It's no wonder a palpable air of expectancy rips through the Varsity on January 25, just before the slated conversation between Spike Lee and Clement Virgo about the role of music in Lee's iconoclastic films.
In and around the box office at the sold-out affair, a mixed bag of folk - old and young and the gamut melting pot of ethnicities that make this city proud when things are in order - mill about like something big is about to go down. And it is, all right.
Inside the theatre, spirits are high, with chance meetings of old friends resulting in jawboning, glad-handing, backslapping. One dude boasts that he set off by transit, jumped off after a glitch, took a cab home, grabbed his wheels and there he be. A party within earshot hails his intrepidness and casually drops the fact that their journey entailed a four-hour drive and time off work.
"There's no way we were going to miss this!"
Obviously this is a Spike Lee love-fest, witnessed by the standing O at his intro and exodus. But between the lines, what goes down is straight-up bizarre.
Virgo is an award-winning Canadian celluloid homeboy - and also nobody's chump. He's long evoked Lee as his idol and inspiration, and calls this night "a dream come true." All well and good, then. Stage left: enter Lee, a renowned moody prick of an interview, even under the best of circumstances.
The twist of this bewildering fete noir is that he exhibits a quality of mercy toward Virgo that's admirable and entirely uncharacteristic given, shall we say, Virgo's failure of elocution, this night, as a moderator/interviewer.
"He's just nervous" is heard again and again from the peanut gallery. As at a losing home team sporting event, some even try to start a "boo" chant. Civility wins out.
The gig goes down mostly in the dark, to facilitate a scant few vid-bites of memorable Spike-flick significance. And talk about a load-blowing anti-climax: the first clip is the full intro of Lee's seminal Do The Right Thing, replete with the eternally lovely Rosie Perez undulating to the massive beats of Public Enemy's (PE) timeless groove Fight The Power.
Lee tells how he requested an "anthem" from PE frontman Chuck D. One rendition or the other of it is blasted close to 30 times during that flick - and it never gets old. Lee opines that the days of slopping in some hit song that drives a movie while the movie boosts sales of the song in return are long gone. (Think Grease, Saturday Night Fever, etc.)
"It's a totally different movie without Fight The Power," he gleefully submits.
After that - strictly musically speaking - there's really no where else for this thing to go. In retrospect, a less topically specific confab may have made for better dialogue. There are only so many ways to ask a filmmaker why he chose a certain tune for a particular scene.
The notoriously short-fused Lee, to his credit, keeps accommodating Virgo. Asked about his beginnings as an NYU film student and working with his legendary musician father, Bill Lee: "The music was better than the films." Bill Lee composed original scores for his son's pantheon of flicks including She's Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do The Right Thing and Mo' Better Blues.
Lee reveals his belief that musicians are the greatest artists because "they're closest to God."
Regarding the choice between score versus source music, Lee simply goes "totally by feel." And asked again, later, "by mood." To soften the moment, he elaborates that music is used to "help tell a story." After the last clip, Virgo goes in again - with the same angle in his inquiry. Lee finally shows a bit of wear and tear: "It's not that deep. Music is part of my shit."
And while still roiling at the thought that none of his soundtracks have won an award of any sort - "crazy," Lee deems it - he emphatically downplays his Academy Award nomination for the doc 4 Little Girls. The greater glory was the fact that it helped open up a 20-year-old FBI investigation into a firebombing of a church in Alabama. As Lee puts it, "We put those motherfuckers in jail!" A round of applause ensues, of course.
An audience member tries to bait Lee into maligning the efforts of other black directors. Not a chance.
