Ok, so we thought the whole Spike Lee vs. Clint Eastwood imbroglio was over. After a few barbs back and forth between the two filmmakers over the lack of black characters in Eastwood’s two ‘Iwo Jima’ films in 2006 (Lee is making a WWII film about the black experience called, “Miracle At St. Anna”), it appeared like the feud was over when Lee seemingly took the “Obama high road,” and refused to insult Eastwood any further.
Well, that’s at least how Lee treated it when he talked to MTV. When he talked to ABC, however, it was entirely different story.
After Eastwood told Lee to “shut his face,” Lee responded.
“First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either. He’s a great director. He makes his films, I make my films. The thing about it though, I didn’t personally attack him. And a comment like ‘a guy like that should shut his face’ — come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there.”
“If he wishes, I could assemble African-American men who fought at Iwo Jima and I’d like him to tell these guys that what they did was insignificant and they did not exist,” he said. “I’m not making this up. I know history. I’m a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II.”
But Eastwood says his history lessons were better than Lee’s history lessons (nyah, nyah!). “The story was about the men who raised the flag and we can’t make them black if they were not there. So tell him: Why don’t you go back and study your history and stop mouthing off!”
To add to it all, the excellent New York magazine blog Vulture (who hipped us to the ABC story we missed originally) went one step further and tracked down a still from “Flags Of Our Fathers,” that included black people in the movie. The scene is apparently a brief cutaway, but still, hey, look, African Americans are in a Clint Eastwood WWII movie, however briefly. Then again, it is just a quick shot. Will this feud ever end?
