She’s Gotta Have It: Spike Lee crucial chronicle of the changing face of New York

In 1986, Spike Lee changed how black characters were represented in American cinema with She’s Gotta Have It. Set in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the movie was a revelation. Thirty years on, Lee is revisiting his debut film for his first TV series, a 10-parter for Netflix – but regenerating the impact of the original will be no easy task.

“The world has changed”, says Lee. “It’s completely different worlds. Brooklyn New York was not gentrified back in 1986. Now it is.”

Back then, Lee showed a New York that had been hidden from cinema, featuring black middle-class characters who looked as though they had walked off the set of Annie Hall rather than the Blaxploitation pictures of the 1970s. The film put Lee at the forefront of the American independent film scene, alongside Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater.

The movie tells the story of Nola Darling, played by Tracy Camilla Johns, a sexually emancipated, independent and fiercely political Brooklynite with three boyfriends, each one an archetype of the 1980s.

These men were Mars Blackmon, played by Lee, a cycle courier with a basketball infatuation and an oversimplified take on black politics; Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks), a suave Buppie (as Black yuppies were called); and Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell), who was …

Please read original article- She’s Gotta Have It: Spike Lee’s crucial chronicle of the changing face of New York