Clint Eastwood: Spike Lee Should "Shut His Face", Lee Responds, "We're Not On A Plantation" - Entertainment on The Huffington Post



Clint Eastwood: Spike Lee Should "Shut His Face", Lee Responds, "We're Not On A Plantation"


UPDATE:
"First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either," Spike Lee told ABCNEWS.com about Clint Eastwood. "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."

"Not everything was John Wayne, baby..."

"I never said he should show one of the other guys holding up the flag as black. I said that African-Americans played a significant part in Iwo Jima," he said. "For him to insinuate that I'm rewriting history and have one of the four guys with the flag be black ... no one said that. It's just that there's not one black in either film. And because I know my history, that's why I made that observation."


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Clint Eastwood has advised rival film director Spike Lee to "shut his face" after the African-American complained about the racial make-up of Eastwood's films.

In an interview with the Guardian published today, Eastwood rejected Lee's complaint that he had failed to include a single African-American soldier in his films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both about the 1945 battle for the Japanese island.

In typically outspoken language, Eastwood justified his choice of actors, saying that those black troops who did take part in the battle as part of a munitions company didn't raise the flag. The battle is known by the image of US marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.

"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." Referring to Lee, he added: "A guy like him should shut his face."

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Read Spike Lee's Clint Eastwood criticism from Cannes just last month:

"He did two films about Iwo Jima back to back and there was not one black soldier in both of those films," Lee said Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was a judge in an online short-film competition.


"Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version," Lee said.

Yeah I read about this which reminded me of this...

Where have all the black soldiers gone? | World news | The Guardian

"A guy like him"?

When it comes to cooning in a Mcdonalds or Coca Cola advert they don't mind showing 'black' faces then because they know it sells, but when it comes to omitting us from history they have no qualms because they're afraid of losing revenue. I'm not a big fan of Spike Lee but Clint Eastwood is clearly a bigoted fool who conveniently forgets all the African fans he had when he was starring in all those western movies - but has no problem making a movie from a Japanese perspective. Clint Eastwood KNOWS exactly where Spike Lee is coming from so this feigning ignorance b.s. is a major insult to Africans not just in America, but everywhere.

I don't usually agree with Spike Lee's methodology but I'm with him on this one, particularly when he mentioned the elders who fought in Iwo Jima only to have their contributions go unacknowledged.


Clint Eastwood has shown his true colours (no pun intended) but I doubt it'll make the slightest bit of difference to the average 'black' fan anyway.

Right on, Spike!!!!

Yeah

Spike is hot and cold to me..

he's done good work for Black arts...but sometimes he turns a personal battle into something bigger and uses it for his own benefit.


He called out Clint Eastwood for being inaccurate and he's right.......
Don't revise history......

Black American soldiers were invovled in a vast majority of military engagements of WW2 even in a support capacity.Spike is indeeed correct.I have family who were at DDDay and other significant events during the war.


BTW Spike has a WW2 themed movie coming out s this is his usual MO.

i don't see what the problem is really.

haivng said that...i lived in carmel, ca in the 70's. eastwood's eatery the "Hogs Breath" was jumping. I knew some people who worked there. One of the guys mentioned once that one of the partners was a nazi from the old days.

someone may research that...

if he is truely a bigot then this would probably make this true.