By Darrell L. Hope
Photos by David Lee ©2000 New Line Cinema

Spike Lee (left) with Damon Wayans during rehearsals.

When Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee burst onto the independent film scene with 1986's She's Gotta Have It, the film world welcomed his fresh new perspective with the Independent Spirit Award, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award and the Young Cinema Award from the Cannes Film Festival. Lee quickly followed through on that early promise with a string of critically lauded films including the Oscar, Cannes and Golden Globe-nominated Do the Right Thing, the Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear-nominated Malcolm X, the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion-nominated Clockers and the Oscar- and Emmy-nominated documentary Four Little Girls.

Over the years through the 21 projects he has helmed, Lee has refined his cinematic technique by choosing to do a variety of different types of projects including features, documentaries, shorts and commercials. However, the constant through-line of his major works has been his tendency to veer toward material that a lot of the mainstream would deem either thought provoking or confrontational, and usually a bit of both. Often the media impression of his career makes it seem as though each new Spike Lee release can be used as an ersatz barometer for the state of American race relations. But just as his films do not flinch from controversy, neither does Lee, which brings us to his latest feature, Bamboozled.

Bamboozled is Lee's scathing satire of the way minorities have been and are projected in the American media. The film tells the story of Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans), an Ivy League-educated African-American writer for a flailing minor network whose white boss (Michael Rapaport) continually rejects his ideas for shows built around the black upper-middle class. To prove a point, Delacroix dredges up the most offensive idea he can, a modern minstrel show set in an antebellum southern watermelon patch, replete with actors (Savion Glover, Tommy Davidson, Thomas Jefferson Byrd) in blackface makeup. To his initial shock and dismay, the show is not only accepted, it becomes a major hit. As his star rises, Delacroix's assistant, Sloane (Jada Pinkett-Smith), realizes that little by little her boss is trading his (no pun intended) soul for fame and power. And in the end, although he thought to bamboozle the powers that be, Delacroix discovers to his horror that he has in fact bamboozled himself. Drawing from an embarrassingly rich array of racist imagery of African-Americans from the past, Lee's film casts a satirical, yet critical eye over the present and into the future, while proffering the question, has any real progress been made?

Wayans with a shameful prop from the past

"The germ for this story started when I began to go see films at an early age in Brooklyn, New York," said Lee. "My siblings and I were not allowed to watch live television. Even at that young age, I think that everybody was influenced by the media and being raised the way we were in our household, we were told of the negative images that had been made in the past and currently. We were not allowed to watch a Tarzan film. My parents told me that we built the pyramids, we built the Sphinx and we weren't walking around with grass skirts and rings and bones through our noses saying, 'Ooga booga.' I remember very early on my mother telling me Cleopatra did not look like Elizabeth Taylor.

"Bamboozled came about because I was thinking about the end of this century and moving into the next. I have often been disappointed by the limited ways that people of color have been portrayed, depicted and often rewritten out of history. This seemed an appropriate time to think about the next hundred years of media. Looking around at the current content of movies and TV shows, I saw that the minstrel show is still very much with us. In my opinion, the only thing Delacroix's show is doing different from some actual shows on television is putting blackface on the actors."

Lee has no doubt that there will be strong reactions from all quarters regarding Bamboozled. In a world where the battle lines between creative freedom, censorship and political correctness are constantly redrawn, a lot of Bamboozled's imagery will no doubt inspire both unease and deep thought even amongst people of color.

"I think this film is very hard for anyone to sit on the fence about," said Lee. "The images really disturb some people and other people who understand the history don't have a problem with the images the way they're used within the context of the movie. This is very clearly satire. But this is also one of the topics where once you learn the real history, it raises some uneasy feelings."

To capture those images, Lee chose to split the production up between film and digital video. "Ninety percent was shot in mini-DV with a Sony VX-1000 digital camera. We had a seven-week schedule so we had to shoot with a lot of cameras and be able to move very fast." Lee says that at some points of the production he would have as many as 15 cameras rolling at the same time. "We had a ton of coverage." For the other ten percent of Bamboozled, which depicted the actual "Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show," Lee chose a different technique. "We wanted to have a different look between the show and the rest of the movie so that was shot on Super 16. It was an aesthetic choice that, El [director of photography Ellen Kuras] and I felt would be a good look. Both were blown up to 35mm in Switzerland at this effects house called Swiss Effects."

Lee (right) prepares scene for Bamboozled.

With so many cameras rolling at once, Lee had a plethora of choices to make in the editing bay. "We were editing while we were going. Sam Pollard and Barry Brown cut the film, and these are editors I have been working with since my second feature, School Daze. But this is the first film that we edited on an AVID. Everything else has been cut on a 35mm flatbed Steambeck. I like film. I've cut commercials and music videos on an AVID, but then gone back to the Steambeck. I'm just convinced that the ease of the AVID makes you cut more."

But long before any film reached the cutting room, Lee needed to find players to bring his story to life. Although the majority of the cast had major credits on their résumés, Lee also brought some fresh faces into the mix including hip-hop artist Mos Def who portrays Sloane's radical brother Julius who serves as her inconstant moral compass. To prepare both his experienced and less experienced cast members for making the film, Lee had a two-week rehearsal period. "We always have rehearsal on my films. I just try to make them feel a part of the process and let them feel that they can contribute. I want them to feel at ease; I want them to feel comfortable and just do what they do. They have a special quality. If they didn't have that, they would not have gotten cast.

"These two weeks were spent not just going over the text but really trying to absorb as much as we could about this whole thing. I found that a lot of the cast had never seen the historical footage before. They had never seen Judy Garland or Mickey Rooney in blackface. They had never seen Bugs Bunny in blackface. They weren't aware of the depths of degradation in cartoons, movies and TV shows, the misrepresentation of a people. Now people look at this stuff and don't know how to feel. So we were watching hours and hours and hours of tape and we talked about a lot of stuff."

To that end, Lee says his cast really got into the edgy material once he had them properly prepared. "Damon patterned his character after this actual African-American TV writer who's working out there. Damon is a very fine dramatic actor even though people know him mostly from his comedy. In this film you'll see a range that people had never seen from Damon, Jada, Tommy and Savion. The first time Jada saw the film she said something really special to me. She said, 'That's the first time I've ever seen a grown woman, an adult on screen that I played.' I'm glad she felt that way and we're very happy with everybody's performance in this film."

A large part of the reason Lee was able to get away with his fast-paced schedule is that most of his team has been with him through many projects. "[1st AD] Mike Ellis has been with me since Do the Right Thing. Mike, [Key 2nd AD] Tracy Hinds and [2nd 2nd AD Michael] 'Boggie' Pinckney ... we've been together a long time. We're a family at 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks and that's not just true of our AD department, but throughout. Some of the same people have been working with me since as far back as She's Gotta Have It, the first film - people like Terence Blanchard, who does my scores; costume designer Ruth Carter; Ellen Kuras, who shot the last three films; producer John Kilik; editors Sam Pollard and Barry Brown; and Aisha Coley who cast my films." Still Lee likes to strengthen his filmmaking family by introducing fresh blood. "This is the first time I worked with Victor Kempster, the great production designer. I'm like a general manager of a ball club. You want to have your seasoned, grizzled veterans but you also want the vitality of the promising rookies too. So that's the way we operate."

According to Lee, one of the most difficult aspects of making Bamboozled lay not within it's fast-paced shooting schedule or its mixed cast of experienced actors with less experienced music artists, but in facing and filming the material itself. "A very difficult day was the assassination of Mantan. To me it's not a light thing where you have to take somebody's life even though it's a film. I don't get any joy about killing anybody."

Lee asserts that Washington's new tactic of politicizing Hollywood amounts to little more than window dressing. "I think a lot of this stuff is a witch hunt. Of course, I don't agree that R-rated films be marketed to a 9 year old. That should be stopped. But with some of this stuff, they're just trying to make movies, TV shows, music videos and video games, the modern-day boogeyman. I don't know how we're ever going to have intelligent discussion about violence in this country if you don't include the NRA [National Rifle Association] in it and what needs to be done about gun legislation. In my opinion, the other stuff doesn't really matter. Even if you get the most violent images, these kids still have to get a gun. It's still too easy to acquire firearms in this country."

Glover, Davidson, Pinkett-Smith, Lee and Wayans go over notes during the filming.

Lee also agrees with the DGA stance that the present ratings system is due for an overhaul. "This is where Jack Valenti has to come clean because despite what he says, the MPAA has two different standards when it comes to sex and violence. I've had many dealings with the MPAA, and it's very confusing because the boundaries are always changing. An analogy would be like we're going to play a double-header today and in the one game you get three strikes and the other game you get one, and they don't tell you beforehand which rule we're going with. So what could be R in one film is PG-13 in another. And they're much, much more lenient with violence than they are with sex. I'm a father and when my children get of age, I'll much prefer they see two people making love - and I'm not talking about pornography, I'm talking about tasteful depictions - than seeing somebody getting their head blown off. I know that Saving Private Ryan was one of the most realistic portrayals of war ever. Great film. No qualms with that. Spielberg is a great filmmaker. He has great skills and he's showing you the horror of war. But despite its greatness, I look at that film as an NC-17 movie. It was violent - bombs and limbs flying through the air and stuff like that. But if we want to show a penis, that's NC-17. What gets me mad about the MPAA is they tell you straight to your face they view sex and violence the same way and they're full of shit. They are much more lenient with violence than they are with sex. That's probably emblematic of the United States being this pseudo-Victorian country. They can't deal with sex at all."

Lee also believes that parents must shoulder their portion of responsibility on these issues. "Parents really have to think about this stuff. I cannot understand parents today saying Huckleberry Finn should not be taught in school today because of the N-word. To me that's ignorant. Ignorant. First of all, you've probably used that word as a child, number one; they've heard it in the streets. Even the nastiness of that word does not outweigh the value of that monumental piece of American literature."

Despite his outspokenness, Lee finds it amusing that a lot of the world views him as an angry black filmmaker. "People seem to think that I walk around in a perpetual state of black anger. I find that hilarious, to tell you the truth. There is this perception that if you're an African-American and you become successful and you have a little bit of money, you should just shut the fuck up and not say a word. And that's the way it goes. 'Look, forget about everything else that's happening, are you making money? Are things going for you? Good. Then nothing else matters, just be quiet.' I really can't operate like that."

Which brings us back to Bamboozled. Lee hopes that his newest release will not only teach the world about the shameful history of the minstrel shows, but also force people to "have a look at the stuff happening today with an educated eye and ask, 'What's the difference between now and then?'" He's even offered to personally send cars to ferry development executives from the networks to screenings of Bamboozled. However, he will note that the record is not all bad. "We give a heads-up to Bill Cosby. What he did was revolutionary. Unfortunately, nobody has been able to take it further after he stopped doing The Cosby Show. I would just like to see us in more diverse roles. We've got to try to get out of this ghetto of the sitcom. I would love if there were really more of an attempt at doing some great episodic, hour-long television. That's my next goal. I want to try to crack that nut."

Table of Contents     Top of Page