EMC / JOUR 3000 Introduction to Motion Pictures Edward Bowen

Study Guide: “Do the Right Thing” (1989)

Universal Pictures / 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks Written, Produced and Directed by Spike Lee.

Cinematography by Ernest Dickerson. Edited by Barry Alexander Brown. Music by Bill Lee. Production Design by Wynn Thomas.

Starring Spike Lee, Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Giancarlo Esposito, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, Robin Harris, Sam Jackson, Rosie Perez, Martin Lawrence

“The best film of the year is not even nominated, and it’s Do the Right Thing.”Kim Basinger at the Academy Award Ceremony that named “Driving Miss Daisy” the

best picture of the year.

“Anyone who thinks we move in a post-racial society is someone who's been smoking crack.”Spike Lee

BACKGROUND – The history of African-Americans in the film industry is complex, troubling, and inspiring. When director Spike Lee made his inaugural feature, “She’s Gotta Have It,” in 1986, he was swimming with the tide of the low-budget independent film movement of the 1980s, initiated by Lee and filmmakers Jim Jarmoush, Joel and Ethan Coen, Steven Soderbergh and John Sayles, filmmakers who forced their creations into being through sheer will power with little money and no industry support. Building on the relative success of independent black cinema after the fall of the Hollywood Studio System’s crushing dominance of film production, both Lee and Robert Townsend cobbled together their first features in 1986. They stood on the shoulders of filmmakers like Melvin Van Peebles (“Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” 1971), Gordon Parks (“Shaft,” 1971), Gordon Parks Jr. (“Superfly” 1972), and Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep” 1973/77), who had birthed a black film industry following the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. There had not been a coherent black film industry in the United States since the silent era, when filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux produced films largely in reaction to the racism of “The Birth of a Nation.”

Essayist Matthew Dessem has noted that, in the late eighties, such films as “Glory,” “Mississippi Burning” and “Driving Miss Daisy” suggested that to make a successful movie about race in America, these were rules that needed to be followed:

Make your main characters white. You may remember Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman as main characters in Glory, but you're wrong: it was Matthew Broderick.

Spend as little time as possible with non-white characters outside of their interactions with your white protagonists. Think of Driving Miss Daisy: What did Hoke do on his day off?

Always, always remember: racism was a historical phenomenon, largely confined to the South, overcome many years ago by heroic white people on behalf of grateful African-Americans.

Spike Lee and other African-American filmmakers proved that effective and even successful movies could ignore these tenants. What does the recent success of “The Help” say about these characteristics in today’s film industry?

EMC / JOUR 3000 Introduction to Motion Pictures Edward Bowen

As a film, Do the Right Thing is a study in how cinematography can effectively add credence to plot and character development. The film's sensual details, such as the hot, sticky, suffocating

heat of a summer day, are visually stunning.Cynthia C. Scott

"I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia when I was a kid. I must have visited the Coca Cola stand three times before the film was over. I wanted that effect for Do the Right Thing."

Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, on depicting heat in “Do the Right Thing”

STYLE AND TECHNIQUE: Spike Lee and cinematographer Ernest Dickerson use every cinematic technique at their disposal to reveal character, create a tangible setting, steadily build tension, and suggest the stifling heat of the hottest day of the year.

Color: The striking color palate has been compared to the work of revered cinematographer Jack Cardiff, who photographed such film as “A Matter of Life and Death,” Black Narcissus” and “The Red Shoes.” Vibrant colors are used throughout the film to suggest physical and psychological heat. What colors accomplish this, and how are they used? Notice examples where Lee and Dickerson place lit cans of sterno just below the lens to create visible waves of heat in the foreground. What other techniques lend a sense of heat.

Location: Although studio executives hoped Lee would film “Do the Right Thing” in Los Angeles, he insisted that it be filmed on location in the boroughs of New York, specifically Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and the studio acquiesced. Lee filmed almost the entire movie on a single block. Only the striking opening credit sequence featuring Rosie Perez suggests a studio environment with its expressionistic lighting and backdrop. How does Lee and company use the location to lend weight to the story?

Lenses: Lee and Dickerson make particular use of wide and telephoto lenses. As the movie progresses, an increasing use of telephoto lenses flattens perspective and adds a sense of claustrophobia leading up to the climatic confrontation. There is one subtle use of a dolly-zoom in the film. Can you find it?

EMC / JOUR 3000 Introduction to Motion Pictures Edward Bowen

Angles: Notice the consistent view we have on Radio Raheem. What is Lee trying to communicate about the character, and our assumptions about the character as film viewers? Also note the use of angles in scenes of confrontation, such as the one between Buggin’ Out and Clifton, or between Buggin’ Out, Radio Raheeem and Sam. How do angles contribute to the relation of one character to another?

Sound: How does the soundscape created for the film adds to character and tension? Notice particularly the volume of the various levels of sound in the confrontation in the pizzeria, and its crescendo into violence.

Characters addressing of looking at the camera: Usually, it is axiomatic that characters in a movie ignore the camera, as if it were not there. When characters acknowledge the camera, and therefore the audience, it is referred to as ‘breaking the fourth wall.” This is a reference to a typical stage and sometime film set comprised of three walls and an invisible ‘fourth wall’ that is assumed to exist. We see this most clearly when Lee has several of his characters spew long strings of racial epithets right at the camera, and therefore the audience. Lee also makes extensive use of POV (point of view) shots, that also allow for characters to address the camera, but these times as if through the eyes of another character. Radio Raheem’s Love/Hate monologue is so delivered, in a shot that begins objective, and tracks to become Mookie’s POV. How does the use of these types of shots make you feel as a viewer?

Music: Most associated with “Do the Right Thing” is “Fight the Power,” a reimagining by Chuck D and Public Enemy of an earlier Isley Brothers tune, commissioned by Lee for the film. We hear this anthem about racism playing from Radio Raheem’s boombox over and over again. But just as important is the mood created by the more conventional instrumental score by Bill Lee, Spike’s father and a respected jazz musician. Identify placement and uses of the score in the movie and its impact.

EMC / JOUR 3000 Introduction to Motion Pictures Edward Bowen

Lighting: Notice the use of lighting in the interior scenes, where it is used to carry the heat of the street into the apartments and businesses. In Tina’s apartment, warm sunlight breaking through the rotating blades of a window fan adds both physical and sexual heat to her encounter with Mookie.

Canted Angles: Lee and Dickerson make extensive use of canted angles to add tension and compositional interest to a visually confined space. Identify specific uses of these angles and their effect.

“Spike Lee had done an almost impossible thing. He'd made a movie about race in America that empathized with all the participants."

Roger EbertDRAMA:

Characters: There are no obvious heroes or villains in “Do the Right Thing.” All the characters are layered with traits both sympathetic and unattractive, lending complexity to our relationship and opinion about them. If there is a main character in what is largely an ensemble cast, it is Mookie, whom we follow up and down the block as we meet the various characters. Mookie is likeable, but he certainly has his faults. He appears as a bridge, a negotiator, a mediator between the white and African-American worlds, which makes his actions at the end of the film all the more complex, shocking, and ambiguous. Some critics (Lee claims they are all white) focus on the question of whether or not Mookie ‘does the right thing.’ What do you think? Is it possible that Mookie’s actions are a kind of Rorschach test, in which interpretation says more about the viewer than the filmmakers?

Wake up: The film begins as Lee’s previous film, “School Daze,” ends, with the words “wake up.” In this context, what does this mean?

EMC / JOUR 3000 Introduction to Motion Pictures Edward Bowen

Classical unities: Some critics have observed that, while a groundbreaking and taboo-smashing work, Lee has observed the classical unities of time, place, and action as delineated by Aristotle, making it a kind of classical Greek tragedy. The film takes place in one confined place, a single city block (unity of place) and in a restricted period on time, just one day (unity of time). It also follows a confined series of events that lead to convergence in a single action (unity of action). There are even Greek choruses, characters who observe and comment on events, in the persons of the three men who sit on the street and Mister Señor Love Daddy, and wise elders, in the persons of Da Mayor and Mother Sister, all characteristics of classical Greek tragedy. Aristotle and the Greeks felt these conventions were important in telling a complex and important story. How do these conventions impact “Do the Right Thing?”

Love/Hate: Lee directly references a scene from an earlier film, “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), directed by actor Charles Laughton (“Mutiny on the Bounty,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) and starring Lillian Gish (“The Birth of a Nation”) and Robert Mitchum (“Ryan’s Daughter,” “Cape Fear,” “Out of the Past”). In the film, Mitchum portrays a sinister preacher who has the word “Love” tattooed on the fingers of his right hand and “Hate” on the fingers of his left. He delivers almost verbatim the same speech that Radio Raheem delivers regarding his brass knuckle rings. But where Mitchum’s speech reveals a hypocritical darkness and menace, Radio Raheem’s reveals the somewhat threatening presence to have a simple and loving heart. It’s a clear indication that no one in the film can be judged by appearance, or presentation, that no one is a simple stereotype. Here is the original from “Night of the Hunter.” http://youtu.be/X20XIg38GcE. And here is a supercut combining the two. http://youtu.be/G0DLTQQwDfc

AUTEUR: “A Beginners Guide to Spike Lee Joints” http://www.avclub.com/articles/a-beginners-guide-to-the-spike-lee-joints,88191/

The Angriest Auteur http://nymag.com/movies/profiles/19144/index1.html

EMC / JOUR 3000 Introduction to Motion Pictures Edward Bowen

“White people still ask me why Mookie threw the can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color

has ever asked me why.”Spike Lee

Birmingham, Alabama – 1963

“Do the Right Thing”

SOCIO-HISTORIC: 1983, Lower Manhattan: African-American graffiti artist Michael Stewart is strangled to death while in police custody. 1984, Bronx: Elderly Eleanor Bumpus is shot to death by the NYPD. 1986, Howard Beach, Queens: African-American Michael Griffith is killed when he is hit by a car crossing the Belt Parkway. A gang of about a dozen Italian-American teenagers, many with baseball bats, is pursuing him and two friends after a racial altercation in a pizzeria. 1987, Wappingers Falls, New York: Fifteen-year-old African –American Tawana Brawley claims to have been abducted and raped by six white men, some of whom were police officers. 1989, Bensonhurst: 16-year-old African-American Yusef Hawkins is shot and killed after he and three friends are attacked by a crowd of baseball bat wielding Italian-American youths. All these incidents inspire and inform “Do The Right Thing.” The film also, as seen above, visually references earlier civil rights struggles. Lee reportedly wrote the script in two weeks.

EMC / JOUR 3000 Introduction to Motion Pictures Edward Bowen

The obvious question here is what are Lee and company saying about America in 1989? And what does it say about America in 1989 that several critics of the film worried in print about the possibility or even probability that black audiences would riot after seeing the movie?

Not long after “Do the Right Thing” ended with Mister Señor Love Daddy exhorting the viewers to vote, David Dinkins, New York’s first African American Mayor was elected.

Barack and Michelle Obama saw “Do the Right Things” on their first date.

Additional Resources:

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing : An Explosive Film That Continues to Spark Questions About Racism in Americahttp://voices.yahoo.com/spike-lees-right-thing-explosive-film-that-29987.html

The Inside Story of Do The Right Thinghttp://focusfeatures.com/article/the_inside_story_of__em_do_the_right_thing__em_

TCM on “Do the Right Thing”http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/359465%7C0/Featured-Films.html

Celebrating 100 Years of Black Cinemahttp://www.theroot.com/views/celebrating-100-years-black-cinema-0

Spike Lee Speaks About “Do the Right Thing” at 20 http://thegrio.com/2009/07/04/do-the-right-thing-turns-20/

The Criterion Contraption: Do the Right Thing http://criterioncollection.blogspot.com/2010/03/97-do-right-thing.html

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: SECRETS BEHIND THE MAKING OF “DO THE RIGHT THING” http://madamenoire.com/213236/bet-you-didnt-know-secrets-behind-the-making-of-do-the-right-thing/

Black Cinema http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/black-1.jsp

How I Made It: Spike Lee on 'Do the Right Thing' http://nymag.com/anniversary/40th/culture/45772/

Do the Right Thing Filming Locations http://moviemaps.org/movies/9h

An Open Letter to Spike Lee: Did Mookie Do the Right Thing? http://www.thesecondageblog.com/2008/06/open-letter-to-spike-lee-did-mookie-do.html

Children’s Hospital Makes Unexpected Tribute to Do the Right Thinghttp://www.vulture.com/2010/10/childrens_hospital_makes_unexp.html http://youtu.be/zTMR69hdrsk