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"Spike Lee shocks with wild race tale. Edgy 'Bamboozled' pushes satire to its limits," by David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 6, 2000
A friend of mine once likened a Spike Lee movie to an overloaded truck. It's piled too high, it's going too fast, it tilts precariously as it speeds around the bends, and sometimes it hops the curb and sends pedestrians running for their lives. But it's exciting to watch, your eyes are riveted to its every move, and you have to admit you've never seen anything like it. Lee outdoes himself in his new picture, "Bamboozled," which is like several of those overloaded trucks piled on top of one another. By any conventional standard, it's an overstuffed, overambitious jumble. Yet it has more pungent themes, and takes more cinematic risks, than any other movie on the current scene. It's a vintage Lee production: sometimes brilliant, frequently infuriating, never dull, and so jammed with provocative ideas that you're uncertain whether to yell "Right on!" or throw your popcorn at the screen.
Damon Wayans plays Pierre Delacroix, an African-American writer who's determined to turn his creative talent and Ivy League education into a successful media career. He's taken a job at a cable TV network with perilously low ratings. A bold new concept is needed in a hurry to reverse its slide. Pierre decides he has two options: present his bosses with the wildest idea he can dream up - on the theory that only an aggressive gamble can save this rapidly sinking ship - or make the ship sink even faster, but save his own skin, by getting fired before it goes down for good. He puts both plans into operation by designing a show so outrageously awful that the network will self-destruct, and he'll watch the disaster from the safety of his next job. It's the idea Pierre pitches that makes "Bamboozled" such an audacious satire. The entertainment industry has made a fortune by exploiting African- Americans through demeaning images, he reasons. So he'll reach directly into that long, disheartening heritage and steal its most shameless tricks. Hiring a couple of gifted black performers, he makes them conspicuously blacker - with large dollops of burnt-cork makeup - and christens their act "The New Millennium Minstrel Show," surrounding them with every humiliating cliché he can find. Surely this travesty will crash in the ratings, the offending network will zoom into oblivion, and Pierre will move on to more meaningful projects? Just the opposite: The show is a smash, racist images and epithets become the hottest thing in entertainment, and Pierre finds himself the most controversial guy in town.
Lee says "Bamboozled" was inspired by "Network" (1976) and "A Face in the Crowd" (1957), two classics of media-minded cinema. He must also have thought of Mel Brooks's farce "The Producers" (1968), about two Jewish con artists who stage an outlandish show ("Springtime for Hitler") that foils their swindle by becoming a box-office hit. What sets "Bamboozled" apart from these precedents is Lee's willingness to push his satire beyond ordinary limits of taste. Scene after scene mixes in-your-face comedy with over-the-top plot twists and outspoken social commentary, and Lee backs it all up with a barrage of film clips and other artifacts with blatantly racist messages - that makes the movie as impossible to dismiss as it is disturbing to watch. "Bamboozled" is a unique blend of history and hysteria. Is it entertaining, or educational, or both, or neither? How willing are you to engage with a filmmaker who insists on following his convictions to extreme conclusions?
The picture's box-office prospects may benefit from its raucous humor and first-rate cast: Wayans as the protagonist, Jada Pinkett-Smith as his assistant, Savion Glover as the minstrel-show star, and Michael Rapaport as the network chief. But its long-run significance rests on the dead-serious themes beneath its flamboyant surface. Whatever you think of Lee's provocations, remember that the title comes from his hero Malcolm X, in a speech we hear within the movie. "You've been hoodwinked," the black leader tells his listeners about their treatment by mainstream society. "You've been had. You've been took. You've been led astray, led amok. You've been bamboozled." Are the shock tactics of "Bamboozled" bamboozling us in turn? Or is Lee opening our eyes in ways no commercial filmmaker has ever tried before? That's for every viewer to decide - and if enough spectators take up the challenge, the coming debate will be as invigorating as anything on the screen itself.
Rated R; contains violence, vulgarity, and large amounts of racist imagery and language.
"Bamboozled: Just Brilliant," by Lou Lumenick, New York Post, October 6, 2000
George S. Kaufman famously defined satire as "something that closes on a Saturday night." "Bamboozled" opens with a more technical definition - but even that seems utterly inadequate to describe the ferocious comic style of Spike Lee's incendiary and brilliant new film. Put simply, it's an utterly devastating commentary on contemporary "black" show business - and how people of all races respond to it. Harvard-educated Pierre Delacroix (a dead-perfect Damon Wayans), the sole black writer for a struggling UPN-style network, is so determinedly assimilationist, he's changed his accent and his name. His proposal for a gentle, "Cosby"-style sitcom is rejected and he's ordered to come up with something more "edgy." Dela, as he's called, channels his anger into a proposal for a variety program modeled directly on the minstrel shows that were a staple of American culture for a century, until about 50 years ago. Stereotypically depicting blacks as stupid and lazy will be acceptable to people of color, he facetiously argues, because they will be played not by whites - but by blacks wearing burnt-cork blackface makeup. Dela expects to be fired, but to his amazement, he's put in charge of producing the show. He recruits two penniless street performers who are so desperate for work, they eagerly debase themselves, allowing Dela to rename them Mantan (Savion Glover) and Sleep N Eat (Tommy Davidson), after two black Hollywood actors of the '30s notorious for their eyeballing-rolling, shuffling portrayals. "Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show" depicts its characters (among them Topsy and Aunt Jemima) in the crudest possible situations, with no offensive archetype, watermelon patch or chicken coop left unturned. Of course, it becomes a huge ratings hit, inspiring a blackface revival among white viewers, as well as people of color. The nonplused Dela is soon under pressure to make the show even more outrageous, even as his black secretary, Sloan (Jada Pinkett-Smith), tries to prick his conscience and the Rev. Al Sharpton (playing himself) marches on the network to protest.
"Bamboozled," which takes its title from a Malcolm X speech, doesn't pull punches and is likely to make audiences of every pigment very, very uncomfortable. At a screening I attended, a scene depicting white audience members nervously watching their black counterparts' reactions at a "Mantan" taping was being played out in the real audience - by whites who seemed barely less shocked at what they were seeing than the blacks did. Lee has found many targets for his blowtorch style, which fits the material perfectly. When Dela wins an Emmy, he gives it to his presenter (Matthew Modine, playing himself) and executes a moonwalk to pander to his mostly white audience, simultaneously parodying real-life acceptance stunts by Ving Rhames and Cuba Gooding Jr. Lee spares neither "In Living Color" (on which Wayans and Davidson made their reputations), suggesting it is not all that far removed from "Amos and Andy," nor black Hollywood superstars like Will Smith, his leading lady's husband.
My main quibble with "Bamboozled" (which Lee acknowledges was inspired by "Network" and "A Face in the Crowd") is the ending, which seems more predictable than the rest of the movie. Still, it's hard not to be awfully impressed as Lee, never more in control of the medium, juggles as many characters, and a whole lot more issues, than any Robert Altman film. An entire movie could be devoted to Dela's relationship with Sloan (with its Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill overtones), Sloan's defiantly illiterate rapper brother (Mos Def) or Dela's patronizing white boss (the hilarious Michael Rapaport), who gleefully boasts he's blacker than Dela is. Lee's most powerful movie since "Do the Right Thing" will confuse people, make them angry and, most important, make them think. It pushes the envelope to raise the bar - unlike, say, "Scary Movie," which merely lowers it. "Bamboozled" may not be the year's best movie, but it's undoubtedly the most important.
"Lee will not be bamboozled Other black artists are, he says," by Andy Seiler, USA Today, Oct. 5, 2000
NEW YORK -- Spike Lee has always been more than just a filmmaker. His movies raise serious issues, and he himself is a bit of a provocateur, firing off angry letters to anyone he feels distorts his work. Now comes Bamboozled (opening Friday in select cities), a Molotov cocktail of a satire that argues that popular black entertainers of today are nothing more than players in racist minstrel shows. The movie's targets vary widely, and Lee is proud to reel off some of them: ''Ving Rhames, Cuba Gooding Jr., Whoopi Goldberg, Diana Ross, Will Smith, President Clinton, Mother Teresa, malt liquor, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Johnnie Cochran, In Living Color, UPN, the WB, Quentin Tarantino, D.W. Griffith, the NAACP, athletes, rappers and myself.''
So controversial is Bamboozled, shot before Lee's The Original Kings of Comedy, that a reported 11 movie studios rejected the film before New Line Cinema agreed to put it out. Yet Lee is unbowed, unbroken and unapologetic. ''The film has been brewing for me, subliminally probably,'' he says, ''from the first day I started watching television or started going to movies.'' He considers several current TV shows appalling, including Eddie Murphy's The PJs (8:30 p.m. ET/PT Sundays, WB). ''I am not a big fan,'' Lee says. ''When you have crackheads and cockroaches coming out of toilets, and you're making fun of the whole pathology of lower-income African-Americans living in the projects, I don't see any humanity in that.''Lee realizes that sometimes actors and comedians are just trying to make a living. But he hopes that they will think about the bigger picture when choosing roles -- and that Bamboozled might nudge them into being more responsible.''You have to put stuff in context,'' he says. ''Things have happened before us that give our actions great significance. And so it is possible to be a funny African-American comedian without having to be a coon. . . . As African-American entertainers, Mantan Moreland, Hattie McDaniel and Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson didn't have a choice of the roles they picked. Today we have choices.''
The director has sometimes called on actors to explain their choices. He once asked Darryl Bell, who was in Lee's School Daze, why he signed up for the 1996 TV series Homeboys in Outer Space. ''He said, 'I needed a job,' '' Lee recalls. ''Cool. People can do what they want to do. But you've got to remember: These shows don't go away. Everything that's made now is going to be seen. All that stuff comes back.''
"Spike Lee Takes on Hollywood," by Nekesa Mumbi Moody, AP, October 4, 2000
NEW YORK (AP) - The images are painful and ugly. Depictions of blacks as lazy and shiftless, or as mammies and Uncle Toms, their faces darkened and their features exaggerated to generate laughs. The early portrayals of blacks in Hollywood - some by white actors in blackface, others by black actors in stereotypical roles - are a source of embarrassment and anger for many blacks, even decades after these images disappeared from the screen. Spike Lee's provocative new film "Bamboozled" revisits those images.
A satire of a 21st-century black minstrel show, the movie parodies the images of blacks on television and film today, and questions just how much progress blacks have made in Hollywood. "I think from my observation, black people don't want to deal with that stuff," says Lee. "It's like, `Oh, why bring that stuff up? We're trying to get away from it.' "But I think we need to deal with that stuff because it still has an effect on us today. By seeing who these people were - why were they forced to do that? What was the effect of those roles? How is it still affecting us? ... These are all things we need to ask." The movie's poster displays a cartoon image of a man with jet-black skin, ruby-red lips and a bright white smile, recalling Sambo images of the past. The New York Times refused to run the image as an advertisement for the film, asking that Lee submit a different image.
Lee has become adept at stirring up controversy with films about race, including "School Daze," "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X." "Bamboozled" is no exception. It stars Damon Wayans as Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard-educated TV writer for an upstart, struggling network. As the only black on staff, he is ordered by his white boss to come up with something black and hip - or be fired. So the frustrated Delacroix, hoping to get the boot, creates "Mantan The New Millennium Minstrel Show," a contemporary blackface comedy starring two desperate street performers, played by Savion Glover (Broadway's "Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk") and Tommy Davidson (TV's "In Living Color"). But instead of getting fired, Delacroix is celebrated for his "genius" by the white network brass, who put the show on the air and watch it become a phenomenon - with dire consequences.
Although the film is over-the-top and outlandish, Lee believes the idea of modern black minstrel shows isn't far-fetched. They already exist, he says. He won't point to any particular show, but says "the stuff is there, and (we) just hope that we start to make some headway, so when African-Americans do appear on television, it doesn't always have to be a sitcom." In the past, Lee has described Eddie Murphy's claymation comedy "The PJs" as "really hateful, I think, towards black people." The show, which debuted on Fox and is now on the WB network, is set in a mostly black housing project afflicted with drugs, guns and poverty. The filmmaker also was one of a number of critics, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who pounded the UPN network for "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer," a sitcom about a black English nobleman who becomes butler and adviser to President Lincoln during the Civil War. The low-rated show, which debuted during the 1998-99 television season, was quickly canceled.
As usual, when Lee talks, people listen - and tend to get upset. Comedian Jamie Foxx, who stars on the WB's "The Jamie Foxx Show," recently took offense at the 43-year-old director's general criticisms of today's black comedy hits. "With the most respect I can give him, I think he needs to back off a little," Foxx told Entertainment Weekly Online. "I think it's getting to the point where nobody cares, because he talks about it so much that now he's just become the angry guy, the angry black man." Lee called Foxx's statement "ignorant." "I did not name a show, I did not say his show was a minstrel show. ... So, I don't know why he would get all defensive," he says. "And then, for me, to say that Spike is angry - that sounds like some white person, No. 1, because black people - I think we're not angry enough, to tell you the truth. And also, anger is good."
"Bamboozled" takes its title from a speech by Malcolm X in which he said blacks in the United States had been "bamboozled" and "hoodwinked." "Being a conscious black man in this country, and seeing how we've been depicted in television and film, this film has been inside of me since I started watching television and going to movies," Lee says. For many in the cast, the film was an education on the history of blacks in Hollywood and how they were debased on film. For example, when Davidson and Glover put on blackface, they burned cork and smeared the ashes on their faces. "What was hard for Tommy and Savion was putting on that blackface," says Lee. "That was the hard part, because that is a very painful thing to do, very painful."
Lee had the cast, which includes Jada Pinkett Smith and Michael Rapaport, study old films that showed Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney - even cartoon character Bugs Bunny - wearing blackface. Rapaport says those images surprised him. "I didn't realize the extent of it. I didn't realize that's what it was, that black performers, that's what they did, and that's pretty much only what they did. I didn't realize how much it was just sort of a regular thing," he says.
In the film's closing credits, Lee tries to educate the audience as well. He shows a montage of offensive images of blacks from past films. Among those featured in the clips are Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel, comedian Stepin Fetchit and the namesake of Glover's "Bamboozled" character, Mantan Moreland. While those actors have been derided by blacks for their role in perpetuating stereotypes, Lee offers a more sympathetic view. "These were very talented people, and it's criminal that they were not able to express the full range of their talents. I mean, do you think that Bill `Bojangles' (Robinson), that in the highlights of his film career, he had to be dancing with this moppet, Shirley Temple?"These guys were great artists, but because of the times, they were confined to play that part."
On the Net: http://www.bamboozledmovie.com/
"At The Movies: 'Bamboozled'," by Christy Lemire, AP, October 4, 2000
Spike Lee definitely has something to say about the way blacks are portrayed on television in "Bamboozled." It's just not always clear what his message is. He throws so many varying images at the audience, and gets so preachy toward the end, his point seems convoluted. Thankfully, though, Lee has chosen to be a filmmaker, because no other director raises the issues he does in such a risky, thought-provoking way. "Bamboozled" stars Damon Wayans as Pierre Delacroix, an uptight, impeccably dressed, Harvard-educated network television writer - the only black writer on the staff. His brash, loudmouthed boss Dunwitty (Michael Rapaport) demands that Delacroix come up with a hip TV program about urban blacks or he'll be fired. Dunwitty says such shows about the black middle class as "The Cosby Show" are hackneyed, and wants something bold and fresh. So Delacroix goes in the completely opposite direction, creating a variety program that recalls the days when blacks wore blackface and performed in minstrel shows. "Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show" stars two dancers Delacroix has seen performing on the street in front of the network offices - Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson). It's set on an Alabama plantation, and the characters joke about watermelon, fried chicken and picking cotton - when they're not singing and dancing.
It is extremely uncomfortable to watch, both for viewers in the film itself and for those of us in the audience. Delacroix hopes his in-your-face satire will end black stereotypes. "I want them to be offended," he says. "I want to wake America up." The show sparks a few protests from the Rev. Al Sharpton and attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. But for the most part, people don't realize it's a satire, and it becomes a ratings blockbuster. Fans hound the stars for autographs. Members of the audience also wear blackface. And Delacroix is showered with accolades. This is when the film gets seriously heavy-handed. Lee's movies, including "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X," often reach a boiling point. Here, egos spiral out of control. The film gets bogged down in a love triangle among Delacroix, his assistant Sloan (Jada Pinkett Smith) and Manray. And a group of social revolutionaries, led by Sloan's rapper brother named Big Black Africa (Mos Def), plot to overthrow the show. After starting as a comedy, the film's increased tension and violent shift in tone cause confusion. What exactly is Lee trying to say? That blacks have been portrayed in limited ways in popular culture? This is true. But his preachiness - capped by an overlong montage showing the ways black performers have been demeaned over the years on film and television - only erode his message. There is no subtlety in his satire, so the audience walks away feeling beaten down, not enlightened.
"Bamboozled" is always visually interesting, though. Lee shot the movie using digital cameras in a verite style, so it feels like we're eavesdropping on the network executives and entertainers. And Lee, who wrote and directed, draws some strong performances from a talented cast. Smith is always solid, at first as the voice of reason and later as she falls for Manray and loses her sense of self. Rapaport gives a bold performance as a white man who thinks he has embraced black culture by marrying a black woman and hanging giant photos of Mike Tyson and Michael Jordan in his office. His role is one of the most difficult because he has to strike a balance between being offensive and being funny. For Wayans, who made his name in comedy on the TV show "In Living Color" and about two dozen films, this is a major departure, a rare chance at a dramatic part. Unfortunately, his forced, elitist accent and stiff performance undermine him.
"Bamboozled," a New Line Cinema release, is rated R for strong language and some violence. Running time: 135 minutes.
Motion Picture Association of America rating definitions:
"Spike Lee?s Own Scary Movie," by Amy Taubin, Village Voice, October 4, 2000
What better title than Bamboozled for a film in which the most electrifying dance numbers since the days of Vincente Minnelli occur within an updated minstrel show and feature a tap-dancing shaman with dreadlocks flying around his corked-up black face, a fast-talking sidekick (also a black actor in minstrel makeup), and a chorus line of coons, mammies, and pickaninnies? The sequence is so deliriously transgressive, and its ironies so tricky to unpack, that it puts the preachy satiric narrative in which it's framed to shame. Bamboozled may prove to be Lee's most controversial, least commercial film. It's also a seriously schizophrenic work made up of two incompatible movies. One -- a terrifying nightmare in which the confusion between identity and stereotype leads to martyrdom and murder -- is affecting but underdeveloped, its potential undercut by the more dominant film, a justified but overly reductive attack on the television industry for its degrading representations of African Americans and on the audience that swallows the racist brew and begs for more.
Lee has never made a secret of his anger toward In Living Color. In part, Bamboozled is an act of revenge on the show and on one of its creators and stars, Damon Wayans, who's made to pay for his success in more ways than one. Lee has done Wayans no favors by casting him as Bamboozled's snobbish, confused, and cowardly protagonist, Pierre Delacroix, a Harvard-educated television writer. Pressured by his white boss (Michael Rapaport), whose blacked-up pose he despises, to write a cutting-edge series, Delacroix finds his inspiration in Amos 'n' Andy and The Jeffersons. His program, Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, set in a watermelon patch and starring "two real coons," Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat, is so tauntingly racist that he expects to be fired for insubordination. Instead, the show is a huge hit. Delacroix pockets his check, but his repressed rage and guilt drive him over the edge.
Wayans hasn't a clue how to play a character as cerebral and alienated from himself as Delacroix, and Lee gives him no help. Wayans's performance is so one-dimensional, stiff, and monotonous that it could hurt his career. It also nearly destroys the movie. As his assistant, Jada Pinkett-Smith is burdened with an unlikely character arc; she begins as the voice of moderation and ends as a combination of Cassandra and Antigone. It's a punishing role, though not as humiliating as that of Verna (Gillian Iliana Waters), the Jewish publicist (a female version of the music promoters in Mo' Better Blues) who only exists so Lee can take some anti-Semitic potshots.
If Bamboozled's primary story line is clumsy and badly acted, the subplot involving Manray (Savion Glover) and Womack (Tommy Davidson), homeless street performers who become overnight sensations when Delacroix casts them as Mantan and Sleep 'N Eat, is extremely moving and filled with possibilities. The movie comes to life in the backstage scenes, where they look at themselves in the mirror as they coat their faces with cork, paint their lips fire-engine red, and try to swallow their dismay at what they have to do to earn a living. Mantan's stardom enrages the Mau Maus, gangsta rappers with stereotypes of their own to account for. Eventually, the Mau Maus (whose members include Mos Def and Canibus) hijack the movie and turn it into a tragedy in cyberspace or maybe inside someone's psyche. Narrative consistency is not Lee's strong suit.
On the other hand, iconography is. Lee is unparalleled among American directors in his talent for seizing upon hot, subversive images and having the guts to put them on the screen. The black collectibles that line Delacroix's shelves, the montage of Hollywood classics in which racist stereotypes were taken for granted, and, most of all, the minstrel show itself make Bamboozled a scary movie indeed. For the performers -- Manray, Womack, Junebug (Paul Mooney), and Honeycutt (Thomas Jefferson Byrd), whose "niggers is a beautiful thing" routine boggles the mind -- the minstrel show is an exorcism, and their discovery that the studio audience views it as mere entertainment is the first step in their coming to consciousness.
Bamboozled itself has the feel of an exorcism. Lee, whose own hands aren't completely clean (what about the booty call in He Got Game?), gets the demons out in the open. He isn't always in control, he doesn't think through the contradictions, but he reminds you that movies have power, that they matter, and for a few brilliant moments, Bamboozled matters more than any other American movie this year.
Bamboozled
Written and directed by Spike Lee
A New Line release
Opens October 6
"Lee sticks his neck out with 'Bamboozled'," by Bob Ivry, Bergen Record, October 1, 2000
Like him or loathe him, one thing we can all agree on is this: Spike Lee has got guts. With his new film, "Bamboozled," Lee breaks all previous records for chutzpah. The movie stars Damon Wayans as Pierre Delacroix, a struggling TV comedy writer ordered to come up with a hit. His subsequent sitcom pitch, "Mantan and His New Millennium Minstrel Show," wins the approval of a grateful television network. The show stars two black actors in blackface -- Savion Glover plays Mantan, a tap-dancing fool, and Tommy Davidson is his wisecracking sidekick, Sleep 'N Eat -- and soon, their weekly televised foray into the watermelon patch, accompanied by music from the Alabama Porch Monkeys and dancing from every African-American stereotype made flesh, becomes a nationwide smash. "Mantan"-crazed fans of all colors take to wearing blackface, and soon, Delacroix, surrounded in his office by dozens of knickknacks harking back to a less politically correct time, is winning industry awards and bowing and shuffling to the delight of his peers and the television audience.
Like it or loathe it, "Bamboozled" is likely to be Lee's most provocative film in years, both for dredging up nauseating stereotypes of yesterday and for what it says about the entertainment industry today. We caught up with the beehive-busy Lee at the Madison Avenue offices of SpikeDDB, his advertising agency. Contrary to his sometimes querulous public image -- fueled by his highly visible high jinks as a Knicks courtside season-ticket holder -- Lee was affable and candid. Like Spike or loathe him, he remains an important cultural critic, someone with the guts to remark on the emperor's lack of designer clothing.
The Record: How much opposition to "Bamboozled" did you encounter from the film studios?
Lee: This is my 15th feature film, and aside from the very first, "She's Gotta Have It," for which I raised $175,000 by myself, this was the hardest film to get made. Hollywood is very funny, because they never just want to say no, because they know that OK, I don't like this one, but down the line I don't want to mess up my relationship with Spike Lee. They'll say, "Spike, if you can get Will Smith and Leonardo DiCaprio to work for scale, then we'll make it for $8 million." Which is kind of like saying, "If you can walk to the moon, and come back, then we'll make the film." Then New Line Cinema stepped up, and we knew we'd have to do it for a price. So we committed to bring it in for under $10 million.
The Record: What were the studio executives' reservations?
Lee: They're never going to be too specific -- "Too dark," "Not what we're looking for." I think they figured that the film is an attack on an industry that sends their children to school and pays for those houses in the Hamptons and Malibu. And that's just what it is.
The Record: Do you think people are aware of some of the stereotypes you deal with in "Bamboozled" -- the merry coon, the mammy, the Uncle Tom?
Lee: I think people are aware of stereotypes, but nobody, black or white, wants to revisit this stuff. I know there'll be a resistance to this film, like, "Why is Spike bringing this stuff back? That was the last century; we're in a new century, a new frontier." I think it's important that we look at this stuff. It has to be confronted. Blackface is part of American history.
The Record: "Bamboozled" seems to be ambivalent about blackface entertainment. I mean, a lot of it is funny.
Lee: That's why I think this film works so well -- it puts the viewer in a very uncomfortable position that you're not familiar with, because most films dictate to you how you should react, by the music, by the filmmaking technique. When they see this film, a black person is saying, "This is funny, but if I laugh, am I giving power to these stereotypical images?" And a white person might say, "If I laugh, will this black person sitting next to me think I'm insensitive?"
The Record: "Bamboozled" ends with a montage of film performances by stereotypical black characters out of the past. How do you feel about black film actors like the shuffling servant Stepin Fetchit and the bug-eyed Mantan Moreland, who were forced to perpetuate those horrible stereotypes?
Lee: I'm going to be honest. Ten years back, I thought Stepin Fetchit was an Uncle Tom. But I've evolved on this issue. I'm getting older, I'm becoming more mature, I've come to understand that unlike us today, they didn't have a choice. And these guys were good artists. Mantan Moreland, that guy was funny. Bill Bojangles -- I don't think it was his choice to spend the best years of his life dancing with Shirley Temple, you know, this 5-year-old mop head. Hattie McDaniel had the famous quote, "It's better to play a maid than be a maid." So, I've gained a much greater understanding of performers like that. But nowadays we have choices -- at least, more choices than Mantan Moreland or Stepin Fetchit.
The Record: "Bamboozled" begs the question: Are there minstrel shows out there, still, today?
Lee: I think we're experiencing 21st century forms of minstrel shows. I think a lot of these rap videos have evolved into minstrel shows. I think it's possible to say some of these television shows today are at least borderline minstrel shows. You don't need blackface. That's the point. There's a line Tommy Davidson has in "Bamboozled": "It's the same old [stuff], they're just bringing it back around." They just took the blackface off.
The Record: Any specific videos or TV shows you'd care to name?
Lee: No. I don't think it does anybody any good to say, "Spike Lee says such-and-such on TV today is a minstrel show."
The Record: Would you say the opportunities open to African-American entertainers today make these contemporary minstrels more culpable than folks like Stepin Fetchit?
Lee: I would hold today's artists to a higher standard. And I include myself.
The Record: "Bamboozled" is not an easy film. How do you think people will react to it?
Lee: I came to the realization when I decided to write this script that it's going to be very hard for people to be indifferent about it. But I think the film is so powerful that even when people don't like it, they'll still tell their friends to see it. Because it provokes emotions and discussion about the power of images and the history of America.
The Record: How important are those images?
Lee: The United States of America hasn't become the greatest power in the history of civilization because of its nuclear weapons. Movies, TV, rock-and-roll, rap, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Levi's, Mickey Mouse -- that is why America is the world power. Our pop culture is why we dominate the world, not because of nuclear bombs. We still live with hurtful stereotypical images, and that's why I think "Bamboozled" is important.
The Record: Because you're such a huge Knicks fan, I'd be remiss if I didn't get your reaction to the Patrick Ewing trade.
Lee: I think it's really sad that the newspapers and WFAN ran Patrick out of town. How could he come back to New York after he saw the headline, "Good Riddance"? He's the best player the Knicks ever had. For the first time, I'm looking at the money I spend for season tickets.
The Record: You mean it's possible you'll no longer be prowling the sidelines, making life miserable for Reggie Miller, et al.?
Lee: That's right.