Spike Lee shares why Frank Sinatra got mad about ‘Do the Right Thing’
Appearing on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’, legendary filmmaker Spike Lee recalled falling foul of singing great Frank Sinatra.
Spike Lee says he once had to issue a grovelling apology to Frank Sinatra, after the legendary singer was enraged by a scene in the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing.
Written and directed by Lee, who also starred, Do the Right Thing chronicled the tensions between African-American residents of a Brooklyn neighborhood and the Italian-American owners of a local pizza parlor.
In a climactic scene, the pizzeria is burned down - taking with it a photo of Sinatra that was hanging on the restaurant’s wall.
“You disrespected him”
Appearing this week on the talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Lee remembered the moment when he learned that the fire sequence had angered ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’.
“A couple of films later, I did a film called Jungle Fever,” Lee told Kimmel. “Again, African-American-Italian-American stuff. And I wanted to use three songs from Frank Sinatra. The songs were Once Upon a Time, It Was a Very Good Year and Hello, Young Lovers.
“Frank’s daughter, Tina, handled his business, still handles his business. So I called up Tina and she said, ‘Spike, you can’t get the songs.’ I said, ‘Why?’. [She said,] ‘My father’s mad at you […]. You disrespected him.’”
“I said, ‘Tina, what did I do?’ She said, ‘You burned his picture in a pizza parlor!’ I don’t know if he saw it [Do the Right Thing], but he knew his picture got burned. He was not having it.”
The only way to get back into Sinatra’s good graces, Lee recalled, was to pen a formal expression of contrition. “I wrote, hand-written, a 10-page letter apologizing to the great Frank Sinatra,” Lee told Kimmel. “And he gave me the songs!”
Lee, who received the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his 2018 film BlacKkKlansman, was appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! having recently brought out his latest movie, Highest 2 Lowest.
A remake of the 1963 Japanese movie High and Low, Highest 2 Lowest stars Denzel Washington as David King, a New York music mogul who is targeted by a ransom plot. Released in U.S. movie theaters in August, and on Apple TV+ in September, the film’s cast also includes Jeffrey Wright, Ilfenesh Hadera and ASAP Rocky.
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