The history-making movie Spike Lee hated: “I felt like putting a rock through the screen”
As one of cinema’s most outspoken voices, Spike Lee has never cared much about who he could potentially upset with his no-frills approach to passing judgment on the industry’s past, present, and future.
Whether they’re actors, icons, peers, colleagues, or contemporaries, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker has always shot from the hip. As a result, he’s ruffled some feathers during his four-decade stint as one of the most distinctive and incendiary voices in the business, telling it like it is regardless of the backlash he gets from those in his crosshairs.
It took Steven Spielberg’s intervention to resolve his ongoing feud with the legendary Clint Eastwood, he didn’t work with Samuel L Jackson for years after they fell out over a financial dispute, and even billionaire multimedia mogul Tyler Perry ended up in Lee’s bad books based on nothing but how he approached his career and built his empire.
Even when it came to actors who broke new ground, blazed a new trail, and made history, Lee wasn’t one for holding back. While he certainly holds Sidney Poitier in the highest of esteem not only as an actor but for what he meant to Hollywood’s aspiring Black actors, writers, directors, and beyond, he wasn’t obligated to love every one of the actor’s movies.
Describing him as someone who “burst and burnt through the silver screens of Hollywood” and a formative figure in his filmic upbringing after his mother took him to see Poitier’s films on the big screen when he was a kid, it goes without saying that Lee was one of the many wide-eyed youngsters in the theatre who were blown away by Poitier’s work.
He achieved something that nobody had ever done before when he was named ‘Best Actor’ at the Academy Awards for his central performance in the 1963 dramedy Lilies of the Field, making him the first Black man to win the trophy. It was a watershed moment, but Lee couldn’t stand the picture.
It might have been the first Poitier flick he saw on the big screen, but he was hardly blown away. “I hated that movie,” he admitted to Playboy. “I must have been six or seven years old, but even at that age, I felt like putting a rock through the screen. But we owe a lot to Sidney Poitier because in order for us to get to where we are today, those films had to be made.”
Needless to say, Lilies of the Field won’t be making Lee’s ‘best of’ list, but even at that age, he was smart enough to realise that watching a Black man deliver an Academy Award-winning performance in a mainstream Hollywood movie was something capable of setting the stage for others to follow in his footsteps.
