Spike Lee to Clint Eastwood: Slave Owner Racist!
By Nix | June 9, 2008 (11:36 am)
Spike Lee thinks Clint Eastwood is a slave owner, and shouldn’t be telling him to “shut his face”. Or at least, that’s what ABCNews.com reports Lee as saying, in reply to Eastwood’s previous comments, in regard to Lee’s racism-tinted accusations against Eastwood, via black soldiers at Iwo Jima, vis-a-vis Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” movie. (If all that sounds confusing, read here and here.)
ABCNews.com got this response from Lee:
“First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either,” he told ABCNEWS.com. “He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, 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.”
Lee has a proposal for Eastwood:
“If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima and I’d like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist,” he said. “I’m not making this up. I know history. I’m a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II.”
About those black soldiers at Iwo Jima, Eastwood told Focus Magazine this (via):
“Does he know anything about American history?” Eastwood told Focus when asked about Lee’s criticism. “The U.S. military was segregated til the Korean War, and the blacks in World War Two were totally segregated. The only black battalion on Iwo Jima was a small munitions supply unit that came to the beach.
“The story was about the men who raised the flag and we can’t make them black if they were not there. So tell him: Why don’t you go back and study your history and stop mouthing off!”
Lost in all this is the fact that Lee’s World War II movie “The Miracle at St. Anna” has the potential to be a great war movie. Check out the poster below via Cinematical.
I saw the poster on the May issue at Cannes 2008 film Festival. I was amazed at the dark ...
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haha epic fail the bloody director confirmed it was from the sea awoken by a satellite 
Spike Lee is an idiot.
He sounds ridiculous. He’s so sensitive yet he feels free to fire off derogatory and potentially harmful accusations towards others. That plantation comment is offensive to Eastwood blacks,whites and inteligent people everywhere. What a dick bag.
Spike Lee needs to stop playing the race card every chance he gets. Yes, we get it. History has been terrible to a lot of people. But the way to make things better in the present and for the future is to work on NOW and STOP DRUDGING UP ever minescule little slight or taking everything and either a) making it personal or b) relating it to race.
Personally, I’d like to tell Spike Lee what a piece of shit racist I think HE is. I stopped watching his movies because he can’t seem to make a film without including a white character spouting racial slurs.
Note to Spike: Not all white people are bad. Most of us are good, honest people just trying to get by. Please, give us a break. Try talking to us without accusing us of being WHITE DEVILS. Who knows, you might even make a friend.
Spike Lee never fails to garner media attention for his causes. This was a movie about the guys who raised the flag at Iwo. And Lee’s own racial tunnel vision shows when he doesn’t understand that Hayes, one of the flag raisers, was Native American. I wonder if Lee would similarly want equal angle representation in a movie about the Buffalo Soldiers?
The first thing that came to my mind when I first heard of the war of words between Eastwood and Lee was how long ago had Eastwood’s films been released? It’s been about 2 years and Lee is just now saying something about this? Now I see that Lee has a film coming out in a few months so what all of this looks like to me is he’s using a platform for publicity which I think is petty, irresponsible and insincere. It seems that everytime Lee has a fit of racial injustice the press knows about it. Is Lee so concerned about racisim in this country or does his concern only surface when it serves him? I’m not so certain that Lee really cares that much about anything except what it can get him.
Once again, Spike Lee’s big mouth overshadows his deft talent as a filmmaker. God, how horrible it must be to be that bitter all of the time.
While it is clear to me that great black characters are rapidly becoming an extinct species in film and television, this is not an appropriate way to handle it. Good black characters are disappearing, but also consider when the last time you saw an Asian character who wasn’t a martial artist or femme fatale (besides “Harold”) headlining a film? Even then look at who is playing the very asian “Goku” in the DB movie.
Spike Lee is a filmmaker, not an internet ‘talkbacker’. If he has a problem with something, then he should settle it with FILMS not with rants. This will accomplish nothing, except make him look like a bitter has-been struggling for relevance. Personally, I like many of Spike Lee’s films: Inside Man and 25th hour come to mind as solid films.
This whole “controversy” smacks of desperation. He picked this fight, so that he could be relevant again. This will sour people on his new film instead of promoting it.
The biggest disappointment is that Spike Lee should spend his time directing and producing the kinds of films that he wants to see. Unlike many people he can actually have a direct impact on the industry. Name-calling and petty bickering will not create the sea-change that he wants.
“You must become the change that you wish to see in the world”
This unprovoked attack will not help anyone.
AE.
Spike is SOOOOO right… They should have taken a moment in the film… when the flag is being raised… to pan away from the evil white bastards to show a few heroic black guys stacking crates at the bottom of the hill… They could then look up in longing…knowing that their day will come. Smoke a cig, as a white private tells them to clean a latrine… then the camera could pan back up the the waving American flag, showing the ironic bitterness of the moment.
Woulda been so powerful… Figure Clint must have just added in the Indian guy to appease tribal elders… Its the ultimate story about sell out uncle Toms…
Um… and yeah…I am being sarcastic… Spike Lee is a douche. He negates any real discussion of race relations with his own hate filled nonsense… I think there should be a debate between Spike Lee and Tom Metzger. I think they would find they have a lot in common.
I had forgotten about Spike Lee, as well as his hate towards white people. When I was about 15 or so, ‘Do the right thing’ came out and while I could not grasp the utter racism towards Italians at the time, I thought it was a funny movie. Now being over 30 years old, I think back on the movies he made and can conjure up several scenes which are all about race, and only about the black man being ill-treated and that all other races are horrible, especially italians and anglo-americans.
He is a sad, sad individual. These attacks on Clint Eastwood are uncalled for and quite disturbing. I bet Spike is the kind of guy who sits in front of his TV and counts how many seconds pass before a black person is shown on each TV show or film - if too many seconds pass, well then the show is racist. No, I’m not exaggerating, some people actually do this. And I would wager that Spike is one of them.
Just look at his remarks about no black people being in Eastwood’s movie ‘Iwo Jima’. Historically the USA was still segregated, HEAVILY. And especially the Armed Forces. There was only a small all-black munitions platoon on Iwo Jima on the beach, they were not involved in any combat. But STILL Spike has to bitch about it, and I’m sure he even would’ve wanted one of the four guys who raised the flag to have been black, because otherwise it’s racism. Jeezus. He is so SAD. I had totally forgotten how sad he is. It must hurt to be this racist all of the time.
In conclusion, I will not concode his racist remarks, his racist view on people, nor will I add economic contribution to his works of racism by seing this movie. I will not go to the cinema, I will not get the DVD, and I will avoid it when it is broadcasted on TV. Furthermore, I will ancourage others to help STOP racism by following my example.
Spike has always been a whiner and one to play the race card. Hes using his whining to try and prop up his own film sales. People like him think about ways to hate other people different than him all the time. Or ways to create total chaos out of nothing. No matter what color God, or whatever the hell created us, a racist is a piece of shit, regardless of the Paintjob given at birth.