“This might sound like a depressing story, but the level of performance and filmmaking is so high that Do the Right Thing becomes a most entertaining warning.”
Nigel’s introduction to the film, shown at The Star, 28 March 2017
A few years ago I watched Do The Right Thing at home with Joanne. She’d never seen it before and I told her she’d love it. I think we were about to go to New York on holiday, staying in Brooklyn and I said it was a perfect New York City movie: a really entertaining and energetic film.
When the film ended she said, “That was one of the most depressing films I’ve ever seen.”
Which is not an unreasonable response. It is a serious film about race relations in America and deliberately doesn’t offer any easy answers.
The film came out in 1989 and Spike Lee, who wrote, directed and stars in the film was inspired by a crime that happened in 1986 in the Howard Beach neighbourhood of Queens, New York. Three black men whose car had broken down at night went to seek help while a fourth man stayed in the car.
After they’d quickly popped into a pizzeria they were confronted by a group of 10 white men who racially abused and fought with them. One of the black men, Timothy Grimes escaped unharmed; the other two - Michael Griffith and Cedric Sandiford - were seriously beaten and Griffith, while he was running away, was killed by a moving car.
This event sparked major protests and criticism of the NYPD. So this is just a bit of the context. In the introduction to the screenplay, Spike Lee writes, “It was 1986, and a black man was still being hunted down like a dog. Never mind Mississippi burning. Nothing has changed in America, and you don’t have to go down south to have a run-in with racist rednecks. They’re here in Nueva York.”
The fact that a pizzeria is the main location in Do The Right Thing is a deliberate reference to Howard Beach and you’ll also hear some references to it as well.
So I think today, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter campaign and Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric it’s still a very powerful and relevant film. The violence of white police officers in black neighbourhoods, the gentrification of working-class areas into middle-class areas… the film covers a lot of issues that remain topical.
The film caused a sensation in some quarters when it came out. Joe Klein, who’s a very respected, liberal journalist (he wrote the biography of Woody Guthrie and Primary Colors) wrote that the film was “reckless” and David Denby who now writes for the New Yorker wrote in New York magazine that "Do the Right Thing is going to create an uproar… if some audiences go wild, [Spike Lee] is partly responsible."
It is certainly an ambiguous film politically and open to numerous interpretations. And in some ways that was deliberate. Spike Lee has said: “I don’t know if there any role models in this film - black or white. That doesn’t make them any less believable.”
But I still maintain it’s a very entertaining film. For a start it’s funny. In his production diary, Spike Lee wrote, “The humour in Do the Right Thing is gonna be like the humour in Dog Day Afternoon, Cuckoo’s Nest, Network, The Last Detail. These are serious movies that are as funny as shit”. (All of those are films that Wayne and I are fans of which may explain why we like this film so much).
It’s also a film that is very much ‘a movie’. It doesn’t have a realistic, documentary feel. It was filmed entirely on location on a single block where the film is set in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. But it’s still very stylised. The production had to close down two crack houses on the block before they started shooting. But the film doesn’t have a gritty, inner-city feel. In a way, it’s more like West Side Story than The Wire. (The crack houses just moved over a few blocks).
The credit sequence with Rosie Perez dancing definitely evokes the bright artificial backdrops you see in Hollywood musicals. And that theatricality is evident in the rest of the film too. The conceit that the whole story takes place over a single day is something you’re more likely to see on stage than in the cinema.
There are sorts of soliloquies that are addressed directly to the camera and there’s also a kind of Greek chorus in the form of old geezers who sit and drink on the street and comment on what’s going on.
I mentioned the touchstone films for Spike Lee in terms of the humour in Do The Right Thing. He’s a very cineliterate filmmaker. He’s said he was influenced by The Third Man and its use of so-called Dutch angles where the camera is often at 45 degrees as a way of increasing the sense of uneasiness and tension in the film. There’s also a very overt reference to Robert Mitchum’s character in Night of the Hunter which, if you know that film, you’ll spot immediately.
One of the most striking things about the film is how brilliantly it conveys the heatwave. This was really important to Spike Lee. Again, from the screenplay introduction he writes, “After Howard Beach, I said to myself, yep, that’s it, we’re fed up. I think that the only reason a public disturbance didn’t jump off was because it was the dead of winter. But what if a racial incident like Howard Beach had happened on the hottest day of the summer. That ‘what if’ is the basis of Do The Right Thing.”
This is how Spike Lee’s production diary starts:
December 25 1987
“It’s nine in the morning and I’m sitting down to get started on my next project Do the Right Thing. I want the film to take place over the course of one day, the hottest day of the year, in Brooklyn, New York. The film has to look hot too. The audience should feel like it’s suffocating, like In the Heat of the Night”.
The film was shot over 9 weeks in July and August 1988 so achieving the sense that it all takes place on the hottest day of the year was a challenge that is brilliantly realised. The main way is through the use of really vibrant colour. Ernest Dickerson, the cinematographer, who should take most of the credit here, has said how much he was influenced by Jack Cardiff who shot the great Powell and Pressburger technicolour movies like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.
I’ll just say a little bit about the music in the film. The score was composed by Spike Lee’s father Bill Lee who’s an acclaimed composer and musician and is quite traditional and features Branford Marsalis playing.
In stark contrast, the most famous piece of music in the film is Public Enemy’s Fight the Power which is like a refrain throughout the whole movie.
Spike Lee said he wanted something “to be defiant, I wanted it to be angry, I wanted it to be very rhythmic. I thought right away of Public Enemy". So he approached Chuck D to write it. Interestingly the song wasn’t finished while they were shooting so they had to use alternatives. But it now stands as one of the great pieces of protest music.
A quick word about the cast... It is a truly brilliant ensemble cast and you will recognise many people in it.
Spike Lee has acted in quite a few of his films and always envisaged himself in the lead. He wanted Robert De Niro for the role of the pizzeria owner that Danny Aiello plays. They had quite a few conversations but De Niro ultimately turned him down because he thought he’d played too many similar roles.
Rosie Perez had never been in a film before and was cast after Spike Lee saw her dancing at a party. It was also the first feature for Martin Lawrence the comedian. We also have Samuel L Jackson, John Turturro, Bill Nunn... like I said a really great cast.
Ossie Davis who plays Da Mayor and Ruby Dee who plays Mother Sister, the elders of the neighbourhood, were a real-life couple (married in 1948). As well as being actors they were both very much involved in the civil rights movement. Ossie Davis delivered the eulogy at Malcolm X’s funeral and a tribute to Martin Luther King in New York the day after his assassination. So their involvement in the film I think would have been inspirational for the cast and crew.
The film’s stature has certainly grown since its release in 1980. It’s certainly one of the very best films of the 1980s and I’d put it on any list of all-time American classics.
It was snubbed at the Oscars. Danny Aiello was nominated for best supporting actor and Spike Lee got a screenplay nomination but it wasn’t nominated for Best Picture.
Does anyone know what won that year? 1990? Driving Miss Daisy. David Thomson in his book Have You Seen? has a snarky take on that decision.
“What can you say when a lace doily of a movie wins Best Picture and Do the Right Thing doesn’t get nominated, except that the Academy is a club where people can get very sentimental over how good they are to their chauffeurs.”
It’s now preserved in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry and in 2014 for a 25th anniversary screening Barack and Michelle Obama recorded a special message for Spike Lee and the others who made the film. So I’ll finish with what Obama said:
“Thank you for telling a powerful story… Do The Right thing still holds up a mirror to our society. It makes us laugh and think and challenges all of us to see ourselves in one other.”
