The DGA Fails to Do the Right Thing
Few films recognized by the organization have enjoyed the level of cultural relevancy as Do the Right Thing.
In Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), a bespectacled Brooklynite nicknamed Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) has a moment of clarity.
Buggin’s neighborhood pizza joint, Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, has a predominantly black customer base. Yet its owner, Sal (Danny Aiello), only hangs photos of Italian Americans on the walls. When Buggin’ balks at the inconsistency, Sal responds with this argument, similar to that which runs America:
If Buggin’ Out wants different photos on the establishment’s walls, he needs to go buy his own store.
This statement, of course, is easier said than done.
Earlier this month, the Director’s Guild of America released a list of 80 top directed films in cinema history, polling members to see what they consider the highest directorial achievements in cinema since the Guild’s founding in 1936.
Sal’s Famous Pizzeria comes to mind as not a single black director’s work is on that list, and the films have a paucity of minority lead actors. (For the record, only one woman director, Kathryn Bigelow, is included.)
So just how similiar is the DGA to Sal’s Pizzeria?
The Director’s Guild of America (DGA) — a trade union which routinely negotiates industry-wide agreements — is overwhelmingly comprised of white male directors. They make up 82% of the association’s membership.
Meanwhile, minority directors constitute only 12% of the DGA. And when it comes to racial disparity in the film industry, the DGA, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg.
In its scathing 2016 Hollywood Diversity Report: Busine$$ as Usual, the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies finds that although films with diverse casts like Fast and the Furious 7 and Creed continue to be popular in a country now composed of 37% of nonwhites, movies with minority leads and/or minority directors constitute less than 15% of Hollywood productions.
Further, white males still constitute about 70% of agent and partner positions at the three largest agencies in Hollywood, i.e., those folks responsible for putting pitches and casting lists on executives desks.
And as to film executives, the Washington Post finds that of a sample of 343 executives in the Academy in 2015, 299 of them are white males.
Ultimately, The Bunche Center study strongly indicates that Hollywood’s major executive pipelines are clogged by a familiar business model that favors preserving homogeneous ownership over the necessary experimentation and diversity that make art thrive.
And this takes us back to Buggin’ Out’s dilemma: how to get some more black people on that wall?
Clearly, it’s not on artistic merit alone — because if that were the case, Do The Right Thing would be on that DGA list.
For example, Lee’s direction illustrates the stifling combinatory nature of heat and small, isolated space in inner-cities. He deftly shoots scenes in corners and against fire-hydrant colored walls, often crosscutting to close-ups of tense, sweaty faces.
And during moments when tempers are on tilt, Lee relies on dutch angles to make the audience feel as if Brooklyn’s boiling cultural melting pot is about to spill over.
Second, apparently cultural relevance isn’t a requisite for directorial achievement either — because again, if that were the case, Do The Right Thing would be prominent on the list.
A quick search query on Do The Right Thing yields mounds of discussion about how the film and Lee’s directorial techniques effectively (and unfortunately) reflect current issues in America, e.g., race relations in Ferguson and elsewhere, dangers of Global Warming on human interactions, widespread effects of gentrification on people of all backgrounds.
All this, and we haven’t even delved into academic studies on the film or its place in introductory film textbooks across the globe.
To be frank: over the last three decades, few of the other films on the DGA’s list have enjoyed the same level of real-world relevancy as Do the Right Thing.
A scene from Do The Right Thing that isn’t mentioned nearly as much as its blistering finale is noteworthy here as we consider the lack of diversity on Sal’s wall and the black directors absent from the DGA and its list.
After trading racial barbs back and forth for the better part of the day, Sal’s pizza delivery man Mookie (Spike Lee) — good natured as he is impatient and myopic — invites the unabashedly bigoted Pino (John Tutturro) over to the juke box to break bread.
If you watch their conversation without seeing the rest of the film, you’d think you saw a whole new Pino and Mookie: the two have a quiet heart-to-heart while gentle saxaphone music plays in the background.
Pino not only admits that his favorite celebrities are Magic Johnson, Prince, and Eddie Murphy, but surprisingly that he has read about Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan.
There’s a hope in this scene — however short-lived — that intimate moments of humanity can reign over surface racial stereotypes and, for our purposes, close-minded Hollywood executives.
If Mookie and Pino could keep their dialogue going for another few hours, then maybe their world would be a better, more tolerable place to live. Maybe, as Mookie’s friend Radio Raheem’s hand jewelry suggests, hate would finally give over to love.
But neither Mookie or Pino has the patience for this. There’s too much hostility in the air, and the blazing summer temperature and centuries of racial animus are impossible to erase in a momentary sit-down.
Yes, Spike Lee’s direction here gives us a glimpse of what could be, but then he promptly takes it away… just as Hollywood continues to do to those films that don’t fit its traditional mold.
