‘This Is Your Life’ Meets a Job Fair: Spike Lee Talks Tribeca, Receives Gifts

Spike Lee at the indieWIRE/Apple Store SoHO Tribeca Talk Wednesday night. Photo by Peter Knegt.

“This is like ‘This is Your Life’ meets a job fair,” the Museum of the Moving Image’s David Schwartz said to Spike Lee as he moderated their discussion at the Apple Store in SoHo last night. The packed event, which reached capacity well before Lee entered the building, saw an eclectic mix of audience members eager to share their six degrees of seperation to Mr. Lee.  Two audience members had gone to his Brooklyn high school, one had worked as a production assistant on “Bamboozled,” while another thanked him for employing her family on many of his sets. 

Additionally - and more prominently - audience members had a wide array of gifts for Lee, from their scripts to their screeners to the posters of their films.  Lee politely answered their requests for advice, and would yell over at his long-time assistant, Earl, to collect the gifts. By the end of the discussion, whenever a new audience member would request Lee to see their work, the rest of the audience would announce in unision with Lee, “Earl!” 

“I’m not trying to discourage you,” Lee said to one aspiring filmmaker. “But you should know what you’re getting in to. It’s rough for me to get a film made. That’s just the world we live in… In order to get your film made you have to write a great script. So, hopefully you can do that.”

To another filmmaker who had already completed a documentary on his struggles being disabled after having been shot as a teenager, Lee both advised film festivals and advocated gun control. “That’s where your work gets seen, in film festivals,” he said. “And it sounds to me like what you’ve been doing has been the right path. I commend you for what you’ve been doing. And we have to do something about guns in this country. I mean, we live in the most violent country in the history of civilization. People shooting each other left and right over dumb shit. And it’s so easy to acquire guns and, I mean, fuck the NRA. I’m sorry. We need tougher gun laws to stop this madness of people just killing each other. It’s crazy.”

Lee eventually - and respectfully - requested the questions pertain to the reason he was there: To promote his double dose of Tribeca Film Festival offering - Kobe Bryant-centered doc “Kobe Doin’ Work,” and his documentation of the musical “Passing Strange.”

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“The reason I’d never been in the Tribeca Film Festival before is because I didn’t have a film,” Spike Lee said to an audience member who asked what took him so long to screen work at the festival. “With the way this festival comes in April, usually I have stuff ready for the summer or the fall. So it’s a calendar thing. And it just worked out that after eight years I had two films and I’m glad they wanted them to be part of the festival.” Page 1 of 2 Next Login to recommend this article » posted on April 23, 2009 Films to Snag Comments 1 ben77 says on April 24, 2009 at 5:53pm Great piece. Indiewire needs to keep up this kind of focused, well-written work. Sometimes things can feel so uninspired… with all due respect. Login to Leave a Comment »