Shelton “Spike” Lee was the eldest child of two college-educated and highly talented parents. His Father Bill Lee was a Jazz Bassist who played with Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, and John Lee Hooker. Bill Lee often worked as a composer on scores for Spike Lee’s films. His Mother, Jacquelyn Shelton Lee was a very intelligent woman who taught literature and art at a private school in New York. They moved to Brooklyn from Chicago at a point when the area was transitioning from Italian to African American. Spike noted “I’ve always been the product of a loving and supportive family. If your family is behind you, that’s half the battle. I’ve always felt that children’s dreams are killed by their parents more than anybody else, but my parents were not like that – my grandparents weren’t like that.”
He reported that his grandparents on both sides had been educators and musicians. It was a source of pride that his great-grandfather William Edwards Williams had studied under Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute and had started the Snow Hill Institute in Alabama. Spike Lee was born in Atlanta, Georgia. The world he knew as a child in Brooklyn was Black, proud, and brimming with potential, but poverty and drugs took their toll and it was a very rough neighborhood for his younger siblings.
He earned his nickname as a child for his petulant and fiery nature. Obsessed with sports, he was always the captain of the team in school. As a filmmaker, he was quickly stereotyped as an angry young man who challenged everyone, from his audiences to those foolhardy enough to interview him. His coworkers knew him as a loyal but brutally direct man. You always knew where you stood with him, you had the latitude to create that he granted you, but it was his show.
His three brothers and sister grew up so much in his shadow that some felt eclipsed, that they had no identity separate from being his sibling. His brother David worked for other filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch and Michel Gondry as a still photographer. His brother Chris bypassed the business altogether. Finally, his brother Cinque and sister Joie had ambitions of their own to write and direct.
Cinque encouraged Joie to write down the aspects of her childhood that bothered her and this autobiographical searching became the entry point for a thirty-page collaborative script. As they continued developing the project they hoped to do themselves, they sought advice from Spike and eventually sold him the rights.
The subject cut Spike to the bone in an emotional way he could not allow. Their Mother had been so central to their lives; he could not face up to putting it all on screen. In addition, Joie’s truthful but R-rated image was rougher than what he thought he could sell as a family story. He ended up cutting out huge parts of the script, putting in a bevy of nostalgic street games for a certain neighborhood feel, and changing the ages of the characters so that the daughter was much younger than reality. The end result is still a characteristically honest portrayal with great music and an off-putting anamorphic Southern vacation (to symbolize the unreality of the environment). It is among his most sensitive, subtle, and critically successful films because of the way he makes the young girl’s point of view so complicated and heartfelt.