12/14/2023 0 Comments Spike lee kids![]() ![]() It was a great time to grow up in Cobble Hill.ĭo you make it back at all? It’s not so Italian anymore. But as soon as the neighbors understood that there weren’t any other black families, it was not like a mass of black families moving in behind me, I was just like everybody else. And we got called “nigger.” At that time, Cobble Hill was strong-I mean, strong-Italian-American, because of the docks. We were the first black family to move into Cobble Hill. First we lived at 1480 Union Street in Crown Heights and then we moved to Cobble Hill, 186 Warren Street, between Henry and Clinton. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but we moved here from Atlanta at an early age. These are New York City street games.Įight years, from ’61 to ’69. Stoop ball, stickball, cocolevio, crack the top, down the sewer, Johnny on the pony, red light green light one-two-three. What bothers me is that these kids do not know the street games we grew up with. I cannot imagine what it must be like for you to walk around Cobble Hill now and see wheat-germ places and Pilates. It took me a long time to get rid of it, to be honest. Well, I’ve lived in New York for twelve years, but I am originally from Central Illinois. I live in Cobble Hill, where you grew up, and it’s so gentrified now that it’s almost entirely white people with strollers like me. What is going to happen to Bushwick? Next thing, after Coney Island, there is the Atlantic Ocean. Then you moved to Williamsburg-oh, it became too hip. People lived on the Lower East Side and got priced out of there. Fort Greene’s gentrified, Harlem was gentrified, Bed-Stuy’s gentrified, and Williamsburg is gentrified. He’s still delivering.īut this isn’t Mookie’s Brooklyn anymore. You brought Mookie back from Do the Right Thing. It was nothing unusual, just the same processes as an editor on a book or a musician doing an album-twenty songs and you have to get it down to twelve. I forget what we did-whatever we had to do to make it a better film we did. Red Hook Summer had a somewhat difficult reception at Sundance. And that is not an indictment of them, it is just a fact. But I knew the Hollywood studios were not going to make this film. I do independent films and also do Hollywood films-I love them both. From the very beginning I have done both. Fun is not for me determined by whether it is an independent film or Hollywood. I do not know if you can shoot it faster. Is that as quick as you had shot a film before this? She’s Gotta Have It was shot in twelve days and two six-day weeks. We shot it in eighteen days, three six-day weeks. The film was shot within a ten-block radius. I talked about Red Hook, he grew up in Red Hook, his father and mother were preachers, you have the Carmelo thing, and that is how it all came together.īesides writing and directing, I am producing this thing, too, so I know that time is money. We both have kids, and we were talking about what kind of film our kids would see. One Saturday morning, James McBride and I were eating breakfast there. So I said, “Let’s go to Red Hook.” Then, one Saturday morning, James McBride and I were eating breakfast at Viand. We claimed Michael Jordan-he was born in this neighborhood, Fort Greene.īut here is the genesis to the whole thing: When the Knicks traded for Carmelo, he got a deal with Boost Mobile, and they came to me to do a digital piece on Carmelo. They claimed him when he was at Syracuse. But the people of Red Hook don’t feel that way. There’s a perception that Carmelo isn’t really from New York, that he’s really from Baltimore. We actually painted the shrine to him on the courts for the movie. She’s Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, He Got Game, Clockers, Crooklyn, and Red Hook Summer. I am a professor at NYU-I’ve been one the last fifteen years-and one of the courses they are teaching in cinema studies this summer is “Scorsese’s New York.” The postcard has a map of Manhattan and a dot where each Scorsese film took place. Red Hook Summer is another chapter in my chronicles of Brooklyn. This is not Spike going back to his roots. I am glad you asked that, because I am going to try to shake the narrative as much as I can. People keep talking about Red Hook Summer as a return to your roots. ![]()
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