With Red Hook Summer currently dividing audiences at Sundance, Spike Lee has been talking about his next project... and it might not be what you expect. All eyes recently have been on Lee's Oldboy adaptation, but this week Lee seems more inclined to talk about **Brooklyn Loves MJ.
Lee's screenplay pre-dates Red Hook Summer, but was shelved when the director struggled to drum up the finances. "I never went to studios with Red Hook Summer," Lee explains. "I just bought a camera and said we're going to do this motherfucker ourselves. But I wouldn't have been able to finance Brooklyn Loves MJ that way. With Red Hook Summer we had a low-budget agreement from the Screen Actors Guild. Brooklyn I could not have done like that."
The MJ of the title is Michael Jackson, and the film is an old-school Lee story of neighbourhood politics and simmering race-relations, which takes place on the day of the megastar's death in the summer of 2009.
Touching wood, Lee told The Playlist that, "Hopefully Brooklyn will be the next story," although it's unclear whether he means his immediate next project, or the one following Oldboy (which he doesn't mention at all). Oldboy, which seems to be struggling with casting, has had its projected start date pushed to the latter part of this year. Does that give Lee enough time to put** Brooklyn Loves MJ** together in the interim? Or is Oldboy quietly going away altogether?
We'll keep you posted. Red Hook Summer, where Lee reprises his Do The Right Thing role of Mookie, doesn't currently have distribution beyond the festival circuit.