n For someone who was hailed as the great black hope around a decade ago, Spike Lee seems to have gone remarkably quiet. The director of such controversial movies as Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X has succeeded in alienating many of the people who previously championed his work, and has been accused, in recent years, of looking for racism in areas where it doesn't exist. However, he has been active, making a little-seen docu-drama called Get on the Bus, based on the Million Man March on Washington in 1997. And he has been courting controversy again by planning a film about the serial killer David Berkowitz, who killed six people in the 1970s and who called himself Son of Sam.
n Born in 1957, Lee was brought up in the New York district of Brooklyn which features in so many of his evocative films. His father, Bill Lee, was a jazz musician and has written many of the scores for Spike's movies. Lee attended Morehouse College and New York University's film school, where one of his short films won him acclaim and attracted sufficient finance for his first feature, She's Gotta Have It (119986).
n She's Gotta Have It was a streetwise and funky film about an independent young black woman and her three lovers, one of whom was played by Lee himself. Lee followed it with School Daze (119988), which was less well received, but was a landmark film since it signalled the first time that a major studio (Columbia) had given complete control of a project to a black filmmaker.
n However, it is for dealing with issues of racial tension that Lee is best known. Do the Right Thing (119989), with its shocking ending, divided critics, and Jungle Fever (1991), while a powerful and compelling drama, lost something in its attempt to tackle the issue of drugs as well as the inter-racial love affair between Afro-American Wesley Snipes and Italian Annabella Sciorra. Lee's last major film was his ambitious biography of black leader Malcolm X (1992).
Spike Lee directs and co-stars in Jungle Fever. (BBC2, 11.15pm)
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