USA / 1986 / 84mins / Drama, Romantic Comedy / English

Sexy and unconventional, Spike Lee’s first film features Nola Darling, a free-spirited woman who shares her bed with three men while refusing to fall for the vanities of male behavior.

Spike Lee

Spike Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee on March 20, 1957, in Atlanta, Georgia. At a very young age, he moved from pre-civil rights Georgia, to Brooklyn, New York. Lee came from artistic, education-grounded background; his father was a jazz musician, and his mother, a schoolteacher. He attended school in Morehouse College in Atlanta and developed his film making skills at Clark Atlanta University. After graduating from Morehouse, Lee attended the Tisch School of Arts graduate film program. He made a controversial short, The Answer (1980), a reworking of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Lee went on to produce a 45-minute film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983), which won a student Academy Award. In 1986, Spike Lee made the film, She’s Gotta Have It, a comedy about sexual relationships. The movie was made for $175,000, and earned $7 million at the box office, which launched his career and allowed him to found his own production company, 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks. On May 2, 2007, the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival honored Spike Lee with the San Francisco Film Society's Directing Award. In 2008, he received the Wexner Prize. In 2013, he won The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the American arts. In 2015, Lee received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to film. Lee won his first competitive Oscar in 2019, for the adapted screenplay for BlacKkKlansman. Learn More