Filmmaker (or is it former filmmaker?) Spike Lee holds a special place in the darkest recesses of many Bostonians’ hearts for the way he went after Larry Bird in the 1980’s. The color of Bird’s skin in Lee’s eyes made him somehow illegitimate, a view that Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan among others vehemently disagreed with. Lee’s kind of skin-color uber alles philosophy has often had him careen from the obscene to the obtuse. Thus, it was a tremendous delight to see none other than Dirty Harry put Lee in his place in a Guardian interview:
Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. “Has he ever studied the history?” he asks, in that familiar near-whisper. The “he” is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood’s movie and told reporters: “That was his version. The negro version did not exist.” Eastwood has no time for Lee’s gripes. “He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else.” As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.” Eastwood pauses, deliberately – once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho – and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. “A guy like him should shut his face.”
One other nugget from the story concerning a showbiz legend is also worth noting:
John Wayne had turned “Dirty Harry” down, as had Steve McQueen, Robert Mitchum and various others. Frank Sinatra was set to star until, according to showbiz lore, tendonitis in his wrist prevented him from handling the Magnum’s heavy recoil. “Probably just bulls**it,” says Eastwood.
