THE CANNES FILE : Controversial Film for a Long Hot Summer

The signed photos on the celebrity wall at Sal’s Famous Pizzeria in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn are familiar to everyone. Frank Sinatra. Sophia Loren. Al Pacino. Joe DiMaggio.

The problem, as the angry young black they call Buggin Out sees it, is that the subjects are all Italian and Sal’s customers are mostly black. How about putting some black faces up there on that wall, Sal?

“Because I own this place and I’m Italian,” Sal says. “You buy your own place, you can put up pictures of anybody you want.”

That basic disagreement provides the spark on an already smoldering summer day that leadsto the violent last-reel riot in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” a film that has people here believing it is both good enough to win the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival and strong enough to incite riots back home.

“I did not make this movie to incite riots; that’s the thing people are going to hang me for,” Lee said, shortly before a press conference Friday. “I do not think that black people will watch this movie and come out wanting to tear things up.”

At the press conference, Lee got a huge ovation--a rare show of appreciation from the international body of reporters and critics--then was asked to defend an ambiguous ending that seems to condone violence.

“I’m not Jesus, I don’t have any solutions,” Lee said. “All I can do is show the problem so we can talk about it.”

“Do the Right Thing,” a $6-million film set for release in the United States by Universal on June 30, is an anatomy of a riot--one day on one block in one racially tense neighborhood when the temperature and the temperaments both soar above 100.

Lee, the film’s writer, director, producer and star, said the story was inspired by the 1986 Howard Beach incident, in which a young black man was killed by a car while fleeing from whites chasing him with baseball bats and tree limbs.

“There’s no doubt in my mind there would have been a riot that night if it had happened in the summer,” Lee said. “In fact, it happened in the dead of winter when no one was on the street.”

For “Do the Right Thing,” Lee took the basic outline of the Howard Beach incident, plus elements from a separate event where a black youth was killed by police, and set his story around a family pizzeria that serves as the social hub of the neighborhood.

The first two-thirds of the movie is a funny and effective street comedy, following an array of locals around the neighborhood. Among them are: Sal (Danny Aiello) and his two bickering sons; Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), a homeless philosopher living in the past; Mother-Sister (Ruby Dee), the neighborhood matriarch; Mookie (Lee), the aimless pizza delivery man who lives for his paydays; and two angry youths--Buggin Out and Radio Raheam, who wears “LOVE-HATE” brass knuckles and carries a ghetto blaster that is constantly blowing out the song “Fight the Power.”

There’s also Mister Senior Love Daddy, a radio deejay who does his show from a bay-window perch that gives him a view of the block and the trouble that’s brewing there.

What Mister Senior Love Daddy sees in the street is as unsettling a dramatic conclusion as any major studio has ever paid for, and Universal Pictures, which spent last summer defending its release of Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” may spend this summer defending the timing of “Do the Right Thing.”

“People are going to walk out of theaters across America and throw trash cans through pizzeria windows, there’s no doubt about it,” said one American distributor who expressed concern about opening the film in certain markets. “It’s a great movie, but it’s coming out at a very questionable time.”

Universal Pictures disagrees.

“The film will only get heat if (the media) make it so,” said Tom Pollock, the head of Universal Pictures, and the man who gave the green light to “The Last Temptation of Christ” and Lee’s movie. “I don’t think movies cause incidents. Incidents cause incidents.”

Pollock said Cannes’ invitation to screen “Do the Right Thing” in competition actually pushed the opening date forward. It was originally set to open later in the summer, he said. It will now open in more than 300 theaters for the long July Fourth weekend.

Pollock said the studio encountered no exhibition resistance to the timing of the film’s release.

Lee said “Do the Right Thing” was always meant to be a summer movie. “It’s set in the summer, we made it in the summer, and people go to movies in summer,” he said.

What is most likely to put “Do the Right Thing” on the editorial pages at home is the positioning and language of two quotes--one from Martin Luther King Jr., the other from Malcolm X--that end the movie. King’s quote addresses the futility of violence; Malcolm X gets the last word, saying that violence in self-defense is “intelligence.”

“I’m leaning now more toward the words of Malcolm X than King,” Lee said. “Nonviolence had its time. . . . Now, when you’re getting hit upside the head with a brick, I don’t think young black America is just going to turn a cheek and say, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ ”

There’s another agenda to the timing of “Do the Right Thing,” as far as Lee is concerned. New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom Lee blames for much of the racial tension in the city, is up for reelection this fall, and Lee said he wouldn’t mind if the film helps him get defeated.

Pollock said Universal sought Lee out and gave him creative control over “Do the Right Thing” because the studio is confident that it can make money with him.

“We’re not some crusading studio out looking for social issues,” Pollock said. “Spike is interested in the subject matter, and so are we. . . . But we can’t afford to make movies if we can’t make money on them.”

Pollock said Lee’s first two films--”She’s Gotta Have It,” made independently for $175,000, and “School Daze,” a $6-million Columbia Picture--both made money.

The only parallel Pollock was willing to acknowledge between “Do the Right Thing” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” is that they were both made by “talented, opinionated, passionate film makers with their own unique visions about the movies that they make.

“I think it’s one of the obligations of our industry to support the most talented film makers.”

The articulate, outspoken Lee seems primed to use his forum from “Do the Right Thing” to give a black perspective of racial issues that, in film at least, are usually filtered through white points of view. At the press conference, he brought up both Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple” and Alan Parker’s “Mississippi Burning” as examples of black-themed stories distorted by white directors attempting to appeal to white audiences.

Justifying the unresolved ending of “Do the Right Thing,” Lee said, “It would have been a lie to have a Steven Spielberg ending where we’re all holding hands singing, ‘We Are the World.’ I don’t think I should be criticized for making a film from the point of view of a black director.”

Lee also lashed out at the white press for exacerbating racial tension with subconscious racism. Asked at the press conference about the absence of drugs in the movie, he shot back, “Drugs are everywhere. How many of you journalists went to ‘Rain Man’ and ‘Working Girl’ and said, ‘Where are the drugs?’ This movie is not about drugs. . . . The question shows what you think about blacks.”

“Do the Right Thing” is sure to draw comparisons to Dennis Hopper’s “Colors,” which dealt with gang warfare in Los Angeles and prompted some incidents. Lee said the comparison was unfair.

“ ‘Colors’ was much more inflammatory. It really exploited the whole subject matter,” Lee told The Times. “This film does not exploit the issue. It just shows it the way it is.”

Lee also cited the recent incident where a gang of youths beat and raped a white woman jogging in Central Park. The event was a continuing Page 1 story in the New York press, Lee said, while the rape and death of a black woman a few days later was relegated “to Page 28.” “No rape is OK, but you always see this mentality among editors that a black life is not important,” he said.

Lee is very good at describing the events that are polarizing urban neighborhoods and threatening to break into new waves of racial violence. The question is whether in showing so many people in “Do the Right Thing” doing the wrong things is he going to provoke the kind of productive discussions he says he wants, or merely drive the summer’s urban temperatures up even higher?

“I’ll go on the record right now saying that whatever happens I won’t shrink from the responsibility,” Lee said. “You can’t predict the effect of any film.”