks of the Hip-Hop Era.
This film is important for
a number of reasons. Lee succeeded in showing powerful
Hollywood studios that this
new genre of comparatively low-budget films could be
profitable to the major studios.
DTRT's popular and critical reception (it earned millions and an
Academy Award
nomination) caused Lee's star to rise to such a degree that he
became the most visible
black filmmaker of the past decade. Hollywood studios tried to
duplicate DTRT's
success, thus allowing other black directors access to the
Hollywood production
system, albeit within predictably prescribed limits (Watkins
108).
Lee's use of rap music (and some of the musical practices
associated with it)
demonstrated how it could be used to depict a range of
associations. Some of these
include: black male and female subjectivity, ethnic identity, a
sense of location, emotional
and mental states, a specific historical moment, and the
perspectives of age groups.
In these realms, DTRT cast a long shadow over the repertoire of
acceptable character
types, plots, and themes in subsequent ghettocentric films
during the Age of Hip Hop.
Scoring the Right Thing
DTRT conforms to some of the conventions of classical
Hollywood cinema dis-

cussed above but with marked differences. Victoria E. Johnson
has recognized the
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importance of music in DTRT, calling it Lee's most musical
film (Johnson). She
identifies two primary modes of musical rhetoric in the score.
What she calls the
"historic-nostalgic" strain encompasses, for the most part,
orchestral music written by
Lee's father, Bill Lee. The sound is reminiscent of some of the
chamber music by African-
American composer William Grant Still-quaint, genteel, and
staid. Interestingly, Bran-
ford Marsalis's jazz-inflected saxophone and Terrance
Blanchard's trumpet perform
the melodies.3 This music is always non-diegetic, and in
Johnson's view, serves to
convey a romanticized vision of community in the ethnically
mixed neighborhood in
which the story takes place. This use of music corresponds to
the classical approach.
Rap music rests at the other end of the aesthetic continuum in
this film. The group
Public Enemy's rap anthem "Fight the Power" (1989) is heard
diegetically at various
points in the film as it pours out of the character Radio
Raheem's boom box. Johnson
argues that the other musical styles heard in the film, which
includes jazz, soul, and

R&B, mediate the two extremes represented by rap and Bill
Lee's original score. There
is one exception to this observation, however. Jazz is also used
non-diegetically to
help depict emotional exchanges between characters.
While I generally agree with Johnson's reading, I depart from it
on several points.
Johnson stresses that Lee is conversant with classical scoring
conventions and that he
"manipulates convention in a traditional manner to orient
spectators within the film
story" (Johnson 52). I experience DTRT somewhat differently
here. The somewhat
unconventional approach of the score "disorients" the audience
in my view. This
musical strategy is joined to unusual cinematic techniques such
as "unrealistic" visual
angles that call attention to the camera, and a use of music that
moves back and forth
between "bath of affect" and "listen to me" narrative positions.
The three modes of musical language in the film-the orchestral
music of the
Natural Spiritual Orchestra (non-diegetic), the popular music
played by WLOV radio
station (diegetic), and the rap music from Radio Raheem's boom
box (diegetic) create
a rather hectic and conflicted semiotic field. Consider, for
example, the first five
scenes in which we hear the orchestral music that Johnson
believes signals a roman-
ticized community. During a monologue in front of the Yes,
Jesus Light Baptist

Church, the speech-impaired character Smiley talks about the
futility of hate in
society while holding up a small placard of Malcolm X and
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Smiley's stammering seems somewhat at odds with the placid
musical gestures heard
in conjunction with it.
The next time we hear this mode of music, the Italian pizzeria
owner Sal and his
sons Vito and Pino drive up to their shop, which sits on a
garbage strewed corner of
a primarily black neighborhood. (Ironically, other scenes in the
film portray the
neighborhood as whistle clean.) In this scene we learn of the
deep hatred Vito harbors
for this neighborhood and for the people who live there.
Although Sal admits with
glib resolution that the air-conditioner repairman had refused to
come around
without an escort, he can barely contain his anger over both
Vito's attitude about
working in the neighborhood. This scene does not, in my view,
conjure a romanticized
community. Again, the placid strains of the score seem
strangely at odds with the
narrative world on screen.
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When the character Mookie (played by Spike Lee) exits his
brownstone into the
morning sun, the neighborhood is stirring with Saturday
morning activity. The
orchestral strains do portray a cozy, communal feeling in this
third instance of hearing
this mode of music. But in the very next scene in which music
of this type is heard, the
character Mother-Sister and Da Major, the neighborhood's
matriarch and patriarch,
respectively, trade insults with one another. The fifth time the
orchestra is heard, Jade,
Mookie's sister, is lovingly combing Mother-Sister's hair on the
sun-baked front stoop
of a brownstone. The communal feeling created by the music
and the scene quickly
dissipates, however, as Mother-Sister deflects a compliment
from Da Major, respond-
ing to his polite advance by hurling more insults. Thus, I see the
score not so much
signaling community. It functions, rather, to highlight conflict
and tension in the
narrative world of the film. This strategy sets the viewer on
edge and frustrates any
"settle-ness" that might be forwarded in the scene.
But the music that Mister Senor Love Daddy plays on the radio
station WLOV does
seem to signal community. It marks the geographic space of the
neighborhood and
underscores his references to love and the importance of

community togetherness. In
the early scenes of the film, the radio music, which consists of
various styles of R&B-
replete with gospel singing and funk beats-is heard in sundry
settings. We hear it in
Da Major's bedroom as he rises, in Mookie's and Jade's
apartment, in a Puerto Rican
home, and in a Korean-owned grocery store-in every cultural
space except Sal's
Pizzaria. This compiled score music inspires the idea of a
"community," one created
by the spatial boundaries of the radio station's broadcast span.
Nonetheless, WLOV's programming inspires one instance of
community conflict.
When Mookie, an African American, dedicates a song (Rueben
Blades's "Tu y Yo") to
his Puerto Rican girlfriend, Tina, a group of Puerto Rican young
men enjoy the tune
on a front stoop. As Radio Raheem passes by playing "Fight the
Power," a battle of
decibels ensues. "Fight the Power" wins the bout as Radio
Raheem's boom box
overpowers the scene with one turn of the volume knob. This
confrontation contrasts
with the first meeting of Radio Raheem's music and that of
WLOV. Community alliances,
like Lee's cinematic uses of various musical styles, are fluid and
situational. Why, one
might ask, didn't the Puerto Ricans identify with the "Fight the
Power" message?
Gorbman writes that "music is codified in the filmic context
itself, and assumes
meaning by virtue of its placement in the film" (Gorbman 3).
Because of the audience's

familiarity with rap music and the dynamic formal qualities of
the music, Lee is able
to highlight its "difference" from other musical styles in
DTRT's score. As the film
progresses, however, the audience experiences a level of
familiarity with "Fight the
Power" because of its persistent use. Lee is able to re-encode
rap music's signifying
affect during the film's narrative.
Lee can achieve this because he capitalizes on the history of
Public Enemy's
reputation outside the use of "Fight the Power" in this film.
Clearly, this use fits into
the affiliating identifications category. At the same time, the
repetitive hearings of the
piece also allow us to spill over into the assimilating
identifications arena. I argue this
because the repetitive use of "Fight the Power" allows Lee to
manipulate audience
members of different subject positions to relate to the musical
conventions and
political message of the piece because they understand what it
means cinematically.
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Thus, they have been assimilated into a particular reaction or
identification with the
music and, perhaps, the story world and its characters as well.
If the typical classic Hollywood film score renders the audience

"less awake," as
Gorbman contends, then Lee's use of rap music breaks that
pattern. He positions it as
an intrusive, embodied presence in the film.
Among all of the music rooted in the black vernacular, jazz
plays a minimal role.
When jazz is heard, it functions much like the music of classical
Hollywood scoring.
Its signifying affect narrows the psychic field, assimilating a
diverse audience of
perceivers into identifications with an emotional state, for
instance. This observation
cuts two ways. For one, it shows where jazz is situated in hip
hop discourse of the late
1980s. It had a somewhat marginal status, one that would
certainly change, however,
in subsequent years. Second, jazz had achieved a level of
familiarity that approached
that of 19th-century orchestral music and could, therefore, be
used to situate a
listener's identifications in the storyworld of a film. As we shall
see below, jazz-
related and inspired practices would soon become a more
important factor in hip
hop's aesthetic profile.
Constructing the New Black Bohemia in Love Jones
The film Love Jones expands the hip-hop lexicon of acceptable
black subjects and
their corresponding musical associations. The film is an urban,
Afro-romantic come-
dy, written and directed by Theodore Witcher and is set in

contemporary Chicago.
Darryl Jones, a bassist and native Chicagoan, scored the
original music. Love Jones'
eclectic soundtrack and the "musicking" practices associated
with the music distin-
guishes the film from run-of-the mill romantic comedies.
Consider the first few minutes of the film, in which Witcher,
(like Lee and Singleton
before him), sets the tone for the story that follows. During the
opening, Witcher
strings together a jumble of short urban scenes, including the
Chicago skyline, the El
train, a run-down neighborhood, a modest storefront shop, trash
lined rail road
tracks, a Baptist church, the hands of a shoeshine man, and the
faces of black people-
old, young, some profiling, others showing no awareness of the
camera at all. But all
of them striking. Filmed in black and white, Witcher's stylish
montage forecasts an
approach to the presentation of inner city blackness that departs
from, and is in my
view, more expansive than, the two previous films I have
discussed.
The music underscoring the opening features the genteel song
"Hopeless" per-
formed by singer Dionne Farris. The tune borders on soft rock
and has virtually none
of the hip hop conventions heard in DTRT and BNTH. The
lyrics of "Hopeless" plays
a slight trick on the viewer because we hear the lyric "hopeless"

against the first few
scenes in the montage which at first appear to paint a somewhat
bleak depiction of inner
city life. But as the visual sequences progress, smiles and begin
wipe across the subjects'
faces. And as the musical narrative spins out, we learn that
Farris is singing about
romantic love and not social commentary: she's as "hopeless as
a penny with a hole in it."
317
CALLALOO
Love Joves features an attractive posse of educated, widely
read, comfortably
middle-class twenty-something, generation X styled characters.
Their hairdos (al-
ways a politically statement with regard to African American
culture) cover the
spectrum: close cropped, dred-locks, braids, chemically
straightened. They live in
tastefully appointed homes, lofts, and apartments that are lined
with books and
stylishly decorated with modern and African art. They are
dressed for success and
"wearing the right thing," if I might borrow Lee's title for the
moment. Intra-black
diversity is the feeling. The characters listen to jazz, the Isley
Brothers, and urban

contemporary music. Their calculated and robust funkiness
translates into frank talk
about sensuality. They read Amiri Baraka, smoke, drink, swear,
play cards, and talk
a boatload of shit in grand style. Like carefree adolescents, they
delight in playing the
dozens with each other. And with fluency they pepper their
musings on poetry,
sexuality, Charlie Parker, gender relations, religion, and art,
with spicy, up-to-the-
minute "black-speak" rhetoric. Witcher apparently wants us to
recognize these verbal
exchanges and their accompanying body attitudes with a
contemporary perfor-
mance-oriented African American culture.
Love Jones's characters portray a hip "big shoulders" black
ethnicity that insiders
recognize as realistic in cultural spaces like contemporary black
Chicago. In this
setting, the film's narrative winds through various venues and
situations wherein
acts of ethnic performance can take place. One such space is a
nightclub called the
Sanctuary. Modeled after a jazz club, the Sanctuary features
spoken word poetry and
live music. The Sanctuary appears to cater to black generations
X-ers. Its audience
respects the performers, paying rapt attention to the time,
timbre, lyric, and substance
of each poet's offering. Quiet diegetic music from the bandstand
and jukebox enve-
lopes the Sanctuary with the soundtrack of hip, polite society.

The film tells a love story between Darius Lovehall, an aspiring
novelist and
spoken word poet, and Nina Mosley, an ambitious freelance
photographer. Darius is
a regular performer at the Monday night open-mike session;
Nina, who is on the
rebound from a bad relationship, is there relaxing with a female
friend. Nina and
Darius meet. Nina initiates a conversation, following their
exchange of curious
glances. Shortly thereafter, an M.C. invites Darius to the stage
and he performs a
sexually explicit poem, which he titles at the last moment (in
true "Mack Daddy"
fashion), "A Blues for Nina."
The performance itself is, in fact, not blues or jazz performance
but what might be
described as easy listening funk: an ostinato bass pattern in D-
minor splashed with
subdued colors from a saxophone's soulful riffing. References
from black music
history inform the poetry; in one line Darius says that he's "the
blues in your left thigh,
trying to become the funk in your right." The audience, which is
depicted in a series of
very flattering close-ups that are reminiscent of the opening
montage, responds with
sporadic declamatory affirmations. These vocables provide an
obligatory bow to the
southern past, even if these verbal exclamations may no longer
signify that history solely.
Music in Love Jones works overtime. Its characters are, in my
view, more fully
constructed, engaging in more musical practices and cultural

spaces than in the
previous film discussed. Music in the pool hall, the night club,
the house party, the
WVON "stepper's set," the reggae club, and the residences
expands the representa-
318
CALLALOO
tions of Hip-Hop Era blackness on screen. While this depiction
of black bohemia may
be a caricature itself, when compared to contemporaneous
visions of black life in
America like DTRT, Love Jones can only be viewed as a
counterweight to those
characterizations.
Although contemporary R&B forms the core musical lexicon of
Love Jones, jazz
references surface in the Sanctuary's performance space and as a
way to show how
"enlightened" the characters are. In one case, the jazz/blues
piece "Jelly, Jelly, Jelly"
becomes the soundtrack of sexual frustration as Darius and Nina
try to suppress their
lust for one another. Importantly, rap music is heard only one
time in the film: during
a car scene in which one of Darius' friends is courting Nina
behind his back. In this
very brief scene, rap music becomes associated with a
questionable character trait.

Interestingly, in both these films (and in John Singleton's Boyz
N the Hood) , music
was linked to other black cultural practices like the dozens,
dance, card playing, and
so on. Music was central to constructing black characters within
these films' narra-
tives. Rap music, for example, helped to create specific kinds of
character traits in
(male) subjects: politicized, nihilistic, or underhanded. Various
styles of jazz were
used for their identifications with middle-class culture or to
enhance the audience's
experience of emotional states. R&B styles, for the most part,
were used to depict
communal associations. The quasi-orchestral music linked most
closely to the sound
of classic Hollywood scoring-when it did appear in these films-
was used in
traditional ways: to assimilate audiences into a particular mode
of identification with
characters and plot situations.
During the Age of Hip-Hop, filmmakers like Spike Lee and
Theodore Witcher,
among others, worked to portray what they thought were
realistic portraits of urban
life. While their portrayals were popular, many critics believed
that they helped to
erect harmful stereotypes. Witcher, director of Love Jones, for
example, was challenged
to convince film executives that his kind of story could find a
niche in the market or
was even plausible because of the ghettocentric focus of so
many black films of the
early 1990s (Watkins 233). Thus, despite the way in which

directors might have
positioned their work as countering hegemony in Hollywood,
their approaches and
the repetition of such, became conventions against which those
interested in other
kinds of representations would have to struggle.
The juxtaposition of different black musical styles in these
films demands that
audiences grapple with the ways in which numerous musical
developments have
appeared under the cultural umbrella of hip hop. How these
styles relate to one
another cinematically represents only one arena of interest.
These expressions have
enlarged the boundaries of hip hop, and this expansion has
inspired celebration,
descent, and, of course, debate of exactly where these
boundaries should be. Because
of the persistence of older styles of black music and their
continual evolution of
meanings during the Age of Hip Hop, filmmakers were able to
use these external
associations as part of the way in which audiences would
experience these scores, and
thus their cinematic representations.
Do the Right Thing's and Love Jones's portrayals are
meditations on how modern
blackness is experienced in cities that in the 1940s represented
the promised land-the
cultural spaces to which black humanity flocked in order to
participate fully in
319

CALLALOO
modern America. The urban conditions recently called the
postindustrial and the
artistic responses to these conditions reflect the changing social
configuration of the
late 20th-century American city. Just as Dizzy Gillespie's Afro-
Cuban experiments
participated in a new demographic shift in the 1940s (that is
Cubans migrating to the
United States), today's musicians mix hip hop conventions with
other expressions to
reflect the configuration and constant refigurations of their
social worlds and the
statements they want to make in them.
If it is indeed true, as the epigraph to this article purposes, that
contemporary
people fashion their lives with the texts around them, then the
study of hip hop film
provides a fruitful site of inquiry in this regard. In the two films
discussed here,
directors and composers worked together to create narratives in
which audience
members could engage and with which they could form
identifications. These texts
became ways through which some understood themselves and
others in their social
world. Music formed an important component in these
narratives, serving to order
the social world in both the cinematic and real life domains.
NOTES

1. Do the Right Thing, written and directed by Spike Lee,
Universal City Studios, 1989 and Love
Jones, written and directed by Theodore Witcher. New Line,
1997.
2. In This Our Life, directed by John Houston and with a score
by Max Steiner (1942).
3. The original score is played by The Natural Spiritual
Orchestra, William Lee, conductor. The
ensemble is organized as a string orchestra and jazz combo. It
features Branford Marsalis,
Terrance Blanchard, Kenny Baron, Jeff Watts and other noted
jazz musicians.
WORKS CITED
This article is a shortened version of a chapter in my Race
Music: Migration, Modernism and Gender
Politics in Black Popular Culture (forthcoming from the
University of California Press).
Ellison, Ralph. "The Shadow and the Act." Shadow and Act.
New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Must Buppiehood Cost Homeboy His
Soul?" Arts and Leisure Section. New
York Times (March 1, 1992): 12-13.
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987.
Johnson, Victoria E. "Polyphony and Cultural Expression:
Interpreting Musical Traditions in Do the

Right Thing." Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Ed. Mark A.
Reid. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in
Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. New
York: Routledge, 2001.
Kelley, Robin D.G. Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the
Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1997.
Kennedy, Lisa. "The Body in Question." Black Popular Culture.
Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992.
106-11.
Smith, Valerie. "The Documentary Impulse in Contemporary
African American Film." Black Popular
Culture. Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. 56-64.
Wallace, Michele. "Boyz N the Hood and Jungle Fever." Black
Popular Culture. Ed. Gina Dent. Seattle:
Bay Press, 1992. 123-31.
Watkins, S. Craig. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the
Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1998.
320
Article
Contentsp.[309]p.310p.311p.312p.313p.314p.315p.316p.317p.3
18p.319p.320Issue Table of ContentsCallaloo, Vol. 25, No. 1,
Jazz Poetics: A Special Issue (Winter, 2002), pp. 1-354Front
Matter [pp.103-103]Love Notes for Betty: A Eulogy: Riverside
Church, NYC October 3, 2001 [pp.1-4]Introduction to "Jazz
Poetics: A Special Issue" [pp.5-7]"Shoot Myself a Cop": Mamie

Smith's "Crazy Blues" as Social Text [pp.8-44]News from
Heaven: Vernacular Time in Langston Hughes's "Ask Your
Mama" [pp.45-65]Jazz Prosodies: Orality and Textuality [pp.66-
91]New Orleans Bibliography [pp.92-93]Jazz [p.94]Miles Davis
[p.95]Gayl Jones [p.96]Untitled [p.97]Liner Notes (Shuggie
Otis Reissue): For Fred Moten [pp.98-101]Bob Kaufman. Poet:
A Special SectionIntroduction [pp.105-111]Notes from the Hot
Garbadine Scene [pp.112-113]The New Riviera Hotel [pp.114-
115]Dust Forever Halflife Bearings [p.115][Letters] [p.116]Jail
Poems [pp.117-121]Bagel Shop Jazz [pp.122-123]The Poet
[pp.124-126]Walking Parker Home [p.127]The Ancient Rain
[pp.128-132]Benediction [p.133]"A Hard Rain" Looking to Bob
Kaufman [pp.135-145]"Remembering When Indians Were Red":
Bob Kaufman, the Popular Front, and the Black Arts Movement
[pp.146-164]Saxophones and Smothered Rage: Bob Kaufman,
Jazz and the Quest for Redemption [pp.165-182]Bob Kaufman
and the (In)Visible Double [pp.183-189]Between Black, Brown
& Beige: Latino Poets and the Legacy of Bob Kaufman [pp.190-
196]The Poet in Post-Endurance [pp.197-198]Wild American:
For Bob [p.199]The Clicker: For Bob Kaufman [p.200]Untitled
[pp.201-202]Untitled [pp.203-204]Endlessly Mendlessly
Seeking All Whole Nest [p.205]Untitled [pp.206-213]Walking
Kaufman Home [pp.214-215]Five Haiku [p.216]Beat
[p.217]Missing in Action: For Bob Kaufman [pp.218-219]A
Context for Understanding Inland Beatness and Bob Kaufman
[pp.220-221]Unpainted Discussions/Bob Kaufman's E-Corpse
[p.222]Mesostics for Bob Kaufman [pp.223-228]Zen Acorn
[p.229]Musical Score Written for Bob Kaufman [p.230]Forget
to Not [p.231][Photograph]: Bass Line [p.232]Of Black Bards,
Known and Unknown: Music as Racial Metaphor in James
Weldon Johnson's "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man"
[pp.233-256]The Role of the Blues in Gayl Jones's
"Corregidora" [pp.257-273]From "Liberating Voices" to
"Metathetic Ventriloquism": Boundaries in Recent African-
American Jazz Fiction [pp.274-287]The Canonization of Jazz
and Afro-American Literature [pp.288-308]Muzing New Hoods,

Making New Identities: Film, Hip-Hop Culture, and Jazz Music
[pp.309-320]Nathaniel Mackey's "Bedouin Hornbook": An
Annotated Discography of Specific Musical References [pp.321-
337]A Bibliography of Jazz Poetry Criticism [pp.338-346]Back
Matter [pp.347-354]
Do the Right Thing Revisited
I T HAS BEEN MORE THAN A DECADE SINCE Do THE
RIGHT THING was released. Yet its impact on post-soul Black
cinema still resonates. Spike Lee's successfu l track record
prompted Hollywood studios to
invest in a host of low-budget Black films that they expected to
yield high
profits. House Party (New Line Cinema, 1990), Boyz N the
Hood (Colum-
bia Pictures, 1991 ), New jack City (Warner Brothers, 1991 ),
Menace II
Society (New Line Cinema, 1993), and Friday ( ew Line C
inema, 1995),
to mention only a few, were all di rect beneficia ries of Lee's
success. An
industry tha t has historically suppressed, d iminished, and
caricatured
Blacks had become willing to take a chance on African-
American film-
makers, especially when their films were financially successful.
Lee has been able to change the course of Black film by making
respectable profits, although he has received meager capital
investment
from studios. This clearly illustrates that the results of the
struggle over
fi lm representation are determ ined mainly by economic facto

rs, and the
interests of multinational corporations, rather than by the
concerns of film-
makers. However, if a particular studio believes that a film
project can be
packaged in such a way as to guarantee large profits for
investors, d is-
agreements over content are negotia ble.
A brief look at recent portrayals of African-Americans before
Do The
Right Thing is instructi ve. In such films as Cry Freedom
(Universal Pic-
tures, 1987), Mississippi Burning (Orion Pictures, 1988), and
Glory (Tri-
Star Pictures, 1989), the Africa n-America n struggle is a
subtext for Whi te
heroism. For example, in Cry Freedom, a fil m that purportedly
portrays
the well-known Black South African anti-apartheid activist
Steve Biko, a
White journalist is the central character. Consequently, Biko's
anti-
aparthcid struggle is completely overshadowed.
/'I
50 Post-Sdul Black Cinema
Conversely, in Do The Right Thing, African-Americans and
their
experience are rhe major focus. The sights and sounds : .: Pilack
America
erupt into a cataclysmic denouement produced partial!) uy

circumsta nce
and partially by the characters' own agency. Many studios were
reluctant
to invest money in Lee's project because of its inflammatory
nature. Lee
was finally able to secure the financing for Do The Right Thing
through a
negative pickup deal, which required the studio to buy the rights
to dis-
tribute his fi lm before it was made. Still, theater owners and
film critics
feared char the film would ignite the flames of racial violence.
Critic David
Denby had chis to say: "If Spike Lee is a commercial
opportunist, he's also
playing with dynamite in an urban playground. The response
could get
away from him." 1 Lucki ly, Universa l and many theaters chose
to ignore
such fears. In the final analysis, Do The Right Thing's popular
reception
caused many to view the film as commentary on the African-
American
urban experience.
This chapter chronicles Spike Lee's battle to ma intai n his
artistic
integrity while making Do The Right Thing. It describes his
struggles with
the studio and New York trade unions, and is based in part on
the valuable
production notebook included in the companion volume to the
film. While
the production notebook could potentially give a biased view of
the process
of making 011 The Right Thing, the value of Lee's personal

firsthand
accounting of the process provides details that cannot be
ignored. More-
over, in describing Lee's experience of shooting Do The Right
Thing chis
chapter indicates how African-American visual artists struggle
for control
of the imaginative representation of African-American li fe and
experience.
THE CHECK IS IN THE MAIL
Film production begins not with the camera but with the
checkbook. As
with the financing of any other Hollywood film, Do The Right
Thing's
production budget had to be guaranteed by the studio chat
would ulti-
mately d istribute the finished product. Do The Right Thing
presented sev-
eral challenges to the standard formu la for distribution by a
major studio.
Unlike a typical blockbuster, it featured no famous stars. Its
subject matter
was unconventiona l by Hollywood standards. But it did have
Spike Lee, a
successful director with a proven track record. Lee's first
feature, She's
Gotta Have It (1986), cost just $175,000 to produce a nd earned
close to
$8 mill ion. School Daze (1988) came in at a cost of
approximately $6 .5
million2 and had domestic box-office sa les of $14 million.
The merchandising of Do The Right Thing, as with Lee's two
earlier

fi lms, was co be handled by his production company, Forty
Acres and A
Mule Filmworks. There were the companion volumes to the
earlier films -
Spike Lee's Gotta Have lt and Uplift the Race: The Construction
of School
Do the Right Thing Revisited 51
Daze - and widespread marketing via T-shirts, sound tracks,
buttons, let-
ter jackets, and baseball caps. Lee's comment, "Somebody
we~ring .yo~r T~
shirt is a walking billboard,"3 explains Lee's strategy of placmg
his films
names and the Forty Acres logo on a variety of merchandise.
Because of its subject matter, Do The Right Thing represented a
ma jor shift from Lee's two previous feature fi lms. The fi lm
was not a mod-
ern romance like She's Gotta Have I t, with three men vying for
the affec-
tions of Nola Darling. Nor was it a Black version of a college
musical like
School Daze (1988 ). Do The Right Thing was a sobering and
somewhat
frightening journey into the seething cauldron of inner-city
pathology and
racial tension. Were American audiences ready to visit a Black
neighbor-
hood and confront its inhabitants on their own terms? Lee
insisted that the
set be located in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant. He balked at
the presence
of New York City police, who Lee believed might turn the Bed-
Stuy block

into an armed camp.
As the pre-production phase bidding began, Paramount and
Touch-
stone were Lee's top choices for studios, with his primary
choice being Ned
Tannen's Paramount Pictures. Lee mused that since Paramount
Communi-
cations owned the Knicks, "I might get the season tickets to the
games I
need and deserve. Regardless, I'm looking for a home, where I
can make
the films I want to make w ithout outside or inside interference.
"4 Even
though Lee's two earlier films were made at Island and
Columbia, respec-
tively, he did not consider either studio for Do The Right Thing.
Island Pic-
tures had fallen by the wayside even before School Daze
because it lacked
the necessary financial resources.
In considering Columbia Pictures, Lee reported that working
with
David Puttnam and David Picker was ideal. When Dawn Steel
took over
production at Columbia, Lee writes, "we both went at it from
the start. I
don't like her caste, don't like her movies."5 Lee knew that more
than a
strained relationship was involved. "The importance of
promotion was
driven home when School Daze was released in February 1988.
It had the
misfortune to come out when Columbia was changing
leadership, which

resulted in the firing of the team of David Putnam and David
Picker." The
new team, Lee said, " left his film to die. " 6 He took personally
the failure
of the new studio boss Dawn Steel and Columbia Pictures to
promote
School Daze adequately. It was apparent he would not seek
financing from
Columbia. As his brief relationship with Col umbia Pictures
came to an
end, Lee said:
The classic nightmare of a filmmaker has happened to me; I'm
caught
in a regime change. Dawn Steel and her crew don't give a fuck
about
School Daze or any film that was made under Putnam. They can
say
what they wanna say, but 1 know better. Their actions prove it.7
52 Post-Soul Black Cinema
Obviously, no love was lost between Spike Lee and Dawn Steel.
After
the misguided marketing of School Daze, it made sense for Lee
to look for
a new studio. Eventually, he took control over the publicity for
his film by
find ing support on Black college campuses and universities, an
effort that
may well have saved the film from oblivion. Not only did
School Daze
receive a better-than-average box-office return of $14 million
based on its

cost of $6.5 million, Daze was one of the few profitable films
distributed
by Columbia Pictures under the Dawn Steel era that was
produced while
Picker-Putnam were at the helm of Columbia.
For Do The Right Thing, Lee first negotiated w ith Paramount
Pic-
tures. As a result of his experience making School Daze, his
first studio
film, he knew that he would demand a contractual agreement
that would
give him the right to approve the fina l cut, a privi lege
extended to few
directors . School Daze was financed via a negative pickup dea
l, meaning
that Columbia was required to buy the rights to distribute the
film, and
that money was then used to produce the film . Several films
have been pro-
duced in this way, and the primary benefit to the director is the
right to
approve the fina l cut. Of course there are alternatives. For
instance, a
screenplay can be sold to the studio and remain at the studio's
mercy, or
the studio can finance the production and the filmmaker then
loses artistic
control.
What transpired during negotiations over Do The Right Thing is
an
excellent example of the kind of tenacity and artist ic integrity
filmmakers
must have. Lee's initial pitch to Paramount emphasized the
script a nd

budget. Lee viewed it as a $10 mill ion picture, while
Paramount intended
to invest only $8 million with a proviso that the ending be
changed. As
negotiations continued, the Paramount production executives
Ned Tannen,
Sid Gannis, and Gary Luchesi repeatedly urged Lee to cha nge
the poten-
tia lly volatile ending. "They are convinced that Black people
will come out
of the theaters wanting to burn shit down."8 According to Lee:
Ned Tannen, the president, has big problems with the end of the
pic-
ture, especially Sal's line about Blacks being smarter because
they don't
burn down their own houses anymore . ... They want an ending
that
they feel won't incite a giant Black uprising.9
In addition to the battle over the script, there were questions
con-
cerning the amount of money the studio wou ld make if the film
were to
explore controversial, only marginally profitable issues. Few
films are pro-
duced by Hollywood majors in which a lead White male
character loses to
his African-American male rival. Sure, Rocky initially lost to
Apollo Creed
and Clubber Lang, but he went on to win the climactic fight in
every
Rocky (United Artists, 1976) film. Similarly, in the
blaxploitatio11 1wriocl,
Do the Right T hing Revisited 53

pioneered by the films Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and
Superf/y,
success came at a price. T he majority of subsequent fi lms were
not about
"beating the Man," "Misra Charley," or whatever you want to
call him,
nor were they about improving the l ives of Black folks. Usually
they were
about African-Americans falling deeper into despair and doing
little or
nothing to change their predicament.
Regardless of how one feels a bout his films, Spike Lee has
helped
make significant changes in the way the fi lm industry deals
with African-
Americans. Before Lee and the Paramount executives arrived at
their fina l
impasse in negotiatio ns, Bill Horborg, another Paramount
executive, tried
to find a resolution satisfactory to both Spike Lee and Ned
Tannen. With
negotiations deteriorating, Lee sent a script to Jeffrey
Katzenberg at Touch-
stone Pictures, the studio that origina lly wanted Lee's second fi
lm, School
Daze. Thirteen days before Para mount rejected the Do The
Right Thing
project, Katzenberg informed Lee that Touchstone was not
interested in the
project. Katzenberg believed the fi lm was not worth the budget
Lee want-
ed. After the two rejections, Lee responded, "I kinda figured
that they were
taking too long. Bill H orborg fought for me ti ll the end . But

he's not Ned
Tannen .. .. Goes to show you, take nothing for gra nted till the
check is in
the bank and has cleared. " 10
Paramount and Touchstone had already turned down Do The
Right
Thing, and it was crucia l for Lee to follow up School Daze
with another
film. W hile any fi lmmaker feels the need to obtain a
production budget
that exceeds the budget for his or her last fi lm, it is especially
important for
African-American fi lmmakers to succeed at this. According to
Lee, "This is
crucial; no recent Black filmmaker has been able to go from
film to fi lm as
the White boys do. " 11
By this time Spike Lee and his lawyer, Arthur Klein, had
already made
contact with Sam Kitt in the acquisitions department at
Universal Studios.
Universal agreed to finance Do The Right Thing, with a
negative pickup
deal, but told Lee that the budget would have to be lower than
the $8 mil-
lion minimum he had sought in earlier Do T he Right Thing
negotiations
with Paramount and Touchstone. Lee's negotiations with
Universal were
more concerned w ith how to stretch the money tha n with
increasing the
budget, but there was an upside to dealing with Universal. T he
studio was
willing to stand behind the script. The studio had alrea dy

generated con-
troversy when it released Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of
Christ (Uni-
versal, 1988). Nonetheless, Universal was attracted to Lee
because he had
a small but successful body of films that were not only
profitable but had
come in under budget. Tom Pollock, head of Universal Pictures,
had this to
say:
54 Post-S~ml Black Cinema
We're not some crusading studio out looking for social issues.
Spike is
interested in che subject matter and so are we .. .. But we can't
afford
to make movies if we can't make money on chem. 11
On the basis of Spike Lee's first efforts at the box office,
Universal felt
it was making a pretty safe bet. School Daze was a box-~ffice .
success
despite Columbia Pictures' lack of promotional support. Lee is a
filmmak-
er whose name alone has the potential to sell tickets. He thus
represents a
traditional, tried-and-true market commod ity: the big-name
director, in his
own way a throwback to the likes of John Ford, Howard Hawks,
and
Alfred Hitchcock.
It is an unfortunate fact that Blacks who work in the U.S. fi lm

indus-
try have very few friends in high places. Perhaps this is also
true for o.ther
people of color. Nevertheless, any film studio that finances a
pro1ec.t reJ~Ct-
ed by other major competitors in the industry not only takes a
ma1or nsk,
but also performs an admirable task. Not only was Universal
willi~g to
take a chance but as Lee would later discover, Tom Pollock, the
chief at
Universal, would give him unrelenting support.
Lee's decision to go with Universal in the wake of fa iled
negotiations
elsewhere was probably an easy one to make. Universal offered
the money
to make the film and allowed Lee to retain artist ic control, as
well as some
degree of financial control. The negotiations that transpired at
Universal
could not have been more different from those at Paramount.
Lee and
Klein got Universal to agree with most of their demands. Lee
had the '.inal
cut and a mutual agreement over the casting. These issues may
seem mmor,
but they can make or break a film. For example, in the making
of The God-
father (Paramount Pictures, 1972), Para mount executi~es ?id
not want
Francis Ford Coppola to cast Marlon Brando and Al Pacino 10
the roles of
Vito Corleone a nd his son Michael. How wrong the studio
bosses were
proven to be. Even today, despite a ll of the great roles that

Brando has
played, people remember him as much for The Godfather as for
any or.her
film. Spike Lee did what he should as the director and took t~1e
.responsible
position. If Do The Right Thing was going to succeed or fail, it
would be
his doing.
PRE-PRODUCTION, FILM TRADE UNIONS, AND DOING
THE
RIGHT THING
Although financing for the film was secured, its production
faced a series
of hurdles. Here was a man with a short but admirable track
record. Lee's
thesis film, f oe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1982),
won a stu-
dent Academy Award for best director. H is first feature, She's
Gotta Have
ft, not only won the Prix de J eunesse at the Cannes Film
Festiv~ l , bu.r bnsed
on box-office receipts of $8 million made more than forty times
"" pro
duction costs of $175,000. Lee's ta lent and determination were
already
indisputable. Critic Nelson George, who helped to finance She's
Gotta
Have It, pointed out, "I invested because it was shot a lready.
Spike wasn't
ta lking doing, he was talking done." 13

Universal agreed to finance Lee's film for $7.5 million and to
shoot in
New York City, which is strongly controlled by the film trade
unions. Do
The Right Thing would be Lee's firs t union film, and he
experienced diffi-
culties with the unions. Lee wanted a nonunion shoot for the
entire ten
weeks of shooting. His cinematographer, Ernest Dickerson,
expressed con-
cern that a nonunion shoot in a union town such as New York
could cause
logistical problems. John Kilik, the line producer, was
responsible for com-
ing up with a budget that would work. In addition, Lee needed
approval
on a budget, so he made the decision to have John Kil ik draw
up a
nonunion budget of less than $7.5 million, the maximum to
which he
believed Universal would commit itself. The revised budget
came in at $5.5
million, and Arthur Klein forwarded it to Universal. Universal
suggested a
cha nge of venue, which was its way of saying no more money.
Even though Universal had agreed in principle to finance the fi
lm, a
final budget had not been reached. W hen Lee firmly decided
that Do The
Right Thing would be shot in Brooklyn or not at all, he forced
Universal
either to accept his decision or to reject the whole project. Lee
thereby
entered into a second significant waiting period in which he
actually

thought Universal would drop Do The Right Thing. The studio
proposed
a budget of $6 million even though Lee insisted that it was a
$7.5 million
picture. At this point, he was prepared to start shopping again
and con-
sulted Klein about giving Orion Pictures a copy of his script.
When Uni-
versal finally settled on a budget, Spike was not p leased. The
terms
included a $6.5 million budget, a union crew, and a shooting
schedule cut
from ten weeks to eight. Lee wrote:
Universal is dicking me around. They won't budge from the $6.5
mil-
lion budget, won't go a penny over it. It's ridiculous. White
boys get
real money, fuck up, lose millions of dollars, and still get
chance after
chance. Noc so with us. You fuck up one time, that's it. After
the com-
mercial successes of She's Gotta Have It and School Daze, I
shouldn't
have co fight for the pennies the way I'm doing now. But what
else can
I do? I'll make the best fi lm possible with the budget I'm given
. H
Because Universal wouldn't budge from $6.5 million, Lee had
no
choice but to negotiate with the unions. A union shoot in New
York would
be problematic for several reasons. First, a sizable portion of
the $6.5 mil-
lion budge• would have to be earmarked for an all-union crew.

Second, Lee
wanted 10 hirt' more than one or two Blacks, a nearly
impossible task since
56 Post-S~>Ul Black Cinema
African-American members are seriously underrepresented in
the fi lm trade
unions. Lee wrote:
On every fi lm, [ try to use as many Black people as possible. A
major
concern l had about shooting w ith an all -un ion crew was
whether this
would prevent me from hiring as many Blacks as l wanted.
There arc
few minorities in the film unions, and, historical ly, film unions
have
done little to encourage Blacks and women to join their ranks.
is
Although Lee was not able to have a nonunion crew, he
succeeded in
getting the National Association of Broadcast Employees a nd
Technicians
a nd the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to hi re a few
African-
American nonunion workers fo r the shoot. Both uni ons made
major con-
cessio ns that included offering membership to the African-
American
nonunion workers who filled positions primarily in the grip and
electric
departments. These gestures by the unions may seem generous,

but actual-
ly solid business decis ions lurked behind them. A local union
should do all
it ca n to keep work among its own. Thus, the union's opening
of its mem-
bersh ip to African-Americans benefited all parties involved.
Despite Universal Pictures' insistence that Lee shoot the film
some-
where other tha n Brooklyn, Lee would not budge. "Universal
suggested we
shoot the film someplace outside New York, li ke Philadelphia
or Baltimore.
I'm sorry, Phi lly and Ba ltimo re are grea t cities, but they just
aren't Brook-
lyn." 16 After my initial read ing of Spike Lee's Do The Right
Thing, the
companion volume to Do The Right Thing, I thought Lee was
foo lishly
stubborn. H owever, I soon realized that although most major
cities with
significa nt African-America n populat ions may seem
homogeneous on the
surface, the rea li ty is that African-America n urba n folk
cultures differ sig-
nifica ntly from city to city. For example, fa ns in Philadelphia
preferred the
bubble gum rap produced by the duo Jazzy Jeff a nd the Fresh
Prince and
New York fa ns leaned toward the edgier sound produced by
groups such
as Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. In other words,
the cul-
tural productio n within the Black communi ty of Philadelphia
does not
produce the same culture found in New York's Brooklyn, the

Bronx, a nd
H arlem.
Lee was determined to shoot the film in the heart of Bed-Stuy.
He sent
o ut a location scout to find one block to use for filming. After
two weeks
had passed, Lee and the film 's production designer, Wynn T
homas, chose
the fi rst block the scout recommended. Lee thought the location
was per-
fect. It was neither too dilapidated nor too upscale. It also had
two empty
lots o n opposite corners that were perfect locations for Thomas
to create
the primary locations used in the film: Sa l's Famous Pizzeria ,
the Korean
grocery, and the We Love Radio 108 FM storefront station.
After choosing
a neighborhood, Lee wanted to communicate freely with its
inhabitants.
Securing a block for a shoot is not usua lly that difficult. You
obtain the
proper permits a nd, maybe, grease a palm or two. This location
shoot
however, would present more complications than usual. Most
films hav;
multiple locations over the duration o f shooting. Do The Right
Thing,
however, would be shot at one location for eight weeks.
Concerned that the
presence of police and the use of permits during preparation of
the location

would perhaps anger the Afr ican-American residents, Lee took
a more
diplomatic approach, which Brent Owens the location manager,
describes:
During pre-production we scheduled a meeting for homeowners
on the
block. We went over our production schedule and the
improvements
planned on several homes. Everyone seemed pleased that we
were
there. Shutting down the crack ho uses won us some points with
the
homeowners. T hey were much more willing to lease us their
property
after we did that.17
Rather than use a traditional security force, Lee, upon producer
Monty Ross' suggestion, hired the Fruit of Isla m (FO i). The
FOi is the
security force of the Nation of Islam, originally trained by
Malcolm X.
Beca use the Fruit of Islam has improved the lives of many
African-Ameri-
cans from all walks of life, they have acquired the respect of
those who live
in Black inner-city communities. By hiring the Fruit of Islam
Lee would
have a security force better suited to Do The Right Thing's
ne~ds than the
New York City Police Department could provide. The Fruit of
Isla m
entered peacefully into Bed-Stuy, assessed the security
problems and tem-
porarily rid the shooting location of any unwanted elements
r~ther than

taking a more traditional approach and closing the location to
the resi-
dents. Some reporters who covered this angle criticized what
they perceived
to be the fa ilings of the FOL Apparently, the FOI closed down
three crack
houses but one moved around the corner and went back into
business.
Some journalists viewed this reopening as a n example of the
lack of effec-
tiveness of the Fruit of Isla m.
Spike Lee made great advances with Do The Right Thing. Lee
served
notice to Hollywood that the rules must change. He knew that at
some
point a major studio would give him a larger budget to work
with. With
each new p.roject, Lee has. been able to increase his production
budget.
However, his budgets remain low in comparison with average
production
budgets fo~ other Holly~ood fare. For instance, in 1989, the
average budg-
et for studio-produced films was $18 million.
Lee is struggling for economic empowerment for African-
Americans
and the opportunity for other African-Americans to ma ke films.
To date,
four of the crewmembers from Do The Right Thing, Darnell
Martin,

Monty Ross, Ernest Dickerson, and Preston Holmes, have
prod~ced, writ-
ten and/or directed their own feature films. Moreover, Lee was
instrumen-
tal 'in integrating the trade unions, getting them to use African-
Americ.an
nonunion technicians and filmmakers who would later become
active
union members and skilled artists.
DO THE RIGHT THING MEETS THE PRESS
I didn't want to strike a false note with that. It's a very shaky
truce.
None of this everybody join hands and sing We Are the World. I
just
don't think that's realistic at this time in America.
Spike Lee18
A survey of the articles and reviews that discuss Do The Right
Thing shows
the broad range of commentary that follo"".ed the pr?du,ction
an.cl reception
of this film. It has been nearly a decade since the film s
theatrical release.
And yet, the ashes from Sal's are still smoldering inside the film
. industry.
By examining what the press had to say about Do The Rzgh.t
Thmg,.good
and bad, we are given insight into the prominent role race st1ll
plays in the
American film industry.
The articles were written from multiple angles. For ease they

can be
broken down into two types. First there are articles written by
writers who
recognize that racism is still one of America's most pressing
prob~ems and
provide honest and thought provoking commenta~y on the .films
attempt
to confront racism head on, and discuss Lee's skills as a filmma
ker that
allow him to hand le an obviously touchy subject. Other
revi.ews appear
oblivious to racism in America and are much more interested m
attacking
Lee's mental capacity and his apparent inability to compr~hend
the after-
math that his film would probably cause and the affect Lt may
have on
audiences. . .
David Denby's New York magazine review of Do T~e Right
Thmg is
an example of an article whose author recognizes .the reah ty of
rac1~m ?ut
is clearly oblivious to the problems associated. with ~ac1sm
that th1.s film
attempts to illustrate. Denby begins by accusing Sp1~e. Lee of
trymg to
please too many crowds. While Denby recognizes Lees immense
talent as
a fi lmmaker and storyteller, there are inferences that Lee may
lack t~e
sophistication to understand the effect that his storytelling may
have on his
a udience. In fact, Lee, according to Denby, may no t

understand. what ~e
has expressed in this film. Denby describes Do T~e Right Thing
.as a
demonstration of the pointlessness of violence that is also a
celebrat10n of
violence. " 19 While Denby's accusation is easily recognized as
underde~el -
oped, it deserves discussion. H e view~ Do .The Right Thing as
a c:l.eb rr11.10n
of violence, and Denby is no t alone m this assessment. Other
n1.11 11 ~ 1 11 · " 11
Do the Right T hing Revisited 59
journalists have expressed sim ilar conclusions. They tend to
focus on the
issues that were not central elements of the fi lm, d rugs and vio
lence, and
effectively subordinate the real issues the film presents.
Denby goes further in his analysis of Lee and his fi lm. H e
concludes:
lf Spike Lee is a commercia l opportun ist, he's also play ing
with dyna-
mite in an urban playground. The response could get away from
him.20
Of course M r. Denby might have dealt in his review with the
real
issues that Lee attempts to tackle in his fil m. Certa inly Mr.
Denby cannot
believe that the very rea l socia l, pol itica l and economic
issues addressed in
Lee's film do not exist; instead he chose to concoct new o nes.
It appears

that he has a hidden agenda he wou ld li ke to explore but on ly
hints at it .
What does he mean when he says, "get away from hi m" a nd
"dyna mite in
an urban playgrou nd?" Den by says this as if he has never seen
institution-
a l and vigi la nte violence perpetrated against Black people in
New Yor k
City. One has to wonder what rock he was hiding under
following the
racia lly-motivated m urders of Yusef Hawki ns, M ichael
Stewart and Elanor
Bumphurs that influenced the making of the film .
New York City, similar to o ther over-populated a nd under-
funded
urban centers, was at the time, without question, a Rodney King
or two
away from exploding. The ' dynamite' that Mr. Denby refers to
was plant-
ed long before Spike Lee made Do The Right Thing. It is almost
as if Denby
wanted to indict Spike Lee as the ca use of the racial tension
that has long
existed in New York City in particular, and America in general.
But most
intelligent and informed citizens know and recognize that
interracial ten-
sions were there long before Lee's Do The Right Thing. The
only thing D o
The Right Thing showed us was w hat could happen if the
dynam ite were
to exp lode. Of course, many fil mgoers were not prepared for
such a visua l
warning.

The Denby article and others have subtle racist undertones. T he
ma jority of people in contemporary America know the imp
lications, mean-
ings and power attached to certa in words. For example,
referring to a
Black man as a boy is offensive. At least two ar ticles written
about Do the
Right Thing refer to the characters Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn )
and Buggin'
Out (Giancarlo Esposito ) as boys. In a Newsday a rticle by M
ona Charen,
she writes " Raheem and another boy had provoked Sa l into a
rage. " 21
David Denby is guilty here as well when he writes, "When some
White
policeman arrive and kill a Black boy, the crowd, riots, taking
revenge on
the nearest White property." 22 Referring to a young Black man
as "boy"
may seem trivia l, but again these are examples of the ongoing
emasculation
of Black men. T he preceding passages say more than some
readers proba-
bly r<·rngnizc. According to the two jou rna lists, the police ki
lled a Black
boy no t a man. When the Los Angeles rebellion broke o ut in
1992, the cir-
cu mstances were reminiscent of the Do The Right Thing
scenario . Denby,
however, in terprets the vio lence in D o The Right Thing as a

stylistic ges-
ture:
My guess is that Spike Lee thinks that violence solves nothing,
but he'd
like to be counted in the Black community as an angry man, a
man
ready, despite his success, to smash things. The end of the
movie is an
o pen embrace of futil ity.23
Less than a decade later little has changed. The Quentin
Tarantino
films Reservoir Dogs (M iramax, 1992), Pulp Fiction (Miramax,
1994) and
.Jackie Brown (Mira max, 1997) a re certainly celebrations of
gratuito us vio-
lence, a nd he gains critical a nd financial success writing and
direct ing fi lms
that ca n be considered mora lly impotent. Yet few, if a ny,
critics have linked
Tara nt ino a nd Lee on this issue, let alone attacked Ta rantino.
Instead
Tarantino has been pra ised as a genius, and his film Pulp
Fiction ca n be
found o n the A.F.I. list of the top 100 films of a ll-time.
Critics also assumed that Mookie (Spike Lee) and his sister Jade
(Joie
Lee) are the only characters on the block with jobs. Although
there is little
evidence to support such a position, Newsday writer Mona
Charen writes,
"Lee ... plays Mookie the delivery man - one of only two Black
characters
in the story who has a job. " 24 In response to the criticism that

Lee only
shows unemployed Blacks, the film takes place on a Saturday in
the middle
of the summer. Thus, one can assume that most people do not
work on Sat-
urday. Additionally, Sweet Dick Willy (Robin Harris), one of
the three cor-
ner men, mentions his job. Senor Love Daddy (Sam Jackson),
on the other
hand, is seen throughout the fi lm performing his job as a disk
jockey.
The lack of drugs in Do The Right Thing is not as problematic
as
some reviewers suggest. Richard Corliss' comments exemplify
mainstream
expectations and ideas of how Ho llywood shou ld portray urban
Black
America. Corliss writes, "On this street there are no crack dea
lers, hookers
or muggers, just a 24 hour deejay Mister Seiior Love Daddy. "
25 This is a
perfect exa mple of preconceived racist images and expectations
influencing
a misguided writer, with a desire to project White stereotypes
onto a Black
loca le. Does the presence of drugs have to dominate every film
that is set
in a Black neighborhood? This type o f mass-marketed
expectation supports
the belief that drug-related narratives must dominate a ny story
about the
Black inner-city experience. T his is just the type of logic that
has made the
transitio n difficult for African-A mericans into mainstream
American soci-

ety and the entertainment industry as well.
Lee answered the charges and criticisms in the Rolling Stone art
icle
" Insight to Riot," written by David Handleman. Lee stated that,
Do the Right T hing Revisited
This fi lm is not about drugs, it's about people and racism.
Drugs are at
every level o f society today in America. I low many of you
went and
saw Working Girls or Rai11 Man and asked, 'Where a re the
drugs?'
1obody. But the minute we have a Black fi lm that takes place
in the
ghetto, people want to know where the drugs are ... because
that's the
wa y you think of Black people. I mean, let's be honest.16
61
The Handleman article is representative of the articles that try
to
make sense of racism while remaining o bjective. Handleman
even notices
the contrasting opinions of the journalists who covered the 1989
Cannes
Film Festival. For instance, Jeann ie Will iams, a colu mnist for
USA Today
had this to say, " I live in New York, I don 't need th is movie in
New York
this summer. I don ' t know what they' re thinking!" 27 To
which Roger Ebert
responded, " How long has it been since you saw a film you

thought would
ca use people to do anything?"28 Jn their own way, the articles
and their
authors reflect exactl y what Lee accuses America of doing - not
dealing
with racism. W hen people spend more t ime discussi ng the
effects of vio-
lence in the movies ra ther than com menting on the socia l
causes of vio-
lence, critics reproduce similar errors in judgment as conta ined
in the
Denby, Charen a nd Kroll pieces.
Do The Right Thing was never about violence, nor was it about
whether violence was right or wrong. Ir was, however, about
how racism
can produce frust ra tion that brings forth violent actions. Most
people
know that violence for the sake of violence is wrong. Even the
quotations
by Martin Luther King Jr. and M alcolm X juxtaposed at the
film 's end sup-
port th is position. Lee stated his intention:
l wanted to generate a d iscussion about racism because too
many peo-
ple have their head in the sand a bout racism, they feel that the
prob-
lem was eradicated in the 60s when Lyndon Johnson signed a
few
documents. 29
Lee's drama tizati on of racism a nd the portraya l of violence in
Do The
Right Thing is m uch more accu rate a nd responsible than most
reviewers

were willing to acknowledge. The past years have shown us that
if things
do not cha nge the violence that Lee filmed in Do The Right
Thing may
become commonplace. In Invisibility Blues, Michele Wa llace
warns,
.. . we are surely headed for race riots much worse than t he one
depict-
ed in the film if there aren't some drastic changes made in our
present
economic and poli tica l policies, in our representations of '
race', and in
our individual attitudes about race. •o
Wallace indicates the problems and the rea lity, a nd provides a
g rim
prophecy about race rio ts of a d ifferent kind and magnitude.
In 1965, Malcolm X announced t hat the American dream has
been a
nightma re for African-Americans. T he years following the
release of Do
The Right Thing have shown us that African-Americans have
begun co vio-
lently awaken from the nightmare. T he socioeconomic status of
Black
~mericans and their brutal t reatment by municipa l and state
police agen-
cies have no t changed much since the end of slavery,
Reconstruction, the
LA rebellion in 1992 a nd most recently the m urder of unarmed

Amadou
Diallo in N ew York city.
Lee's Do The Right Thing at tem pts to present the plight o f
urban
Blacks a nd the experience of non-Blacks owning businesses in
the Black
comm.unity. Further it dramatizes the reality of inter-ethnic
warring. All of
these issues are part of the contemporary America n psyche.
David Ansen
of Newsweek is well aware of the race issue and the complexit
ies inherently
connected. Ansen finds the following shortcomings in his
comparison of
W hite-directed films that deal w ith race and Lee's Do The
Right Thing,
No matter how fine their intentions, they tend to speak in
inflated, self
righteous tones, and they always come down to Holl ywood's
favorite
dia lectic, bad guys versus good guys. They allow the audience
to sit
comfortably on the side of the angels.31
In contrast, Lee's fi lm has no good -guy versus bad-guy d ia
lectic work-
ing because the characters are more complex tha n essentia list
bina ry oppo-
sites of good and bad, or dual mora lity. Sa l, for example, is
beaming w ith
pride about kids growing up in the neighborhood on his pizza,
only min-
utes before his fi ght with Radio Raheem. Acknowledging Lee's
rea listic

character types, Clarence Page, a senior editor at the Chicago
Tribune,
adds, "Lee shows admirable balance as he explores the a
mbivalent, con-
tradictory feelings Whi tes have about Blacks, feelings that can
run from
warm love to cold contempt and, perhaps most dangerous,
benign indif-
ference. " 32 The benign indifference, as Clarence Page calls it,
probably is a
most destructive and dangerous sentiment. It more than likely
played a role
in how the fi lm reviewers perceived racism as an important
issue treated in
Do The Right Thing. Ironically, while Sal tells Pino why the
pizzeria w ill
remain in the Black Bed-Scuy neighborhood, Sal refuses to
place African-
American personalities on the Wall of Fame in his Black Bed-
Stuy pizza
pa rlor, even tho ugh his Black Bed-Stuy patrons p rovide his
Italian-Ameri-
can fam ily with food , cloth ing a nd shelter.
Do The Right Thing was a serendipitous combination of
excellent
filmma king and a timely issue that has grown in significance
since th l· film's
release. T he Clarence T homas-Ani ta H ill hearings, the
Rodney K11111 1fl 11 11 ,
and, most recently, the 0. J. Simpson trial, have reasserted the
questions
dra matized in Do The Right Thing.

Do The Right Thing's achievement lies in Spike Lee's abil ity to
sur-
mount obstacles and deal evenly wi th the issue of racism, both
in fro nt of
and behind the camera. From the outset, he rejected the fi lm
industry's sug-
gestions that he ma ke a fi lm about Black-on-Black crime in a
drug-infes ted
neighborhood. If he had accepted such a project, the studio
would surely
have gra nted him a m uch larger production budget. Now many
post-Do
The Right Thing films d ramatize drug dea lers and violence,
yet Lee refused
to present these issues in Do The Right Thing.33 T he recent
cycle of Black
gangster fi lms roma nticizes the drug dea lers and gang vio
lence that plague
Black urban America . T hese fi lms focus on one situation and
provide a
very na rrow view of the Black urban experience.
Do The Right Thing reminds us that doing th e right thing
always
involves recognizing in terracia l discord and attempting to
eradicate the
socioeconomic problems that produce it. For African-America
ns, there
exist additional right things to do, such as work ing within the
Black com-
munity to find solutions. Do The Right Thing dra matizes a
difficult and
perplexing issue that the United Sta tes must resolve: how to
reapportion
psychological, social, and economic space both the individual

and various
racial and ethnic communities. The resolution of th is
contemporary poli ti-
cal problem w ill surely promote the betterment of society.
Hopefull y, Lee
wi ll conti nue to explore these questions throughout his career.

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