Clint Eastwood takes it to Spike Lee

June 6, 2008 by Jeremy.

Taken from Dirty Harry comes clean:

Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. “Has he ever studied the history?” he asks, in that familiar near-whisper.

The “he” is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood’s Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood’s movie and told reporters: “That was his version. The negro version did not exist.”

Eastwood has no time for Lee’s gripes. “He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that’s why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else.” As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”

 Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. “A guy like him should shut his face.”

I don’t understand why Spike Lee can’t use some Common Sense and realize that there is no need to make this movie a “race issue” because the movie deals in what I like to call “fact” and that is how Clint Eastwood did the film. I’ve seen the film and it is very moving and told the story of the Iwo Jima flag raising very well.

I am so tired of people making racial issues out of something that should not be racial at all. I cannot stand racism from either respect. There are those that are racist by hating someone of a particular race and then there are those that are racist because they think their race deserves special treatment. Both of these thought are racist and deserve to be called such.

So I will put myself out there right now and say that Spike Lee is a racist. I think that is just Common Sense.

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