The Hip Pocket #24: DO THE RIGHT THING

We bring this series back with the best film of the '80s

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

---

Do The Right Thing
Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Richard Edson, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee, Bill Nunn, John Turturro, Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, Robin Harris, Joie Lee, Miguel Sandoval, Rick Aiello, John Savage, Samuel L. Jackson, Rosie Perez, Roger Guenever Smith, Steve White, Martin Lawrence, Christa Rivers, Leonard L. Thomas, Luis Ramos, Steve Park, Frank Vincent
cinematography by Ernest Dickerson
music by Terence Blanchard
screenplay by Spike Lee
produced by Spike Lee and Monty Ross
directed by Spike Lee
Rated R
2 hrs

On the hottest day of the summer, tensions flare in a Brooklyn neighborhood with everyone’s attention focused on Sal’s Pizzeria, the Wall of Fame, and a young man named Radio Raheem, with everything eventually erupting into tragedy.

It may be a cliche to say so, but the dialogue in Spike Lee’s towering (and infuriating) Do The Right Thing is like music, and I love to listen to the film as much as I love watching it. Maybe even more.

When I first moved to Los Angeles back in 1990, I had been here for about two days when I saw a notification for an event that was being held at the Samuel French bookstore on Sunset Blvd. Spike Lee was doing a book signing to mark the release of Mo’ Better Blues, and I decided there was no way I was missing it. My buddy and I drove over the hills from where we lived, found the bookstore (these were the days of relying on your Thomas Guide for everything), parked nearby, and then walked over to make sure we were there the moment the store opened.

Keep in mind, the signing wasn’t supposed to happen until 6:00 that evening. But I pictured this crazy throng of thousands of people all clamoring to get Spike to sign their books, and I wasn’t going to get shut out. Nope. No way. When the store opened and I asked the employees where to line up, they looked at me like I was a crazy person. They recommended coming back a few hours before the event. When I wouldn’t budge, they finally found a place in the side alley for me and declared that the start of the line. I stayed there all day, and by the time it was actually supposed to start, there were a few hundred people in line. And there I was, right at the head of that line, all 6’2” of big goofy white kid, and I had my copies of the books for Mo’ Better and Do The Right Thing all ready to go.

There were camera crews there to shoot a little footage of the event, and when they were getting ready to open the doors, a few people came out to pick someone to be the first person on-camera to get their book signed.

I did not handle this news well.

To be clear, I asserted at top volume that this was BULLSHIT and that I had been there all day and NO WAY IN HELL was anyone else walking in there first just because they were demographically preferable. The people in charge of the event quickly realized that I was a lunatic with no compunctions about bellowing my grievances, and they told me I would be the first one in.

By the time I got inside, it seemed like Spike Lee had already been prepped on what happened, and he watched me with that bemused “what kind of nonsense is this?” smile that is his trademark as I approached the table. “So… they tell me you waited all day because you had a question. What’s your question?”

“In Do The Right Thing, when Radio Raheem does the whole right hand/left hand thing from Night Of The Hunter, is that Radio Raheem paying tribute to Robert Mitchum, or is that Spike Lee paying tribute to Robert Mitchum?”

Lee laughed, and he kept laughing as he answered me. “Radio Raheem doesn’t know who the fuck Robert Mitchum is.”