Spike Lee is telling me the story of how he had to convince Frank Sinatra to let him use his music for Lee’s 1991 film Jungle Fever. Apparently, Ol’ Blue Eyes was upset about one of the film-maker’s earlier movies, Do the Right Thing. In an unforgettable scene, a ruckus breaks out in Sal’s Pizzeria, the neighborhood restaurant where the film’s protagonists hang. At one point during the chaos, a devastating fire starts, and the walls, adorned with photos of beloved celebrities – such as Frank Sinatra – burn.
Lee was trying to negotiate the rights with Sinatra’s daughter, Tina, who at the time handled the music legend’s business affairs. “You disrespected my father,” Tina told Lee, by his own account. Lee apologized and, for weeks, begged for a way to make amends. He told me that when he began writing Jungle Fever, he had a specific soundscape in mind, one that would establish the texture of a subversive film about interracial relationships in a post-civil rights era.
He’d already gotten Stevie Wonder onboard to write new songs for the soundtrack, and he saw Sinatra’s music as a nice juxtaposition. In Lee’s mind, both were crucial to telegraph the film’s two emotional conflicts: the salacious affair between a married, middle-class Black man in Harlem and a single, working-class Italian American woman in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; and the family drama of a drug-addicted son at the height of the crack epidemic.
Of his final plea to Sinatra, Lee told me: “I don’t type. So I hand-wrote a 10-page letter.” Ultimately, he got the rights.
This story underscores a crucial detail about the mind and passions of Spike Lee: he has an unyielding commitment to being in conversation with masters of other crafts. Music, as the Sinatra anecdote illuminates, is one of the most important tools that propels Lee’s creative ethos forward (consider the opening sequences for many of his movies and documentaries). Once a novice who received critical acclaim for his early independent films, today, Lee, who’s 66, is an iconic film-maker known for producing some of the richest, most pointed critiques of American social life. As his fame and prestige have expanded over the years, however, Lee has remained a curious student of the innovators who have shaped his unique style.
A new exhibit, Spike Lee: Creative Sources, offers a bountiful exploration of those influences. Lee, a voracious collector of music and sports memorabilia, Black art, photography and film history, once said of his amassing: “I could fill the Brooklyn Museum.” And though Creative Sources, housed at Lee’s home-town museum, doesn’t quite fill the place, the collection features more than 450 items from his archive.
The show, curated by Kimberli Gant and Indira A Abiskaroon, may overwhelm the senses at first. But patterns emerge, and objects and ideas overlap to illustrate an interconnected core at the center of Lee’s body of work. The exhibit includes clips from the penultimate moments of Lee’s most quintessential films; an original copy of a 1968 Esquire issue with Muhammed Ali on the cover; a photograph of Denise McNair – one of the four girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama – in her pajamas clinging to a baby doll; a portrait of Malcolm X; a painting of Toni Morrison; the artist Deborah Roberts’ collage of Trayvon Martin; a limited edition platinum of Stevie Wonder’s piece de resistance, Innervisions; and a first edition copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
“That’s on the scroll for She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee told me of the opening sentences of Hurston’s 1937 novel. And like a great professor – Lee teaches film at his alma mater, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts – he tests me to see if I can recall the lines from memory. (He is pleased when I can.)
One of Lee’s favorite items on view is an African National Congress flag signed by Nelson and Winnie Mandela, which he acquired while he was filming Malcolm X in 1992. “Many of the things in the show are [from] people from my personal pantheon,” Lee told me. “I’m honoring these people.” He also underscored his spiritual connection to the objects: “When I’m in my office, I’m looking at them, and they’re looking at me.” Though these objects are particular and personal to Lee, the curation allows outsiders to draw connections between Lee’s film vernacular and works by other artists.
Prints in the show by James Van Der Zee, the Harlem Renaissance photographer, typically hang on the walls outside Lee’s editing room at his 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks studio in Brooklyn. They are part of his philosophy of cultivating an immersive and inspiring work space. Many of the prints on view help clarify for visitors the aesthetics in Lee’s oeuvre: Mookie and Tina’s love scene from Do the Right Thing, for instance, signals back to Man Ray’s sensual nude portraits, which are exhibited alongside Margaret Bourke-White’s Depression-era documentary photography and Richard Avedon’s minimalist portraiture. These images are essentially mood boards that Lee used to help construct dozens of scenes.
Lee’s collection unearths his deep reverence for history, nostalgia and Black trailblazers. He adores the Negro League baseball players and the boxing greats such as Jack Johnson and Joe Louis. But what’s more, these athletes are sacred vessels that energize him. The elders in my family who remember the night Joe Louis beat Max Schmeling in 1938 still adopt a wistful awe in recounting what that moment felt like for Black Americans. Lee, who wasn’t alive when that fight happened, has the artifacts to preserve that collective memory: Louis’s boxing shorts and a breathtaking oil painting by the artist Alexander Van Armstrong of his banged-up face, which are paired together in the exhibit. Lee alchemized these objects to shape a memorable moment in Malcolm X: after Malcolm ends his shift as a porter, he’s enveloped in the thrall of revelers celebrating in the streets of Harlem after Louis beat Billy Conn in 1941.
For Lee, a Black man coming of age in mid-20th century America, these memories and items are a rebuke to the erasure of Black people in consequential moments in American history. Lee cherishes these lineages of Black American greatness and the work ethic that made these icons extraordinary. This collection has helped Lee channel his focus; to achieve mastery in his art-making, he uses the artifacts as a reminder that talent requires rigor, endurance, flexibility and adaptation.
Film-making is a painstaking and arduous process that, for Lee, requires many hands, exacting concentration and a drive to create indelible moments that endure over lifetimes. He works to cultivate nostalgia and meaning beyond perception, an unnameable mystery that is difficult to translate. To that end, Lee’s collection is a Wunderkammer; how else can one connect to the sublime, the ancestors and the muses? The exhibit seems to suggest that if art-making is part discipline, part imagination, then its third, most misunderstood element is engagement with the ineffable.
