AFOS Blog Rewind: Do the Right Thing (Part 4 of 5)

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films, Do the Right Thing, the timeless and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(Previously on AFOS: The Blog: Parts 1, 2 and 3. The following is from August 25, 2009.)

After posting a bunch of interesting Batman concept drawings and set photos from the 20-year-old blockbuster's official movie souvenir magazine, I'm doing the same thing with a similar tie-in for summer 1989's other landmark film, Do the Right Thing. But instead of an official movie mag, the Spike Lee Joint spawned a now-out-of-print Fireside/Simon & Schuster companion book that Lee wrote with the assistance of ex-girlfriend Lisa Jones. The director has done several companion books for his films. Each of these books contain behind-the-scenes photos, the film's script and Lee's own production journal (some of the Do the Right Thing journal passages are like tweets with better spelling: "Haven't written in a couple of days. I've been busy trying to save School Daze from being dogged.").

I've discussed before why Do the Right Thing is one of my favorite films and why writers of color like myself cite it as an influence. One aspect of the film that I don't think gets enough props is the terrific production design by Wynn Thomas, who drew this sketch of the We Love Radio and Sal's Famous Pizzeria set exteriors. Using an old Coney Island pizzeria as the basis for Sal's, the film's crew built it from scratch on an empty Bed-Stuy lot. "The ultimate compliment was when real people would walk off the street and try and buy a slice," said Thomas in an L.A. Times oral history about the movie. Thomas later created nifty-looking sets for Mars Attacks! and brought CONTROL Headquarters into the 21st century for Steve Carell's Get Smart.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Do the Right Thing (Part 3 of 5)

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films, Do the Right Thing, the timeless (except for Radio Raheem's boombox and "Dump Koch") and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(Previously on AFOS: The Blog: Parts 1 and 2. The following is from July 1, 2009.)

Do the Right Thing caused quite a stir at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, dividing the audience, the jurors and the guest filmmakers. German filmmaker and Cannes juror Wim Wenders complained that Mookie was not enough of a hero for throwing the trash can in the film's climax. Later on, star/director Spike Lee would say that somewhere in his closet is a baseball bat with Wenders' name on it.

When the film was first released, some critics feared it would incite black moviegoers to riot or start fights in the theaters, while more open-minded critics praised it for its ambiguity. Desson Thomson of the Washington Post called Do the Right Thing radical filmmaking at its best, and Roger Ebert said "it comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time... this movie is more open-ended than most. It requires you to decide what you think about it... Do the Right Thing doesn't ask its audiences to choose sides; it is scrupulously fair to both sides, in a story where it is our society itself that is not fair."

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association was as equally awed by Do the Right Thing, and they awarded the film with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (for Danny Aiello as Sal) and Best Music honors. Meanwhile, the Oscars acted like the film didn't exist, although it was nominated for Aiello's performance and Lee's screenplay. In one of the most memorable moments from the Oscar telecast that year, a nervous and trembling Kim Basinger criticized the Academy for snubbing Do the Right Thing, which she called "the film that might tell the biggest truth of all." Barely anybody applauded, but Lee, who was in the audience, passed on a note of thanks to Basinger after her shout-out.

This week, Do the Right Thing makes its debut on Blu-ray with a few more extras than the already fully loaded 2001 Criterion DVD. This series of partial transcripts of segments from A Fistful of Soundtracks' 1999 episode about one of my favorite films concludes with more comments from S. Craig Watkins, the author of Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Beacon Press, 2005), and Mark A. Reid, the editor of Cambridge Film Handbooks' volume on Do the Right Thing (Cambridge University Press, 1997), whom I interviewed separately for the show.

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Jimmy J. Aquino: Let's talk about Spike Lee's portrayals of the white characters in Do the Right Thing. What fascinates you about these characterizations?

S. Craig Watkins: What's really interesting about Spike's representation of whiteness is a number of things. I think that was the first of his feature films that actually involved white characters. Prior to that, most of his movies had been all-black casts, all-black-themed types of movies. So one of the questions that was actually posed to him as Do the Right Thing was being released was "Spike, how was it trying to direct white actors? How was it trying to write characters who are white?" The presumption for having that question was that a black filmmaker really had little of any knowledge or familiarity with whiteness, so therefore, he or she would have difficulty imagining, creating and directing white characters. Obviously, there's some sort of racial implications embedded in that in terms of... It's okay, I guess... White filmmakers are never asked, "Well, how is it creating or directing a black character?" So the question then is "Why is it that black filmmakers should have difficulty?," particularly given the sort of savvy ways in which blacks see, experience and understand whiteness in our society today anyway.

The other interesting thing about Spike Lee and his representation of whiteness and the white characters in the movie is that Sal is by far the most fully developed character in that movie, in terms of being a well-rounded, three-dimensional character. We see multiple sides of whiteness, multiple kinds of conflicting values around race, class, community, pride and ethnicity that are articulated via Sal's character. In that sense, it really showed how Spike on occasion is able to create very interesting, very nuanced types of characters.

The other thing too that I thought was very important about his portrayal of whites in that movie is I think it would have been very easy for Spike Lee and later African American filmmakers to play on what we might call counterracial stereotypes of whites, and that is depicting whites as the villains, in very one-dimensional, flat ways. I think what he was able to do in Do the Right Thing is to show and suggest that there are multiple ways in which whiteness gets expressed. There are multiple racial attitudes that white Americans develop. So in that sense, the way in which each of the white characters in the movie--and I'm talking specifically about Sal the father and his two sons--they all in some ways represented very different kinds of white racial sensibilities, white racial experiences and white relationships to blacks and blackness.

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Reid explains why Lee's perspective gave Do the Right Thing an edge over other films about race relations.

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JJA: How does Do the Right Thing succeed in its portrayal of racial animosity and racism, whereas other films about racism have failed?

Mark A. Reid: Like what other films would you say have failed?

JJA: Not so much as failed, but more problematic. For instance, films that portray tumultuous episodes in African American or African history, but it's really the story about the white friend of the black leader.

MAR: Oh, those types of films. I see. I think it's very important that a black directed the film. I'm not saying that any film directed by a black is going to be successful about portraying racism, but I think it's very important that Spike Lee's an African American. I think it's important also, to add on to that, that he's an African American that is aware of racism. In his film, the active characters are not just white people. It's very important to have a large swipe of different types of blacks that are involved, as opposed to one unique black and maybe two or three whites. I think that's what Spike Lee films do. They activate those blacks who are involved...

When you think of... Who Killed Vincent Chin? I don't think a white person could have made that film. I know somebody's going to call me an essentialist. I think at that point in time, when that film was made, I think it was very important that an Asian person made the film--and an Asian person who's talented, just like Spike Lee. Although he has a lot of flaws, he's a very talented filmmaker, and his language is well-versed in black culture.

I think it comes down to that--who the director and the writers are, when you work in a collective where you have mixed people, and you listen to all their different cultural stories and languages, to create a film... Because when Spike Lee made that film, his Italian American stars wrote a lot of what they'd say, and if they didn't believe in what they were doing, they'd say, "You know, we should do it this way." Spike Lee was a strong enough director to accept that. I think that's very important. Although I think he had a problem dealing with that in Jungle Fever, when Annabella Sciorra... I think he was unable to accept her reading of that relationship. But I think he's a director that's able to work with actors and be led by them sometimes.

JJA: Mark Reid, thank you.

MAR: Oh, you're welcome very much, and I enjoyed this. I learned something.

JJA: What did you learn?

MAR: That I didn't know that much about Spike Lee's films. [A woman in Reid's office can be heard laughing in the background.]

AFOS Blog Rewind: Do the Right Thing (Part 2 of 5)

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films, Do the Right Thing, the timeless (except for Radio Raheem's boombox and "Dump Koch") and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(Previously on AFOS: The Blog: Part 1. The following is from July 1, 2009.)

"I've been listening to 'Cool Jerk' by the Capitols. It's a real classic, fast and upbeat, and it brings to mind summer in the city. This may be the song for the opening credits sequence. I see Rosie Perez dancing to 'Cool Jerk' all over Brooklyn at the first heat of dawn. Rosie doing the Cool Jerk on the Brooklyn Bridge, on the promenade, and on various rooftops."

--Spike Lee, the May 17, 1988 entry in his production journal, Do the Right Thing (Fireside Books, 1989)

Do the Right Thing wouldn't have been the same without Public Enemy's rousing and confrontational original song, "Fight the Power." I can't imagine the film opening with Lee's earlier choice of "Cool Jerk." The series of excerpts from my 1999 A Fistful of Soundtracks interviews with African American Do the Right Thing experts continues with a discussion with S. Craig Watkins, a UT Austin professor of sociology, African American studies and radio-television-film, about one of the film's most powerful and effective elements, its soundtrack.

The Do the Right Thing soundtrack consisted of original songs by artists ranging from P.E. to Take 6 and a Copland-esque original jazz score composed by Lee's father Bill and performed by the Natural Spiritual Orchestra, which you can hear selections from on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel. For the film, Bill Lee assembled a septet that included saxman Branford Marsalis and trumpeter Terence Blanchard (who later became Lee's regular composer), as well as a 48-piece string section.

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Jimmy J. Aquino: Although Do the Right Thing was a pivotal moment in black cinema, the mainstream films directed by African Americans in the next couple of years were from the gangsta genre instead of being influenced by the Spike Lee Joints, which were more cerebral. Why was that so?

S. Craig Watkins: Much of black cinema, I would argue, tends to be influenced by what's happening in black popular music. In Do the Right Thing, you see Spike using a number of different kinds of black musical genres, styles and traditions. The one song that really, really drives the movie and I think is the most remembered is the song "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy, which is playing into this kind of hyper-racialized neo-black nationalist politics that were taking place during that time, and so he features that and uses that as the energy that drives his movie. But as that's happening, at the same time, we see in 1988/1989/1990 a new trend taking place within the field of black American popular music, more specifically rap music, in terms of the emergence of gangsta rap, and what we see eventually in the film industry, again tapping into that same energy, tapping into that same vibe, tapping into what gangsta rap was saying, doing and how it was resonating with consumers. So we see the movies also turning more and more in that direction...

JJA: Is there anything else that you find intriguing about Spike Lee's use of music in Do the Right Thing?

SCW: Yeah, one of the things I like to say in terms of giving Spike Lee some props regarding his movies is that he's always understood that black musical styles and traditions have a long history, a long legacy and are very diverse. Compare, for example, soundtracks that were typically associated with a lot of popular action ghetto-themed movies throughout the 1990s. Most of these soundtracks are most exclusively gangsta rap music, hardcore, harder-edged kind of music, which in some ways, don't necessary illuminate the complex and rich history of black music.

On the other hand, soundtracks that Spike Lee generally compiled for his movies--and Do the Right Thing is a perfect example--you've got your traditional R&B songs on there, a reggae-style joint on there, you have the rap music by Public Enemy, you have the black female rhythm and blues tradition... He did a jazz score for the movie and subsequently released a jazz score CD. So my main point is that Do the Right Thing, that soundtrack, as well as a number of his other films--particularly School Daze comes to mind--he draws from a broad cross-section of black musical traditions, tapping into an understanding, just how complex, diverse and dynamic black American music has been.

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Not all the films we love are perfect. The Cambridge Film Handbooks volume on Do the Right Thing that UF Gainesville English professor Mark A. Reid edited is a compilation of essays that both praise and critique Lee's controversial film. The book also reprints film critics' reviews of Do the Right Thing from the summer of 1989. During A Fistful of Soundtracks' 1999 episode about Do the Right Thing, I wanted to hear from Reid what he thought were the film's merits and if there was anything that was missing from Lee's depiction of 1989 Bed-Stuy.

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JJA: In the film's portrayal of Bed-Stuy and the interracial tensions... is there anything in this portrayal of racial politics that it overlooks?

Mark A. Reid: Well, one would have to know the Bedford-Stuyvesant area pretty well to be able to say that it overlooks it, but I think it gives an ample picture of the different types of African Americans that live there. You have the West Indians and the different types, and you have the African Americans. You have the fact that there are Korean shopkeepers. Perhaps when Spike was younger, they weren't Korean. They were probably either Jewish or maybe Arab. The fact that there's gentrification going on in Bed-Stuy. But gentrification isn't always white yuppie. It's also buppies. We can see that in Jungle Fever, when in fact, the people who live in that area--and I think it's Harlem--the people that gentrified that area, and they're all upwardly mobile African American couples. You do have the hanger-on who's probably been there a long time... and you have different types of reactions by this Italian American family. I think that's interesting.

You don't get much of an art community around there, and I think there is a black art community that developed because they couldn't afford to live in Manhattan. You don't get the fact that there's drugs, and everybody has criticized him for that. I think if he introduced that, he'd have to develop it, and it would probably overtake the story he's trying to tell...

Do the Right Thing, although it's interesting and everything, I still think it's a very thin film. I think it's an important film because politically, how it was used when it came out and what is criticized in the film, not only Koch, but the brutality that some law officers--although that, I think, was an accident--they abuse their power. It does talk about the tension that was mounting, that would later erupt, and not only in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but in Los Angeles, the trial of Rodney King. It's like a marker. It sees certain things that are happening in the urban situation between blacks and other ethnics. Because ultimately, it did happen between the Korean businesspersons in Los Angeles.

JJA: And also, years before in New York, there were conflicts between the Korean shopkeepers and the blacks.

MAR: Right. But the thing is that what would have been interesting is that also--which is I guess it's hard to do in most films since you have a singular narrative that dominates a film--is that it's very important to understand who those Koreans are and their culture, and that's what we don't get. If Koreans come from a culture where you don't touch people when you're handing back the money or other things, and other people who aren't Korean read it differently, then there's a miscommunication, and it's on both parts, the Koreans and whoever the other community is, be it African American or Mexican American or whatever. It would be interesting to have a film that dealt with that and dealt with what Do the Right Thing did.

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Watkins explains why even some black viewers thought Do the Right Thing fell short.

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SCW: I would argue that the problem with Do the Right Thing in retrospect is that it also illuminated some of the limitations with the kind of racial politics, the racial ideology, that the movie both played on and used as a driving and narrative force. Some thought that it was a bit overdone, in terms of the black racial politics. Some thought that the black racial politics were articulated in ways that weren't either nuanced or very sophisticated, in terms of the kinds of characters who were the leading proponents of a prism of the black progressive agenda. Here, I'm talking about, for example, the character of Buggin' Out, who many argue--and I think accurately so--was basically more of a caricature than a character per se.

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I asked Reid about some black viewers' gripes with Giancarlo Esposito's Buggin' Out character.

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JJA: There's this interesting criticism about Buggin' Out, that Spike Lee's portrayal of Buggin' Out is a mockery of black political activism.

MAR: It's a mockery in a sense that what Buggin' Out wants to do is boycott Sal's, as opposed to... In the history of African Americans, we boycott, and we also choose another alternative to Sal at the same time. What Buggin' Out wants to do is change pictures, which really doesn't mean that much. It's superficial.

JJA: It's about image.

MAR: Right. Why wouldn't he say, "Hire more people from the community"? Why wouldn't he help support somebody else who wants to build a small restaurant and teach them--an internship? That's what a boycott could do. A boycott to change photographs on a wall? "You put up Muhammad Ali and you put up a basketball player"? So what? That's decoration.

But even within the film, the characters didn't take Buggin' Out that seriously. Spike Lee using those characters and taking that not so seriously means that they're waiting for a more serious type of political activism than what Buggin' Out offers them. So I wouldn't look at it totally as a critique of black activism. I'd look at it as a critique of a certain type of black activism, which might, in fact, be a critique of Al Sharpton. That hasn't ever been discussed, but you could see that at that point in time. I don't know what "Tawana Told the Truth" means. Are we supposed to take it seriously or is it like a critique of the Tawana Brawley thing? That's the problem too... But the thing is that do we want a conclusive "Yes, this is what it's about"? Or do we want to be forced to think about these issues? I think that maybe that's what Spike Lee is doing.

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Watkins offers his take on the film's open-endedness.

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JJA: Another intriguing aspect about Do the Right Thing is the narrative techniques. What's unconventional about these narrative techniques?

SCW: What Spike does in Do the Right Thing in some ways is indicative of the way he approached film early on in his career--adopting and incorporating very stylized, very non-conventional kinds of cinematic techniques into his own narratives. One of the problems that a lot of people had with Do the Right Thing is that the narrative structure was very unconventional, both in terms of the way the story evolves, but perhaps more importantly, in terms of the way in which the story is concluded. That is how he goes about trying to engage in narrative closure, when in fact, he engages in a more open-ended kind of narrative structure.

We as filmgoers are so accustomed to movies where there's a definitive beginning, definitive middle and decisive end. I think that Do the Right Thing threw a lot of people off and was perhaps part of what made it a sensational movie in 1989--sensational in the sense that perhaps more so than any other movie during that year, it attracted considerable media attention. It attracted considerable attention within the academic community. There was a very interesting and profound buzz about the movie, and I think part of that was because the movie ended on a series of question marks as opposed to definitive conclusions and definitive statements. It left people wondering, "What was the right thing?" Was Mookie right or justified when he threw the trash can through Sal's pizzeria window and then started the incident that ensued from that point on? What are the right racial politics and black political ideology? Is it Malcolm's version or is it Martin Luther King Jr.'s version? What are the best and most effective ways for blacks to deal with perceived racial injustices and real racial injustices?


So because the movie ended in that way, I think it caught a lot of people off guard and left a lot of people pondering a lot of different questions, which I actually liked because what it does is, unlike most films, which pretend that the kinds of issues, conflicts and crises that it might address during the middle of the film, instead of pretending that those conflicts, tensions and crises can be easily resolved through some heroic individual or some heroic stance, what Do the Right Thing suggests is that many of society's deepest and most profound social problems are in some ways almost unfortunately... very difficult, and you can't come up with a very tidy ending to address these issues. This is something that we need to leave open-ended. This is a debate that we need to have, an ongoing conversation. I think the movie, in terms of a narrative sense, provoked that kind of discourse, provoked that kind of conversation. When I was in graduate school at the time, I could remember a number of different panels and a number of different forums. Even one of the local theaters in the city where I was in school in Michigan actually screened the movie and then had a post-film discussion.

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To be continued. In Part 3 of this series of excerpts from archived interviews about Do the Right Thing, Watkins praises the film's nuanced characters.

AFOS Blog Rewind: Do the Right Thing (Part 1 of 5)

It's Black History Month, so all this week, I'm reposting every single past AFOS blog post about one of my favorite films (and one of my reasons for wanting to get into showbiz), Do the Right Thing, the timeless (except for Radio Raheem's boombox and "Dump Koch") and still-bracing 1989 Spike Lee Joint. You can hear original score (or original song) selections from Do the Right Thing on AFOS.

(The following is from July 1, 2009.)

When I first saw Do the Right Thing in high school--this was a couple of years after the film debuted on VHS--I was more of a fan of Public Enemy than Spike Lee, whose films were too artsy for this kid who was more into Tim Burton's Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. P.E.'s "Fight the Power" theme from Do the Right Thing and their earlier track, the Yo! MTV Raps staple "Night of the Living Baseheads," got me hooked on hip-hop and made me interested in seeing the much-hyped movie that introduced "Fight the Power."

Lee's film floored me. I had never seen anything like it before. The open-ended and complex screenplay about Bed-Stuy racial tensions introduced me to a more cerebral and mature kind of cinema, where there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, and like life, not everything has a tidy ending. Do the Right Thing helped improve my tastes in film. It was my gateway to Lee's other films, then to GoodFellas and Martin Scorsese's other films, and then to Chan Is Missing, Dog Day Afternoon and so on. Movies didn't have to dazzle me with just explosions and tits anymore. I learned to become dazzled by adult ideas and themes and--in the cases of Do the Right Thing and GoodFellas, another great late '80s/early '90s New York movie that was also robbed at the Oscars--brilliant dialogue and astonishing editing.

I first saw Do the Right Thing at a time when I became aware of the racism around me and embraced hip-hop because in their lyrics, rappers were anti-establishment, and they spoke to me about topics I was dealing with at the time--and in some ways, still do. As a teen of color, I identified with the anger and frustrations Lee's younger black characters--and P.E.--expressed in Do the Right Thing. I dug how Lee helped change African American cinema (as well as indie cinema) and empowered black viewers and would-be filmmakers with his bold, angry, funny and complex cinematic statement, and it made me want to someday create something for my community that would be equally bold, angry, funny and complex.

Because this week marks the 20th anniversary of the release of a film that influenced me (June 30, 1989), I thought it would be the perfect time to transcribe excerpts from a couple of Do the Right Thing-related phoners I recorded for a 1999 A Fistful of Soundtracks episode about the classic Spike Lee Joint. The Do the Right Thing ep was part of a series of 1999 AFOS eps called "I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1989."

Two decades after Do the Right Thing's release, even members of the film's cast and crew still can't decide on how they feel about Mookie throwing the trash can. The countless questions that the film raises have fascinated African American Do the Right Thing experts S. Craig Watkins, the author of Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Mark A. Reid, the editor of Cambridge Film Handbooks' volume on Do the Right Thing (Cambridge University Press, 1997), whom I interviewed separately in 1999 for the show.

Almost all the pre-2000 broadcasts of AFOS were pre-recorded on audiocassette, and I don't have the equipment to transfer audiotape content to computer--the audio quality would suck anyway--so I'd rather just post text of the interviews below.

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S. Craig Watkins: I think the movie struck a chord with a lot of young African Americans in particular, in terms of the way in which it played into the kind of neo-black nationalist politics that were being articulated in a variety of different ways across the African American community, particularly by young African Americans who were rediscovering leaders like Malcolm X, Black Panthers and even to some degree, a more militant version of Martin Luther King Jr. So I think this film tapped into the racial discord that was going on during that time... So in that sense, it represented the degree to which black filmmakers, black artists, were able to successfully tap into a lot of those mood shifts and social and political sensibilities that were taking place within the African American community.

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In a separate interview with Mark A. Reid, the UF Gainesville English and film professor discussed some of the events in New York that shaped the film.

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Jimmy J. Aquino: One interesting comment that you made in your book about Do the Right Thing was his ties to his family. He uses his family a lot in his movies. [Spike's father Bill composed Do the Right Thing's original score, and Spike and his sister Joie played siblings Mookie and Jade in Do the Right Thing. At one point in the film, a disgusted Mookie thinks his pizzeria boss Sal (Danny Aiello) is putting the moves on Jade. When Mookie tries to warn Jade, she laughs off her brother's suspicions.]

Mark A. Reid: In fact, sometimes, it's interesting to see how it's played out in Do the Right Thing, where he's trying to protect her, even though she seems like she's much more mature than him. He's trying to protect her against Sal and his Italian sausage. Anyway, uh...

What's interesting also is how he used the Fruit of Islam, how this film can also be taken as a critique of New York City politics. Some people even have argued that the film also helped to bring New York's first African American mayor...

JJA: For those listeners who aren't really aware of New York City political history, can you explain the resentment towards Ed Koch? [In Do the Right Thing, "Dump Koch" graffiti can be seen on a wall, and Sonny, Steve Park's Korean shopkeeper character, expresses his dislike of the then-mayor during the film's famous racial slur montage.]


MAR: Well, one thing is that Ed Koch divided the city--ethnic and racial lines. One thing you have to think about when you think about New York City is it's made up of boroughs, and Manhattan is not the only borough. There's other boroughs that are largely dominated by certain ethnic groups, and sometimes, those ethnic groups are in competition for space and jobs. With Ed Koch, although it was a city that... wasn't in bankruptcy, it was in bankruptcy when you think about the type of racial and ethnic conflict. It led to a lot of deaths during Ed Koch's administration. So I think that that's one of the things that brought together a group of people from different ethnic and racial communities to dump Koch. It was written on the wall.

Another thing about Koch is that he's the type of... Giuliani, right now, is mayor, but after this beating of the Haitian guy by the police officers and the murder of this African, Giuliani at least met with the Haitian and African community to discuss matters, whereas Koch would not do that. He's very flippant after these things happened...

With Giuliani, I think he's at least trying to alleviate that, although I don't think he's going to be successful with that because of the fact that these police officers seem like they're overdoing... He's not critical of the police force...

I recently did visit New York, and it's much a cleaner place, but it seems that the cleanliness... and the lack of much theft and everything, it's taken its toll on how the police deals with the people who pay their wages, the citizens.

This is why perhaps Do the Right Thing is necessary because it's still important when you think of the politics of New York right now. You see how the police are acting, and you see this scene where the police, in fact, accidentally murder this guy, suffocate him. It's interesting because you always will have in New York City struggles between ethnic groups. That's shown there. And it's beautiful in a sense because you also see ethnic groups that can work out their problems.

In Do the Right Thing--it's kind of humorous--the portrayal of the Korean shopkeeper, who's very interesting because he's able to talk to Radio Raheem on the same level, cursing and everything. It's interesting in the sense that he doesn't back down. It's interesting that Radio Raheem gives him a wink, saying "Yes, you're one of us," whoever "one of us" means to Radio Raheem.


It's also interesting, the relationships between the African Americans and the Puerto Ricans... They battle it out with music as opposed to using physical force. The only physical force that's played out is Sal and the police officers, and it's kind of interesting because the people who are considered of color don't do that. It's through language or music.

There's one instance of Savage...

JJA: John Savage's yuppie character...

MAR: ... who is gentrifying the neighborhood... It's kind of interesting because he is part of that neighborhood too. He's not a threatening figure even though he dirties...

JJA: ... Buggin' Out's Air Jordans.


MAR: He's not a person of color, but he's not a threatening figure. And if you think about the people who are threatening figures, they're the ones who pick up the bat or use physical force. They're authority figures...

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To be continued. In Part 2 of this series of excerpts from archived A Fistful of Soundtracks interviews about Do the Right Thing, S. Craig Watkins discusses the film's incredible original music.

Extra mozzarella: Do the Right Thing concept art and behind-the-scenes photos from Spike Lee's companion book

After posting a bunch of interesting Batman concept drawings and set photos from the 20-year-old blockbuster's official movie souvenir magazine, I'm doing the same thing with a similar tie-in for summer 1989's other landmark film, Do the Right Thing. But instead of an official movie mag, the Spike Lee Joint spawned a now-out-of-print Fireside/Simon & Schuster companion book that Lee wrote with the assistance of ex-girlfriend Lisa Jones. The director has done several companion books for his films. Each of these books contain behind-the-scenes photos, the film's script and Lee's own production journal (some of the Do the Right Thing journal passages are like tweets with better spelling: "Haven't written in a couple of days. I've been busy trying to save School Daze from being dogged.").

(WARNING: Spoilers ahead. Yes, there are people out there who still haven't watched Do the Right Thing yet. They're like people who never saw Ghostbusters. They're weirdos.)


I've discussed before why Do the Right Thing is one of my favorite films and why writers of color like myself cite it as an influence. One aspect of the film that I don't think gets enough props is the terrific production design by Wynn Thomas, who drew this sketch of the We Love Radio and Sal's Famous Pizzeria set exteriors. Using an old Coney Island pizzeria as the basis for Sal's, the film's crew built it from scratch on an empty Bed-Stuy lot. "The ultimate compliment was when real people would walk off the street and try and buy a slice," said Thomas in an L.A. Times oral history about the movie. Thomas later created nifty-looking sets for Mars Attacks! and brought CONTROL Headquarters into the 21st century for Steve Carell's Get Smart.

"20, motherfucker, 20": Do the Right Thing's 20th anniversary, Part 3

Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog: Parts 1 and 2.

Do the Right Thing, which turns 20 years old this week, caused quite a stir at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, dividing the audience, the jurors and the guest filmmakers. German filmmaker and Cannes juror Wim Wenders complained that Mookie was not enough of a hero for throwing the trash can in the film's climax. Later on, star/director Spike Lee would say that somewhere in his closet is a baseball bat with Wenders' name on it.

When the film was first released, some critics feared it would incite black moviegoers to riot or start fights in the theaters, while more open-minded critics praised it for its ambiguity. Desson Thomson of the Washington Post called Do the Right Thing radical filmmaking at its best, and Roger Ebert said "it comes closer to reflecting the current state of race relations in America than any other movie of our time... this movie is more open-ended than most. It requires you to decide what you think about it... Do the Right Thing doesn't ask its audiences to choose sides; it is scrupulously fair to both sides, in a story where it is our society itself that is not fair."

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association was as equally awed by Do the Right Thing, and they awarded the film with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (for Danny Aiello as Sal) and Best Music honors. Meanwhile, the Oscars acted like the film didn't exist, although it was nominated for Aiello's performance and Lee's screenplay. In one of the most memorable moments from the Oscar telecast that year, a nervous and trembling Kim Basinger criticized the Academy for snubbing Do the Right Thing, which she called "the film that might tell the biggest truth of all." Barely anybody applauded, but Lee, who was in the audience, passed on a note of thanks to Basinger after her shout-out.

This week, Do the Right Thing makes its debut on Blu-ray with a few more extras than the already fully loaded 2001 Criterion DVD. This series of partial transcripts of segments from A Fistful of Soundtracks' 1999 episode about one of my favorite films concludes with more comments from S. Craig Watkins, the author of Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Beacon Press, 2005), and Mark A. Reid, the editor of Cambridge Film Handbooks' volume on Do the Right Thing (Cambridge University Press, 1997), whom I interviewed separately for the show.

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Jimmy J. Aquino: Let's talk about Spike Lee's portrayals of the white characters in Do the Right Thing. What fascinates you about these characterizations?

S. Craig Watkins: What's really interesting about Spike's representation of whiteness is a number of things. I think that was the first of his feature films that actually involved white characters. Prior to that, most of his movies had been all-black casts, all-black-themed types of movies. So one of the questions that was actually posed to him as Do the Right Thing was being released was "Spike, how was it trying to direct white actors? How was it trying to write characters who are white?" The presumption for having that question was that a black filmmaker really had little of any knowledge or familiarity with whiteness, so therefore, he or she would have difficulty imagining, creating and directing white characters. Obviously, there's some sort of racial implications embedded in that in terms of... It's okay, I guess... White filmmakers are never asked, "Well, how is it creating or directing a black character?" So the question then is "Why is it that black filmmakers should have difficulty?," particularly given the sort of savvy ways in which blacks see, experience and understand whiteness in our society today anyway.


The other interesting thing about Spike Lee and his representation of whiteness and the white characters in the movie is that Sal is by far the most fully developed character in that movie, in terms of being a well-rounded, three-dimensional character. We see multiple sides of whiteness, multiple kinds of conflicting values around race, class, community, pride and ethnicity that are articulated via Sal's character. In that sense, it really showed how Spike on occasion is able to create very interesting, very nuanced types of characters.

The other thing too that I thought was very important about his portrayal of whites in that movie is I think it would have been very easy for Spike Lee and later African American filmmakers to play on what we might call counterracial stereotypes of whites, and that is depicting whites as the villains, in very one-dimensional, flat ways. I think what he was able to do in Do the Right Thing is to show and suggest that there are multiple ways in which whiteness gets expressed. There are multiple racial attitudes that white Americans develop. So in that sense, the way in which each of the white characters in the movie--and I'm talking specifically about Sal the father and his two sons--they all in some ways represented very different kinds of white racial sensibilities, white racial experiences and white relationships to blacks and blackness.

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Reid explains why Lee's perspective gave Do the Right Thing an edge over other films about race relations.

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JJA: How does Do the Right Thing succeed in its portrayal of racial animosity and racism, whereas other films about racism have failed?

Mark A. Reid: Like what other films would you say have failed?

JJA: Not so much as failed, but more problematic. For instance, films that portray tumultuous episodes in African American or African history, but it's really the story about the white friend of the black leader.

MAR: Oh, those types of films. I see. I think it's very important that a black directed the film. I'm not saying that any film directed by a black is going to be successful about portraying racism, but I think it's very important that Spike Lee's an African American. I think it's important also, to add on to that, that he's an African American that is aware of racism. In his film, the active characters are not just white people. It's very important to have a large swipe of different types of blacks that are involved, as opposed to one unique black and maybe two or three whites. I think that's what Spike Lee films do. They activate those blacks who are involved...

When you think of... Who Killed Vincent Chin? I don't think a white person could have made that film. I know somebody's going to call me an essentialist. I think at that point in time, when that film was made, I think it was very important that an Asian person made the film--and an Asian person who's talented, just like Spike Lee. Although he has a lot of flaws, he's a very talented filmmaker, and his language is well-versed in black culture.


I think it comes down to that--who the director and the writers are, when you work in a collective where you have mixed people, and you listen to all their different cultural stories and languages, to create a film... Because when Spike Lee made that film, his Italian American stars wrote a lot of what they'd say, and if they didn't believe in what they were doing, they'd say, "You know, we should do it this way." Spike Lee was a strong enough director to accept that. I think that's very important. Although I think he had a problem dealing with that in Jungle Fever, when Annabella Sciorra... I think he was unable to accept her reading of that relationship. But I think he's a director that's able to work with actors and be led by them sometimes.

JJA: Mark Reid, thank you.

MAR: Oh, you're welcome very much, and I enjoyed this. I learned something.

JJA: What did you learn?

MAR: That I didn't know that much about Spike Lee's films. [A woman in Reid's office can be heard laughing in the background.]

"20, motherfucker, 20": Do the Right Thing's 20th anniversary, Part 1

When I first saw Do the Right Thing in high school--this was a couple of years after the film debuted on VHS--I was more of a fan of Public Enemy than Spike Lee, whose films were too artsy for this kid who was more into Tim Burton's Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. P.E.'s "Fight the Power" theme from Do the Right Thing and their earlier track, the Yo! MTV Raps staple "Night of the Living Baseheads," got me hooked on hip-hop and made me interested in seeing the much-hyped movie that introduced "Fight the Power."

Lee's film floored me. I had never seen anything like it before. The open-ended and complex screenplay about Bed-Stuy racial tensions introduced me to a more cerebral and mature kind of cinema, where there are no clear-cut heroes and villains, and like life, not everything has a tidy ending. Do the Right Thing helped improve my tastes in film. It was my gateway to Lee's other films, then to GoodFellas and Martin Scorsese's other films, and then to Chan Is Missing, Dog Day Afternoon and so on. Movies didn't have to dazzle me with just explosions and tits anymore. I learned to become dazzled by adult ideas and themes and--in the cases of Do the Right Thing and GoodFellas, another great late '80s/early '90s New York movie that was also robbed at the Oscars--brilliant dialogue and astonishing editing.

I first saw Do the Right Thing at a time when I became aware of the racism around me and embraced hip-hop because in their lyrics, rappers were anti-establishment, and they spoke to me about topics I was dealing with at the time--and in some ways, still do. As a teen of color, I identified with the anger and frustrations Lee's younger black characters--and P.E.--expressed in Do the Right Thing. I dug how Lee helped change African American cinema (as well as indie cinema) and empowered black viewers and would-be filmmakers with his bold, angry, funny and complex cinematic statement, and it made me want to someday create something for my community that would be equally bold, angry, funny and complex.

Because this week marks the 20th anniversary of the release of a film that influenced me (June 30, 1989), I thought it would be the perfect time to transcribe excerpts from a couple of Do the Right Thing-related phoners I recorded for a 1999 A Fistful of Soundtracks episode about the classic Spike Lee Joint. The Do the Right Thing ep was part of a series of 1999 AFOS eps called "I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1989."

Two decades after Do the Right Thing's release, even members of the film's cast and crew still can't decide on how they feel about Mookie throwing the trash can. The countless questions that the film raises have fascinated African American Do the Right Thing experts S. Craig Watkins, the author of Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Mark A. Reid, the editor of Cambridge Film Handbooks' volume on Do the Right Thing (Cambridge University Press, 1997), whom I interviewed separately in 1999 for the show.

Almost all the pre-2000 broadcasts of AFOS were pre-recorded on audiocassette, and I don't have the equipment to transfer audiotape content to computer--the audio quality would suck anyway--so I'd rather just post text of the interviews below.

(WARNING: These interviews contain spoilers. Yes, there are people out there who still haven't seen Do the Right Thing yet.)

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S. Craig Watkins: I think the movie struck a chord with a lot of young African Americans in particular, in terms of the way in which it played into the kind of neo-black nationalist politics that were being articulated in a variety of different ways across the African American community, particularly by young African Americans who were rediscovering leaders like Malcolm X, Black Panthers and even to some degree, a more militant version of Martin Luther King Jr. So I think this film tapped into the racial discord that was going on during that time... So in that sense, it represented the degree to which black filmmakers, black artists, were able to successfully tap into a lot of those mood shifts and social and political sensibilities that were taking place within the African American community.

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In a separate interview with Mark A. Reid, the UF Gainesville English and film professor discussed some of the events in New York that shaped the film.

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Jimmy J. Aquino: One interesting comment that you made in your book about Do the Right Thing was his ties to his family. He uses his family a lot in his movies. [Spike's father Bill composed Do the Right Thing's original score, and Spike and his sister Joie played siblings Mookie and Jade in Do the Right Thing. At one point in the film, a disgusted Mookie thinks his pizzeria boss Sal (Danny Aiello) is putting the moves on Jade. When Mookie tries to warn Jade, she laughs off her brother's suspicions.]

Mark A. Reid: In fact, sometimes, it's interesting to see how it's played out in Do the Right Thing, where he's trying to protect her, even though she seems like she's much more mature than him. He's trying to protect her against Sal and his Italian sausage. Anyway, uh...

What's interesting also is how he used the Fruit of Islam, how this film can also be taken as a critique of New York City politics. Some people even have argued that the film also helped to bring New York's first African American mayor...

JJA: For those listeners who aren't really aware of New York City political history, can you explain the resentment towards Ed Koch? [In Do the Right Thing, "Dump Koch" graffiti can be seen on a wall, and Sonny, Steve Park's Korean shopkeeper character, expresses his dislike of the then-mayor during the film's famous racial slur montage.]

MAR: Well, one thing is that Ed Koch divided the city--ethnic and racial lines. One thing you have to think about when you think about New York City is it's made up of boroughs, and Manhattan is not the only borough. There's other boroughs that are largely dominated by certain ethnic groups, and sometimes, those ethnic groups are in competition for space and jobs. With Ed Koch, although it was a city that... wasn't in bankruptcy, it was in bankruptcy when you think about the type of racial and ethnic conflict. It led to a lot of deaths during Ed Koch's administration. So I think that that's one of the things that brought together a group of people from different ethnic and racial communities to dump Koch. It was written on the wall.

Another thing about Koch is that he's the type of... Giuliani, right now, is mayor, but after this beating of the Haitian guy by the police officers and the murder of this African, Giuliani at least met with the Haitian and African community to discuss matters, whereas Koch would not do that. He's very flippant after these things happened...

With Giuliani, I think he's at least trying to alleviate that, although I don't think he's going to be successful with that because of the fact that these police officers seem like they're overdoing... He's not critical of the police force...


I recently did visit New York, and it's much a cleaner place, but it seems that the cleanliness... and the lack of much theft and everything, it's taken its toll on how the police deals with the people who pay their wages, the citizens.

This is why perhaps Do the Right Thing is necessary because it's still important when you think of the politics of New York right now. You see how the police are acting, and you see this scene where the police, in fact, accidentally murder this guy, suffocate him. It's interesting because you always will have in New York City struggles between ethnic groups. That's shown there. And it's beautiful in a sense because you also see ethnic groups that can work out their problems.

In Do the Right Thing--it's kind of humorous--the portrayal of the Korean shopkeeper, who's very interesting because he's able to talk to Radio Raheem on the same level, cursing and everything. It's interesting in the sense that he doesn't back down. It's interesting that Radio Raheem gives him a wink, saying "Yes, you're one of us," whoever "one of us" means to Radio Raheem. It's also interesting, the relationships between the African Americans and the Puerto Ricans... They battle it out with music as opposed to using physical force. The only physical force that's played out is Sal and the police officers, and it's kind of interesting because the people who are considered of color don't do that. It's through language or music.

There's one instance of Savage...

JJA: John Savage's yuppie character...

MAR: ... who is gentrifying the neighborhood... It's kind of interesting because he is part of that neighborhood too. He's not a threatening figure even though he dirties...

JJA: ... Buggin' Out's Air Jordans.

MAR: He's not a person of color, but he's not a threatening figure. And if you think about the people who are threatening figures, they're the ones who pick up the bat or use physical force. They're authority figures...

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To be continued. In Part 2 of this series of excerpts from archived A Fistful of Soundtracks interviews about Do the Right Thing, S. Craig Watkins discusses the film's incredible original music.