Spike Gets Personal : Relationships rather than racial conflict is the focus of his ‘Mo’ Better Blues’

A year ago, as his controversial “Do the Right Thing” was being released, filmmaker Spike Lee spent an exhausting month on the road, publicizing the movie, but more importantly trying to correct the impression of himself and the film that had emerged from the Cannes Film Festival.

There were warnings from the festival that there would be riots in the street when “Do the Right Thing” was shown at home, and in some of the reports there was a clear implication that Lee was an angry, trouble-making racist. No riots occurred, and a cooler, more detached look at the film made clear that it was in fact a call for compassion and understanding, not a shout for violence, even though there was violence in the story.

The critical and commercial success of “Do the Right Thing” confirmed the emergence of Lee as an important, quirky, tough-minded and fiercely individual American filmmaker. In interviews he tended to reveal himself as the sensitive and perceptive observer he is, but with brief defensive shifts to the stance of a street-wise fighter when the questions seemed hostile.

The reports from Cannes, Lee remarked during a luncheon here a few days ago, were blessings in disguise, making “Do the Right Thing” a cause celebre in a way that more conservative estimates of the film might not have.

The notoriety made him a celebrity, always a useful commodity when the independent filmmaker deals with Hollywood but wants to hang on to his independence. Lee won’t have to hit the road to explain who is he, or where he’s coming from, in connection with his new film, “Mo’ Better Blues.”

“Spike performs a real high-wire act,” says his friend Jim Jarmusch, another independent filmmaker (“Mystery Train”) who has known Lee since they were both at the New York University film school. “I’m amazed by his ability to work with a major studio (Universal) but still keep his independence. You think of Woody Allen, but his free hand has come after quite a few films. There aren’t many other filmmakers in the same situation, and for a young black filmmaker, it’s just remarkable.”

Another NYU film school alumnus, Martin Scorsese, remembers that after a screening of his “After Hours,” “A young guy came up to me and said that he admired my work. He said his name was Spike Lee and that I’d be hearing from him. That was just before ‘She’s Gotta Have It.’ ”

By now, Scorsese says, “It’s obvious that Spike is the first really, really important modern black filmmaker. He’s caught a certain important kind of truth about urban life, the truth as he sees it. I don’t think anyone has done it before in the way he does it. There are other good black picture-makers--Gordon Parks is one--but this guy goes right to the heart of what he finds in his world.”

Last Sunday in Brooklyn, Lee launched Spike’s Joint, a retail store that will sell his line of T-shirts. “As soon as I started making films, I knew I wanted to make T-shirts to promote them,” Lee says. They became so popular that filling orders disrupted the business of filmmaking at his Forty Acres and a Mule production offices. Thus the new store.

“Mo’ Better Blues” is a sharp change from “Do the Right Thing.” It’s a film about a young jazz trumpeter, played by Denzel Washington (“Cry Freedom,” “Glory”) whose conflicts are not racial but between his music and the two women in his life. The only significant white characters are the Flatbush brothers who run a jazz club and are seen very satirically indeed. But the film’s significant figures, good and bad, are black, including Lee himself as a talent agent who is a compulsive gambler and no help at all to his client.

Although Lee himself never played an instrument he grew up in a jazz environment. His father, Bill Lee, is a bassist-arranger-composer who has done music for all of his son’s films. Spike has also made a number of music videos, including one for Miles Davis. (The trumpet player in the movie names his son Miles.)

But it is a later jazz world even than Davis’, and much later than Charlie Parker’s in “Bird” or Dexter Gordon’s in “‘Round Midnight.” Lee admires the spirit and the effort that went into those films and is glad they exist, but he also believes that both Clint Eastwood and Bertrand Tavernier missed their targets.

“ ‘Bird’ was supposed to be one of the funniest and most charming guys around, but you didn’t get that,” Lee says. Nor, he thinks, was Parker’s basic and important contribution to jazz was really made clear.

Both films majored in the drugs and the alcohol that were once a part of the musical life, and that day has largely passed, Lee argues--the lesson having been learned that hard drugs and hard liquor didn’t really help the music. “They used to think they had to get high to play better. The new musicians don’t think that any more. Branford Marsalis (whose quartet plays the music on the soundtrack), Wynton Marsalis and players like them don’t do drugs, don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t get high, period.”

Bleek Gilliam, the young black man with a horn, is fictional. “That freed me up,” Lee says. His “Mo’ Better Blues” departs from most of the conventions of jazz movies, insofar as they’ve developed in the limited number of films there’ve been about the music. Lee, a great sports fan, says the inspiration for the plot of “Mo’ Better Blues” came as much from sports as from music.

“I’ve always been fascinated by athletes who spend years getting to their peak, getting to the big time, and then tear a rotator cup or wreck their knees or develop bone chips, and then have to fight their way back, if they can. Think about Danny Manning of the Clippers, guys like him. If they can’t come back, what do they do with the rest of their lives? How do they adjust and go on?”

His trumpet player is severely wounded in the face and the lips in the film’s brief but grisly moments of violence, and the question is whether he will make it back or what he will have learned about life and relationships from the experience.

It’s a far cry from “Do the Right Thing,” but that’s the whole idea, Lee says. “I never want to repeat myself. ‘School Daze’ wasn’t ‘She’s Gotta Have It,’ and ‘Do the Right Thing’ wasn’t either of them.” Budgeted at $10 million, “Mo’ Better Blues” is the most expensive film Lee has made.

In the new film a successful young black architect (played by Wesley Snipes, the tenor and soprano sax man in “Mo’ Better Blues”) falls in love with an Italian woman from Bensonhurt in Brooklyn. “ ‘Do the Right Thing’ was about race,” Lee says. “ ‘Jungle Fever’ is about race, class and sex. Much more combustible,” he adds with a challenging smile. “An explosive combination.”

The couple’s struggle, says Lee, is to preserve their relationship in the face of all the hell that breaks loose in his world, and hers. Those who may find “Mo’ Better Blues” sharply less confrontational than “Do the Right Thing” appear likely to see Lee’s acute view of a society in conflict reaffirmed next time.

Lee says that from a difficult start he has achieved the best of both filmmaking worlds. “I can make the film I want to make, and use the people I want to use. I don’t have to spend three or four years trying to scrape up the money to make a film. And I’ve got the marketing and distribution power of a major studio to help me.”

He uses an enormous crew, deliberately, to give experience and a credit to as many young people as he can. “I was a young film student once, trying to get on a feature, trying to get experience. I’d watch the filmmaking and I’d say, ‘Hey, that’s what we’re doing on our student films. Bigger scale, maybe, but the same things.’ It gave you confidence that you could do it.”

Making films wasn’t a childhood dream. “I didn’t know people actually made films; I just went to see them. To me Hollywood was so mythical, so mystifying. You had the feeling there was a secret order, a lot of hocus-pocus stuff nobody else could do.”

That was (relatively) long ago. Now Lee has built his own loyal cadre, people he works with each time out, like cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, editor Sam Pollard and production designer Wynn Thomas. It is also a family affair, including not only father Bill, but sister Joie (pronounce Zwah, as in joie de vivre ) who plays one of the two women in the trumpet-player’s life. (The other is newcomer Cynda Williams from Chicago.) Brother David shoots production stills. Another brother, Cinque (pronounced Cin-kay) is also a filmmaking writer-producer who played the bellhop working with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in Jim Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train.” He also acted briefly in “School Daze.”

(“Cinque is quite different from Spike; his scripts are almost surrealistic,” Jarmusch says. Thus far Cinque has made short films, but hasn’t had a chance to do a feature.)

“We’re efficient,” Lee says of his team, “and none of us are resting on our laurels. Each time we have to be better than the last time, improve our craft. Ernest’s photography in ‘Mo’ Better Blues’ is the best he’s ever done.”

By now Lee, Born Shelton Jackson Lee, has become not just a celebrity but a hero figure in the black community. “After the Oscars, people came to me and said, ‘The hell with the Academy, we’re behind you.’ That meant a lot to me. I saw the pride you get when one of us sneaks through the cracks in the walls and makes it, against the odds.”