From Young ‘Do the Right Thing’ Director to Oscar Win

Spike Lee’s Childhood

Shelton Jackson Lee was born in Atlanta on March 20, 1957, to jazz musician William James Edward Lee and arts and black literature teacher Jacqueline Carroll. He is the oldest of six kids. 

The nickname “Spike” came from his mother, who thought he was a tough baby. When he was a child, the family left Atlanta for Brooklyn, New York, where he attended John Dewey High School in Gravesend.

Spike Lee’s Higher Education

Lee returned to his birthplace to study mass communication at Morehouse College, a historically Black college. At the same time, he enrolled in film courses at the nearby Clark Atlanta University, and after receiving his undergraduate degree, he pursued a Master of Fine Arts in film and TV at New York University.

While at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Lee created a short film, “The Answer,” as a response to how D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was taught. According to an interview with Backstage magazine, faculty “didn’t like that film” and tried to kick Lee out of school.

“I had done such a good job that they gave me a TA-ship for the next year, and they did that before they did evaluations,” he recalled. “So they couldn’t kick me out, because I already had the letter.”

For his thesis, he submitted an independent short film, Joe’s Bed-Study Barbershop: We Cut Heads, about a man who takes over a barbershop after its owner is killed by gang violence. His classmates, future directors Ang Lee and Ernest R. Dickerson, collaborated with him on the project, and it won Spike a Student Academy Award.

Spike Lee’s First Feature Film

His first feature, She’s Gotta Have It, starred Tracy Camilla Johns as Nola, a young woman dating three men simultaneously. The film was a commercial success, grossing $7.1 million on a $175,000 budget. 

In 2017, Spike adapted the movie into a Netflix series, allowing him to expand on or tweak parts of the story — with an increased budget!

“For [the series], we had millions of dollars, a 63-day shoot, and ten episodes. There were things we couldn’t do then that we can do now,” he told Vulture. “For example, Nola talks about being an artist in the film but we never see her art. Here, we see Nola making art.”

The comedy-drama has stood the test of time, and in 2019, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry for cultural significance.

‘Do the Right Thing’

Spike directed, wrote, produced and starred in what many critics consider his magnum opus, Do the Right Thing. Featuring an all-star cast of Danny Aiello, Giancarlo Esposito, Samuel L. Jackson and more, the 1989 film explored the racial tension between Italian American and African American residents of Brooklyn.

It received Oscar nominations in Best Supporting Actor for Aiello and Best Original Screenplay but was notably snubbed from Best Director and Best Picture. At the 1990 ceremony, actress Kim Basinger called out the Academy for failing to acknowledge the film.

“We’ve got five great films here, and they’re great for one reason: They tell the truth,” she said while presenting Dead Poets Society as a nominee. “But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s Do the Right Thing.”

‘Malcolm X’

With a biopic about the famed human rights activist Malcolm X, Spike brought the revolutionary’s storied life to the silver screen. He credits the film’s success to leading man Denzel Washington’s Oscar-worthy performance.

“The spirit of Malcolm came over Denzel,” he said in a Democracy Now! interview. “He started working on that role a year before we even began to shoot. Stopped drinking. No more swine. No pork was on his fork. … learned how to pray, read the Qur’an. He devoted his life to that role.”

However, the movie almost fell through. Warner Bros. refused to provide Spike with the budget requested to execute the production, so he took the movie far along into the process to force their hand for more money. The studio and bond company also instructed Spike to limit the film’s runtime, which caused a conflict that shut the film down in postproduction.

Prominent Black celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Janet Jackson and Prince donated money to bring the film to fruition, so Spike could preserve its original three-hour length.

Spike Lee’s Friendship with Denzel Washington

Spike and Washington have maintained a close personal and creative relationship throughout their careers. They have four movies together, 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues, 1992’s Malcolm X, 1998’s He’s Got Game and 2006’s Inside Man. Though they haven’t worked together in nearly two decades, Spike said at the Red Sea Film Festival in 2024 that the duo are “brothers.”

“We just do our thing. We’re familiar with one another… our families are very tight,” the director continued.

The two will soon reunite for their fifth movie together, Highest 2 Lowest, an English-language reinterpretation of the Japanese film High and Low.

Spike Lee’s Marriage to Tonya Lewis

The screenwriter met his wife, former lawyer Tonya Lewis, at the 1992 Congressional Black Caucus Dinner in Washington, D.C. They tied the knot a year later at a church in their home state of New York City and have remained together ever since, welcoming two children: Satchel, born in 1994, and Jackson, born in 1997.

As a couple, they’ve teamed up on several creative endeavors, from writing children’s books to reimagining Lee’s first film She’s Gotta Have It.

“My wife, Tonya, watches a lot of TV. She’s the one who said, ‘You should try to make She’s Gotta Have It as a TV show.’ She had the vision. Wasn’t me at all,” he explained to Vulture.

‘25th Hour’

In 2002, he created another decade-defining film with 25th Hour, starring Edward Norton as a man experiencing his last 24 hours of freedom before a seven-year jail sentence. Although the film was in development before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the director decided to incorporate the event and its aftermath into the story rather than ignore it.

“We were very careful how we were going to portray Sept. 11, because we know it’s still very painful and that it will always be very painful for those who lost people,” Spike told The New York Times in 2002. ”But at the same time, we couldn’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend like it never happened.”

‘BlacKkKlansman’

In what many critics called a return to form for Spike, his 2018 crime drama BlacKkKlansman saw John David Washington as a detective trying to infiltrate and expose a local Ku Klux Klan chapter. The film, praised for John David and Adam Driver’s strong performances and cultural relevancy, earned six nominations at the Academy Awards. 

“We were just trying to tell truth to power. You know? It had to be a period piece that also comments on what is happening today with this guy in the White House,” Spike said to Rolling Stone in 2018.

Spike Lee Wins an Oscar

After over 40 years in the industry, Spike won his first competitive Oscar in 2019 when he took home Best Adapted Screenplay for BlacKkKlansman.  

In his speech, he told the story of his grandmother, whose mother was enslaved, and how she defied the odds to graduate from Spelman College. He then thanked her for saving “50 years of social security checks” to put him through Morehouse and NYU. 

Spike also called attention to the impending 2020 election, imploring voters to “mobilize” and “be on the right side of history.” He concluded his moving message with a cheeky reference to his Oscars snub decades ago: “Let’s do the right thing! You know I had to get that in there.”