Spike Lee in December’s Chicago magazine
There’ll be much more free publicity before Amazon Studios releases Spike Lee’s comedy-drama about gun violence in Chicago, based on the sex-strike plot of “Lysistrata,” but ever-clever mouth-that-shouts Spike has the first-last word right now: “OK, so that’s where your mayor and I got off on the wrong foot, right away. What I didn’t like was him trying to paint me as this villain. I’m not the bad guy, but that’s how he was trying to portray it. Do I have the guns? Am I the one pulling the trigger? To be honest, he’s a bully. You know I’m from Brooklyn, so… He’s not gonna bully me. My tactic with the mayor—any bully—is to come out swinging. I said, ‘Mayor, Your Honor, you’re gonna be on the wrong side of history.’ The mayor is a well-educated man. He and my wife both went to Sarah Lawrence. So I know he read Charles Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ It is a fact that Chicago is the most segregated big city in America. That’s not Spike Lee saying that. That’s a fact.”
Best of Chicago 2015
