Brian Damage
06-06-2008, 09:51 PM
Remember last month at Cannes when Spike Lee — promoting his African-American WWII movie Miracle at St. Anna — made some characteristically aggressive remarks about the dearth of black characters in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers? Well, the man who once played Dirty Harry has a few choice words for Lee.
"A guy like him should shut his face," Eastwood told the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper — apparently thinking that calling Lee a "dummy head" might sound childish. Despite his obvious anger, Eastwood gave a straightforward response to why there weren't more black roles in his film: "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 also claimed that Lee had once griped about Eastwood directing Bird, the biopic about African-American jazzman Charlie Parker, a story Lee thought should be told by a black director.
http://community.tvguide.com/blog-entry/TVGuide-Editors-Blog/Movie-News/Clint-Eastwood-Spike/800041046
"A guy like him should shut his face," Eastwood told the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper — apparently thinking that calling Lee a "dummy head" might sound childish. Despite his obvious anger, Eastwood gave a straightforward response to why there weren't more black roles in his film: "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 also claimed that Lee had once griped about Eastwood directing Bird, the biopic about African-American jazzman Charlie Parker, a story Lee thought should be told by a black director.
http://community.tvguide.com/blog-entry/TVGuide-Editors-Blog/Movie-News/Clint-Eastwood-Spike/800041046