It’s too late to wish Spike Lee’s DO THE RIGHT THING a happy 20th birthday but you can still celebrate the milestone – and I can think of no finer way than with AMMO Books‘ weighty coffee table tome about the making, the meaning, the fallout and the legacy of the legendary and controversial 1989 film.

I don’t know whether to cop the attitude that DO THE RIGHT THING needs no introduction or to make concessions for the fact that two decades have passed since its release and that in the interim common perceptions of history have Balkanized, allowing narrow demographic groups to remember things selectively.  Does DO THE RIGHT THING stand up?  Does it still matter?  Does it have legs?  My answers: yes, yes and… gee, I hope so.  I lived in New York at the time of a lot of the incidents that inspired DO THE RIGHT THING, front page stories that trickled down into the common consciousness as a network of insidious or tragic proper nouns: Howard Beach… Tawana Brawley… Yusef Hawkins. I’d moved to Brooklyn two months to the day before a 23-year-old black man named Michael Griffith was chased to his death on Cross Bay Boulevard, pushed by his terror of mob violence into the path of an oncoming car, and my apartment was less than three miles from where Griffith lived in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section and where Spike Lee shot DO THE RIGHT THING in the summer of 1988.  All this to say that I’ve long felt that the film was made for me — not tailored to my tastes but to preserve the tenor of times through which I lived in the place where they happened.

The title of Lee’s original script was HEAT WAVE. The project started out with a home at Paramount until corporate unease about the story’s penultimate scene – a neighborhood riot culminating in the destruction of a white-owned pizzeria in a largely black and Hispanic neighborhood – drove Lee to the more thick-skinned Universal Studios.  The pressure was placed on Lee early on to shoot in Los Angeles, or perhaps even Philadelphia, where the intersection of urban thoroughfares could be mocked up or dressed to look like Brooklyn.  Lee insisted on shooting on location in Brooklyn and allowed the proposed $10,000,000 budget for DO THE RIGHT THING to be reduced to $6 million so long as he could do it his own way.  The Pasadena-based AMMO Books’ 2010 release SPIKE LEE: DO THE RIGHT THING is largely an oral history (compiled by Jason Matloff) told by those behind and in front of the cameras who were there in Bed-Stuy in June and August of 1988.  Perhaps the greatest thing about this picture-filled chronicle is that it shows that, however he may have written it his own way, Spike Lee finished DO THE RIGHT THING in collaboration with everyone he hired, from the lowliest grip to temperamental costar Danni Aiello, who fought with Lee every step of the way and even came to blows with him over the filming of the controversial riot scene.

If it were just an oral history, if it were just words – recollections, reminiscences, regrets, ruminations – SPIKE LEE: DO THE RIGHT THING would still be worth the suggested retail price; if it were just dozens and dozens of beautifully reproduced black and white and color photographs – portraits, action shots, behind-the-scenes candids – it would still be something to have and to hold.  Happily, SPIKE LEE: DO THE RIGHT THING is both of these and more, including between its covers Lee’s script… and I don’t mean some cold black-and-white copy banged out by the studio typing pool as a record of the finished film but Lee’s actual spiral-ring notebook original first draft, scribbled in painstaking block letters between the 1st and 16th of March, 1988.  In the twenty-odd years since this film came out, personal computers and scriptwriting software programs have made it deucedly simple for any idiot to achieve at least the simulacrum of a shooting script, with all the margins and spacing pin-neat; back in 1988, you had to try a little harder.  As someone who wrote his first plays and screenplays via combination of longhand and a manual Royal typewriter, I not only appreciate this as an old school signifier but I treasure the way it connects me to the filmmaker and the spark of his original intent.   Check the finished film’s ending with what Lee scripted off the top of his head and out of his gut and observe the brilliance that comes from collaboration, from tension, collision, argument, challenge and counterpoint.  Lee has made some fine films in the ensuing decades but I don’t think any of his subsequent works can top DO THE RIGHT THING for the heft of its honesty – a truthfulness less about flashpoint issues (“Tawana told the truth”) than about complex and often contradictory human responses and assumptions.

The first time I leafed through SPIKE LEE: DO THE RIGHT THING, I was bowled over by how young everyone looked in 1988.  We’ve all aged along with Lee (only a few years older than I am), cinematographer Ernest Dickerson (so weird to see him back then with a natural where his trademark dreads now hang) and actors such as John Turturro, Martin Lawrence, Bill Nunn (who seemed to mature so quickly in the intervening years … little did we know he was pushing 40 when he made the film), Miguel Sandoval (would younger people even recognize the star of MEDIUM as Radio Raheem’s arresting officer?) and Rosie Perez, making DO THE RIGHT THING something of a home movie.  20 years… wow.  (22 now, actually, and 23 since they shot the thing.) We were such babies then.  We’re so old now… and all of the problems that got us so twisted up and angry still look as though they were born yesterday.

AMMO Books website (girls in bikinis!)

AMMO Books on Facebook