Clint Tells Spike Lee to "Shut His Face"

Friday

06Jun2008

Clint Tells Spike Lee to "Shut His Face"

Friday, June 6, 2008 at 9:09AM

Spike Lee has never been one to keep his opinions to himself. Neither has his new target, Clint Eastwood. Lee, who has directed a movie about African American soldiers in World War II called Miracle at St. Anna, told reporters at Cannes last month that Dirty Harry leaving blacks out of his recent war pictures, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, was a bad move.

"Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen," Lee said. "If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that ... But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know."

Tough talk from Spike Lee, and Eastwood's not ducking from it.

"The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they (African Americans) didn't do that," Clint tells The Guardian. "If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go: 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate." Eastwood says that black troops were in fact a part of the battle, part of a munitions company, but they didn't assist in the raising of the flag. As for Lee himself, "A guy like him should shut his face."

"I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is," insists Eastwood. "When I do a movie and it's 90% black, like Bird, then I use 90% black people." Actually, the ratio is closer to 50%...

"He was complaining when I did Bird (the biopic of jazz great Charlie Parker). 'Why would a white guy be doing that?' I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else."

Curiously, it is Eastwood and not Lee directing The Human Factor, covering the years after Nelson Mandela's imprisonment when the South African civil rights leader was President. Quips Eastwood, "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy."

Update on Saturday, June 7, 2008 at 7:39PM by

Colin Boyd

Spike Lee isn't going to take Clint Eastwood's "A guy like that should shut his face" suggestion lying down. Or, as it turns out, by shutting his face.

After Clint's interview with The Guardian started the best Hollywood fight since Clooney-Fabio, Spike has shot back, saying, "First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either. He's a great director ... I didn't personally attack him. And a comment like "A guy like that should shut his face," come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there."

I'm at a loss regarding his first sentence. Did I miss something? How did paternity and slavery get into this argument?

Second sentence: Open to interpretation, I guess. It doesn't make much sense to me for Spike to bring it up in the first place, so I guess that could qualify as an attack, especially since the inference is 'Clint Eastwood is a racist.'

Third and fourth sentences: Yes, he does sound angry. And he should, since you inferred he was a racist.

In a fist fight, I'd still take the 78-year-old, and I halfway think he'd like to see it come to that.

Colin Boyd |

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Reader Comments (2)

Yeah, but couldn't Eastwood hire Robert Downy Jr. to play Mandela? I mean, it worked for Ben Stiller.

Friday, June 6, 2008 |

Will

Touché.

Friday, June 6, 2008 |

Colin Boyd

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