HE'S GOTTA HAVE IT..

Spike Lee's new movie has already generated hundreds of column inches in US papers. Why?

Because it's about a notorious real-life serial killer.

Is the director courting controversy to revive his flagging career? ROGER CLARKE reports NOBODY likes Spike Lee these days - not even serial killers. Convicted "Son of Sam" murderer David Berkowitz may be the subject of Lee's latest controversial movie Summer of Sam, but last week he slammed into the New York filmmaker for his ruthless exploitation of other people's misery. "The ugliness of the past is resurfacing again," announced dumpy ex-postal worker Berkowitz, with somewhat reptilian piety. "And all because some people want to make money." But the truth is that Lee will be rubbing his hands at this fresh piece of publicity. A quick look at his actions and pronouncements over the past year show a completely cold-hearted determination to make sure Summer of Sam isn't his fifth flop in a row. It's make-or-break time for 42- year- old Spike Lee. And he'll do anything, court the rankest kind of notoriety, to stay on top. He got off to a flying start. Press coverage began with angry families picketing outside the casting session for Summer of Sam in July 1998 and has not let up since. The voluble father of one of Berkowitz's six victims (18-year-old Donna Lauria) quickly put himself forward as Lee's chief nemesis, trying to force his way towards Lee in one public confrontation, and being bustled away by minders. Lee claimed he had genuine reasons for choosing the subject matter of the movie. "The summer of '77 was the turning point of my life," he declared. "It's when I decided to make films." And, after all, he was always being criticised for making all- black movies. Summer of Sam is also Lee's big chance to make a "Scorsese" film, a homage to one of his idols, set firmly in the Italian-American community. But there are murkier reasons for the genesis of Summer of Sam. After the triumph of his 1992 $40 million epic Malcolm X, his directorial career has been in irremediable decline: Crooklyn, Clockers, Girl 6 and finally Get on the Bus (made for a paltry $2.8 million) all bombed at the box office. As if to underline this in 1996 - the year of Get on the Bus Lee set up an advertising agency with DDB Needham. Though he was known for making MTV videos and ads for Nike and Snapple, this was a step backwards in anyone's book. "I don't make a delineation between feature films, music videos and commercials," he claimed defensively. But after a two-year directorial hiatus, he wants his comeback really to count for something. With bantam-like ferocity he set out to raise his profile just before filming began with a savage attack on the "racism" of Quentin Tarantino (rebuffed by a scornful Samuel L Jackson: "I don't like his portrayal of black people," he said of Lee). Throughout the filming of Summer of Sam in the Bronx, it continued to attract massive press. The shoots were continually picketed, though the director claimed he was being sensitive to the families of the murdered by avoiding the actual sites of the deaths (only by a block or so). "The film in no way, shape or form is exploiting the victims or glamorising Son of Sam," snapped Lee as the criticisms grew. By the time the film wrapped, many of the extras went to the press claiming they hadn't been paid. More column inches in the dailies. Then the board of Disney suddenly realised its subsidary Miramax had just made two very controversial films (the other being the Roman Catholic satire Dogma) at a time when it was under siege from the religious Right. Further press comment. But for all its much-vaunted distress, Disney (catching the Lee bug) will still release the film with one of the nastiest publicity campaigns ever devised - linking local serial killers to the country or city of release. A lawyer for the families of the Paul Bernardo killings in Canada has protested to the company over marketing plans for Summer of Sam's Canadian release; and the denizens of LA will find that their homegrown Hillside Strangler also appears in the film's advertising. It's hard not to see a pattern, a continual need to be in the papers. Back in April, Lee conducted an ostentatious public spat with the LA Times, absurdly claiming to have been "led astray, hoodwinked and bamboozled" when a journalist wrote about the film after an early screening. And then in May, black actor James Earl Jones obligingly laid into the director in Movieline magazine, calling him a "master gamesman" and claiming: "He says all that bullshit because he knows it will get in the Press." He certainly knew it would get in the Press when, at Cannes to plug Summer of Sam, middle-class college boy Lee suggested that an antidote to Charlton Heston's defence of US gun laws would be to "shoot him - with a .44 calibre Bulldog". Heston was unmoved by Lee's posturing. The Leader of the House of Representatives issued a terse statement condemning Lee's remarks and demanding he apologise. It got Lee, once again, a huge amount of coverage in the US. Now the New York Times has run an interview with Berkowitz from the Sullivan Correctional Facility in the Catskills, and it seems the hype surrounding the film will go on and on. By all accounts, Berkowitz hated the published interview (he felt it falsely suggested he was closely monitoring Lee and his family). Spike Lee is certainly not going to take it lying down. But one thing is for sure - he has succeeded from the outset in making this a talked-about film, one that will put him back on the map. But will it be big bucks for Spike? Its NC-17 rating (equivalent to the British 18 certificate) means very limited distribution. Not even Natural Born Killers had such a high rating. Spike Lee is unrepentant. Pugnacious, even. When he was asked in Cannes about Donna Lauria's angry father he merely shrugged and said: "He lost his daughter - she died violently. There's nothing I can say that will bring her back." It's an odd note of fatalism in a man who is not fatalistic by nature; and it's one final, stark indication of the self-publicising lengths to which Spike Lee the man will go over Spike Lee the artist. A SPIKE-Y LIFE Born in Atlanta, but raised in Brooklyn, Shelton Lee made his first movie in the summer of 1977, during a college holiday. According to Lee, Last Hustle in Brooklyn was "really like a highlight film of black people and Puerto Rican people looting and dancing". Lee has never been part of the filmmaking Establishment. While a film student, he produced a movie called Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, which won him the first of the many awards he would subsequently acquire. In the wake of this success, he joined the William Morris agency but failed to break into a major studio. At that point, he said, he knew he'd have to go independent. "I thought that now I had this plaque on top of my television that Columbia, Warner Brothers, Fox, Universal, Spielberg, Lucas, they would call me. So I just sat by the phone and sat by the phone some more. That's when the phone got cut off." Do the Right Thing was Lee's breakthrough film, though his first feature, She's Gotta Have It, earned him the tag "the black Woody Allen". Quickly, Lee established himself as a stylish chronicler of inner- city black life. He says, however: "I've never really thought of myself as a spokesperson for 35 million African-Americans All my views are solely my views, and I think that there are African- American people who agree with me, but we also have African- Americans who don't agree It is a fallacy that all my critics are white." His outspoken criticism of Hollywood's treatment of black artists was widely thought to have cost him a Best Director Oscar for Malcolm X in 1992. Lee, 42, has written six books (including Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Film Making), owns his own production company and record company, and is a fanatical supporter of the New York Knicks baseball team. Spike Lee returns to the Seventies for Summer of Sam: Bebe Neuwirth and John Leguizamo read the news Spike Lee say she'snot "exploiting the victims or glamorising Son o fSam" Lee'schance to make a film set in Scorsese territory: John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino in Summer of Sam

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.