Spike Lee to Receive Film Society Directing Award at Historic 50th San Francisco International Film Festival

Preeminent Filmmaker Honored for his Singular Vision and Extraordinary Career

March 14, 2007

San Francisco, CA—The San Francisco Film Society announced today that Spike Lee will receive the Film Society Directing Award at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 26–May 10). The award will be presented to Lee at Film Society Awards Night, a fundraising gala, on Thursday, May 3 at the Westin St. Francis Hotel.

The Film Society’s Education Program will be the beneficiary of the gala black-tie fundraiser honoring Lee; the soon-to-be-announced recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award for a brilliant acting career; Peter Morgan, recipient of the Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting; and George Lucas, recipient of the one-time-only Irving M. Levin Award honoring a man who embodies the iconoclastic spirit of the Festival founder. Fred Levin and Nancy Livingston are the chairs of the Film Society Awards Night committee. Honorary chairs are Karen and John Diefenbach.

A public presentation of the Directing Award, including clips from Lee’s wide-ranging career, an onstage interview by Wesley Morris of the BostonGlobe and a screening of Acts II and III of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts is scheduled for 7:30 pm, Wednesday, May 2 at the Castro Theatre. The full four-hour version of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts will play at noon on Friday, May 4 at SFMOMA.

“Spike Lee is a masterful director and one of the most important filmmakers of our generation,” said Graham Leggat, executive director of the San Francisco Film Society. “No American director of the last 25 years has done more to lever open and examine the inner workings of American society than he has. Spike’s many and wide-ranging films, and the many more that he is still to make, constitute an irreplaceable and invaluable touchstone in contemporary world cinema.”

The San Francisco International Film Festival screened Spike Lee’s early, award-winning short Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads in 1983, but it’s the world premiere of She’s Gotta Have It at the Festival in 1986 that will be remembered forever by those in attendance. When a mid-reel power outage plunged the auditorium into darkness Lee was brought on stage by flashlight and interviewed by Artistic Director Peter Scarlet, holding the crowd, including an acquisitions executive from the eventual distributor, for an entertaining hour with the force of his personality, until power was restored and the screening resumed.

Lee’s second feature, School Daze (1988), defied the sophomore slump through sheer audaciousness. Lee, who attended Atlanta’s Morehouse College, built a musical around an intraracial collegiate feud, where skin tone was the dividing line and dancing the battlefield.

School Daze ended with the exhortation, “Wake up!,” the same words that opened Lee’s next film, Do the Right Thing (1989). Unspooling over one sweltering day, the film presents a corner of Brooklyn as a microcosmic pressure-cooker of racial tension. Here Lee established some of his directorial hallmarks, like having characters move along sidewalks as if floating just above the pavement, imbuing both tough and tender scenes with perfectly chosen music, utilizing minor characters as a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the main action and montages of characters mouthing racial slurs directly to the camera, simultaneously voicing and refuting the language of bigotry. Lee wasn’t playing it safe, but rather than scaring the mainstream, he was embraced, with an Oscar nomination for his screenplay and a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes.

The son of a jazz bassist, Lee foregrounded music in Mo’ Better Blues (SFIFF 1991), his first collaboration with Denzel Washington, who smolders as a trumpeter caught between love and money. Lee returned to the Festival in 1994 with Crooklyn, easily his most openhearted narrative, an autobiographical take on a 1970s Brooklyn family through the eyes of their young daughter. Between these appearances, Lee released Jungle Fever (1991), which made a star of Wesley Snipes as a married Buppie architect conducting a steamy affair with his Italian-American secretary, and gave Samuel L. Jackson his breakthrough role as a Marvin Gaye-like figure undone by crack. Malcolm X (1993), an epic biography of the grassroots leader anchored by another remarkable performance from Washington, was justifiably cited by both Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese as among the ten best films of the decade. At age 35, Lee had claimed his place in the canon.

In the ensemble drama Get on the Bus (1996), he used the Million Man March to craft a character-driven study of African American masculinity, race and sexuality. In Summer of Sam (1999), maybe his most underappreciated feature, the Italian-American working class spins its wheels while New York City burns and a serial killer terrorizes the urban population. Bamboozled (2000), a caustic satire, features a Black TV executive who creates a hit by reviving the minstrel show. Here, Lee skewers contemporary blackface: a white clothing designer named Timmi Hilnigger, and gangsta rappers shilling for malt liquor. In 25th Hour (2002), Lee transformed David Benioff’s novel of a white man’s last day before going to prison into a spot-on portrayal of post-9/11 New York. Part valentine, part jeremiad, the film’s litany of racial slurs are embedded in national anxieties about terrorism, heroism and surveillance. In 2005, Lee scored his biggest commercial success with the heist picture Inside Man, starring Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster.

Lee’s urge to edify (he once said that if he hadn’t become a filmmaker that he might have been a teacher, as his mother had been) can be seen in his fiction films as well as in two of his documentaries: 4 Little Girls, which revisits the civil rights movement via the bombing of an African American church in Alabama; and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), which recounts Hurricane Katrina’s destruction through the voices of the citizens of New Orleans. Discussing Levees in a recent interview, Lee expressed bewilderment that it took the televised desperation of those stranded by Katrina to get Americans to recognize that poor people still live in this country.

He’s been labeled a Black filmmaker, a New York filmmaker, a filmmaker of jazz, of basketball and of politics. But it may be most accurate to say that Lee is the preeminent filmmaker of the American story. Twenty-five years since he got filmgoers’ attention, Spike Lee is still prodding Americans to wake up.

For the past 21 years the San Francisco International Film Festival has honored a master of world cinema with its award for film directing. Previous recipients of the Film Society’s directing award are Werner Herzog, Germany; Taylor Hackford, USA; Milos Forman, Czechoslovakia/USA; Robert Altman, USA; Warren Beatty, USA; Clint Eastwood, USA; Abbas Kiarostami, Iran; Arturo Ripstein, Mexico; Im Kwon-Taek, Korea; Francesco Rosi, Italy; Arthur Penn, USA; Stanley Donen, USA; Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal; Ousmane Sembène, Senegal; Satyajit Ray, India; Marcel Carné, France; Jirí Menzel, Czechoslovakia; Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA; Robert Bresson, France; Michael Powell, England; and Akira Kurosawa, Japan.

For tickets and information for Film Society Awards Night on May 3, only, call 415.551.5190.

For tickets and information for the tribute at the Castro Theatre and the screening at SFMOMA go to www.sffs.org or call 925.866.9559.

The San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com are the sponsors of the onstage tribute to Spike Lee at the Castro Theatre on Wednesday, May 2.