“One of my epic dreams”: the greatest Spike Lee joint that never came to life
The Covid-19 pandemic was a really, really weird time, that’s for sure, when people did strange stuff faced with an unprecedented global catastrophe.
Some stood outside their houses and hit pots and pans with spoons to tell nurses they were doing a good job, my parents washed every item of post they got for months, and others, like legendary director Spike Lee, decided to release scripts that never got made into movies for bored folk to read in lockdown.
Which I suppose made sense, because people around the world really were getting quite fed up at being made to sit all the time indoors, threatened with arrest if they went for a walk with more than one friend, bizarrely, while our toffee-nosed friends at number ten threw pizza parties and giggled at the easily manipulated idiocy of the general public. And it also made sense because the demand to read one of Lee’s screenplays would have been sizable, given we are talking about a seven-time Academy Award-nominated director responsible for some of the best movies in history.
But there were also two reasons why Lee’s act of generosity, which he delivered by posting a link on Instagram for people to read the script, wasn’t quite as exciting as he might have thought, even for a public that was slowly going loopy, making endless banana breads and having family quizzes on Zoom.
Firstly, it was for a biographical movie about Jackie Robinson, who was the first African American to play in Major League Baseball, which is fine, but baseball is an absolutely interminably dull sport in which the same thing happens over and over and over again until you are pleading for it to stop.
And secondly, a Jackie Robinson biopic had already been made, seven years previously, and it’s not like the 2013 production called 42, starring Chadwick Boseman as Robinson, plus Harrison Ford in a supporting role, wasn’t a big deal, as it was a hit at the box office, bringing in $97.5million on a budget of $40m, in the process becoming the most successful opening for a baseball film in history.
Nevertheless, Lee proudly announced that everyone could read his version of the biopic, which was scrapped due to creative differences and financial problems, by writing at the time: “Afternoon from da Corona epicenter of the USA-NYC. I dug deep into da 40 Acres vault and pulled out this script from one of my epic dreams (never got made) projects: Jackie Robinson. You do not have to be a baseball fan to enjoy. This script is a great American story. Be safe. Peace, light and love. And dat’s da ‘Brooklyn Dodger’ truth, Ruth. YA-DIG? SHO-NUFF. Hope you enjoy it. If not, that’s alright too. It’s never getting made.”
On the flipside, however, Lee had already completed filming on a movie released in the early months of the pandemic, which would prove to be one of the biggest hits of his decorated career. Da 5 Bloods was a Netflix-backed war movie starring Delroy Lindo and Boseman in his final film that saw a group of Vietnam veterans return to the country to find the remains of their friend and some long-lost treasure. It won several prizes and unanimous acclaim, eventually ranking alongside some of Lee’s best-loved movies like 1989’s seminal Do the Right Thing and the serial killer movie Son of Sam a decade later.
Lee currently has three directorial projects in the works, including Boner, about the origin of Viagra, plus Prince of Cats, a modern-day retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in Brooklyn and told via ’80s hip-hop, all of which sound much more exciting and novel.
