From the "People" Archives:

by Brandon Judell

The move is on to get Spike Lee's "4 Little Girls" a Best Documentary Oscar nod. To help make this a certainty, his hard-working publicist, Jackie Bazan, is browbeating the media overtime so the acclaimed feature won't be forgotten by nomination time. Since we've always been slightly fond of Spike, we decided to share our chat together with you. The film, by the way, chronicles the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Alabama on September 15, 1963 which left four young women dead.

"4 Little Girls" just finished a 9-city run Thanksgiving and will next be broadcast in February on HBO, the company that pulled together the project along with Lee's own 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks.

indieWIRE: Did you have any memories of the church bombing? You were only five at the time.

Spike Lee: I have no remembrances of it all. I do remember the Kennedy assassination which occurred when I was 11, but not the bombing of the Church.

iW: So when did that event first enter your consciousness?

Lee: I really can't tell you. I heard about it from my parents. My father is from Alabama, though not Birmingham.

iW: Frederick Douglas said, "We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future." Is that your goal with this film?

Lee: I think that there's a lot of young people, both black and white, that really don't know about the civil rights struggle and civil rights movement, and African-Americans in particular who today are bearing the fruits of everybody who had to sacrifice and struggle. They have no idea what happened, and they think it was always like this because they were always allowed to vote or go wherever they wanted. That wasn't the case at all. Afro-Americans somehow fear going back and revisiting painful parts of history, nevertheless we need to do it. All we have to do is look at our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters and see how much they revert back to the Holocaust. Most blacks don't even want to bring up slavery. Why bring that up? But that's our legacy. Even though I don't know how "Amistad", Spielberg's film, is going to turn out, I hope it's good. I do hope the success of that film generates many more projects about that whole dark period in this country.

iW: One person wrote of you that you have the misfortune to be the most prominent black director of his time. Because of this, you're given the responsibility to make the political films -- or to be THE black spokesperson. Do you feel the weight of that when you make a film?

Lee: No.

iW: It's just a media thing?

Lee: I have never, ever felt that I was a spokesperson for Afro-Americans in this country. I understand that the media is trying to pinpoint individuals that they do think speak for the masses or particular groups. It's not really the case now, but there was a time a couple of years ago when anytime something happened in the world concerning black people, the phone would ring in my office asking me for a comment. Being naive, I would comment. Now I guess I really consciously pick and choose sponsoring an issue that I want to talk about.

iW: But many would say you have helped politicize film in this country more than any other director.

Lee: Oliver Stone has done that, too. With "Nixon" and "JFK". We're not the first. Also I think that when you make statements like that, you really have to look at whomever you are talking about. Look at their role by their work. I've done ten films. Not all the films are polemical about issues. I love that stuff but that's not necessarily the only thing that I do.

iW: Just by putting blacks on film and not stereotyping them, you are being political.

Lee: You're saying that just putting blacks on film is political?

iW: Absolutely.

Lee: (Laughs.) Okay. I've also heard it argued that just the absence of politics in a film is political. Just the absence is a political move in itself also, so I won't argue with that.

iW: Were you surprised when you heard that Birmingham, once the bastion of racism in the South, was also the only city in America to ban the "Ellen Comes Out of the Closet" episode?

Lee: Not at all. When I read that was going to happen, I knew that Birmingham was one of the cities not going to run that episode. I was not surprised. They're just following their legacy.

iW: Malcolm X once said, "South was south of the Canadian border." Is Birmingham just America intensified, or do you think it's a land unto itself?

Lee: No, I'm not going to put everything on Birmingham. Malcolm said that when those people in those buses in Boston were being overturned and all that stuff. I think a lot of times the North is too quick to finger everything on the South. The midwest up to the northwest with all those militia people, that's the scary thing now. These militia groups. Neo-nazis and stuff like that. Most of that stuff is not even in the South. It's Oregon. Utah. Things like that.

iW: Certain groups -- gays, blacks, women -- are finally getting the power to make their own films. You have said in previous interviews that you're not happy with some of the films and TV shows they’re making. You thought "Booty Call" and "How To Be A Player" are degrading to African-Americans and doing little to improve their image. You said you wanted to break a TV set when you saw "Homeboys from Outer Space."

Lee: (Laughs.) I said all those things. There is nothing wrong with comedy. Nothing wrong with laughter or laughing. I'm talking about performers. I have problems with buffoons. Coonish type of humor. That's what my problem is. I just was finding it disturbing why every show, not every show, 95% of the shows dealing with African-American are sitcoms. Why can't there be some dramas?

iW: Do you sometimes think that throughout your whole career you'll always be -- quote unquote -- a black director?

Lee: Yes, I have no problem with that. I have no problems with white America looking at me as a black man because I understand the mind-set and where we are in this country. I think the majority of white Americans are unable to look at somebody black and not the skin of their color first. That's just the reality. And if that's the reality, I'm not going to spend valuable time agonizing over that, getting ulcers or hypertension worrying about the fact that people can't see who I really am and see the skin of my color. We're not at that point in this country. This country is not mature enough to get beyond that point.

iW: Addison Gayle Jr. wrote in The New Black Voices: "Perhaps to be sane in this society is the best evidence of insanity."

Lee: I don't know exactly what that means.

iW: Well, maybe you wouldn't be able to do what you're doing now 20 years ago. You'd have to be playing games and kissing ass in Hollywood.

Lee: I have to do that also. (Laughs.) It just amounts how much butt kissing.

iW: Is it easier to be black now then it was anytime in the past?

Lee: As far as working in corporate management or in the arts and movies? What do you mean?

iW: In general.

Lee: It really is a paradox because at the same time that there are more successful African-Americans then ever before, the black underclass is bigger then it’s ever been. So the cup is half empty; the cup is half full. I think you can just move back to the 1950's where in a lot of states, black people could not vote, could not buy clothes in stores downtown. They had to ride in the back of the bus. Public transportation. At the same time if you look at it, black businesses flourished back then. At the same time, look at the statistics. Black males weren't murdered at the rate we are now. We have this unbalance.

iW: In your film, there are scenes of the young black girls bodies who were killed by the bomb being laid out in the morgue. That's something I don't think I'll ever forget.

Lee: The quick cuts.

iW: Were you shocked when you discovered them?

Lee: Very shocked. Here's the story. We were in this public library in Alabama, and we asked to see the morgue photos, not knowing that they had them. When the clerk called the photos out, we were startled and taken aback. You can imagine what 20 sticks of dynamite can do. But when you see the results, it literally brings tears to your eyes. I have to be honest with you, I was not 100% sure whether I should include those shots. The postmortem photographs. But I decided if we didn't linger on them, it would be tasteful. They reinforce the horror and the crime that was committed when those sticks of dynamite went off in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed the four little girls.

iW: By the way, is your Jackie Robinson film getting any closer to reality?

Lee: I hope so especially after the enormous press that the 50th anniversary of Jackie breaking the color barrier received. I hope that one or two studios will now be willing to open up their purse strings.

[The IFP presents a special program tonight in New York City featuring a screening of "Four Little Girls", and a discussion session with filmmaker. For more information visit the IFP website at: www.ifp.org]

[Brandon Judell is the lead film critic for Critics Inc. on America Online and a contributing editor to Detour Magazine. His new book is "The Gay Quote Book" (Dutton). He has also written for The Village Voice, The Advocate, and Rodale's Guide to Weight Loss.]