The original budget for the film was $175.000 and went on to make $8.5 million at the box office. I raised the money for the film originally. When an opportunity happens, ownership is a big thing. "It had to be something that I owned, so that I didn’t have to license something. I went through the entire film and selected stills from a 35mm print of Mars Blackmon and I just had a hunch that would be a good debut as my introduction to NFTs." Why did you choose this film in particular for your debut NFT? In that film, which I directed and wrote, I also played the character 'Mars Blackmon' who was introduced to the world and I think you know his part of the culture. "Well, my grown children introduced me to NFTs and I was intrigued! I then remembered that I own the rights to my first film "She’s Gotta Have It". As an iconic filmmaker, how did you get involved in the tech industry and NFT world? "Yes, I am actually in the office right now!" A great production company behind your acclaimed films! Speaking of your films.you have made an NFT of your groundbreaking debut feature film "She's Gotta Have It". GEORGINA LARA BOOTH interviewed Spike Lee on his award-winning career as a visionary filmmaker and storyteller, his pioneering films, his background, topics of race and gender relations in film, feminism, his exclusive debut NFT of "She's Gotta Have It" and more.Ī post shared by Spike Lee is where your production company, 40 Acres And A Mule Filmworks, is based? Mars Blackmon, known as 'the original sneakerhead', is an iconic character both in film history and also in the world of sneakers due to the Nike Air Jordan line sneakers named after him and the famous ad campaign alongside Michael Jordan with the phrase "It's gotta be da shoes" in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since Lee owns and controls the Intellectual Property rights of "She's Gotta Have It", he chose to turn his Mars Blackmon character - played by Lee himself - into an exclusive NFT in partnership with the Web3 Incubator 'The Visible Project' focused on Independent Art. In 2019, the film was preserved in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Considered a landmark independent film in American cinematic history, "She's Gotta Have It" stands out for its groundbreaking representation of African-Americans in American cinema - making a shift to depicting people of colour as upscale urban professionals instead of criminal characters that were common at that time in American cinema and the Blaxploitation ethnic subgenre. Dickerson, he made his directorial feature film debut with She's Gotta Have It in 1986. Following his subsequent successful graduate film studies at NYU, where he won a Student Academy Award for his thesis film that he worked on with fellow classmates Ang Lee and Ernest R. It was at college where he would direct his very first films. Born in Atlanta in 1957 as Shelton Jackson Lee, to the jazz composer Bill Lee and teacher Jacqueline Carroll, Lee was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and went on to study mass communication at the historically black college Morehouse College where he was a classmate of Martin Luther King III. It is therefore not surprising that he is a tenured Professor of Film and Artistic Director of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, his alma mater, where he continues to teach and inspire the next generation of filmmakers. Lee's captivating body of work and storytelling have inspired new generations of filmmakers and storytellers. The name of his Brooklyn-based production company itself refers to the Reconstruction Era following the American Civil War when emancipated black families were given lots of land of no more than 40 acres and some leftover military mules on the coast of Georgia. Such films include Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman - the latter earning him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Having founded the production company '40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks' and pioneering African-American cinema, Lee has produced many thought-provoking films since the 1980s that have formed a diverse body of work recording the African-American experience in ways that other filmmakers did not dare to do, while shaping his own particular auteur brand and uniqueness within the film industry. SPIKE LEE is the innovative Academy Award-winning filmmaker, producer, screenwriter, actor and cultural icon known for exploring and frankly depicting race and gender relations, crime, poverty and issues within the black community, media and politics in America.
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