Spike Lee: the plight of the black genius
After more than three decades as a provocateur, the filmmaker has returned to the movie that made him famous, rebooting 'She's Gotta Have It' as a Netflix series. By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Before his first movie, Spike Lee used to fantasise about three things: season tickets at Madison Square Garden - home of the New York Knicks basketball team - a brownstone in Fort Greene like the one that he was raised in, and a house in the historically black Oak Bluffs section of Martha's Vineyard.
In 1986, after writing, producing, directing and acting in his infectious debut, She's Gotta Have It, a stylish, edgy rom-com about a libidinous young woman juggling three lovers, those Knicks seats came first. The two homes swiftly followed, and within a decade, Lee's status and celebrity had catapulted him from Da Republic of Brooklyn, as he calls it in e-mails, into an Upper East Side townhouse that was previously home to Jasper Johns. But the getaway in Massachusetts, next to the 18th hole at the Farm Neck Golf Club, has never required upgrading.
As I was preparing to visit him there, Lee warned me that the second week of August is when "everybody" descends on the Vineyard. The annual African-American Film Festival was happening, and the sheer saturation of black achievement on display was something to behold. In the previous 24 hours, both Barack Obama and the two-time NBA champion Ray Allen had teed off behind Lee's house.
Lee has long been a fixture at the festival, and this year he would be previewing his latest project, a 10-episode Netflix reboot of the film that made him a star: She's Gotta Have It. A late-career foray into prestige television, the series, released 10 days ago, marks a homecoming of sorts, as well as a risky departure.
WATCH | The trailer for the Netflix series She's Gotta Have It..
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