"She's Gotta Have It' Turns 25!!

I know I am a couple days late with posting this but I'm not in the states and this one snuck up on me quick and fast. However 2 days ago (August 8th) back in 1986, a director by the name of Spike Lee directed a film that would rock the nation. She's Gotta Have It, was a film that really opened Hollywood's eyes especially as it relates to the assumptions regarding black women's sexuality. I just could not let this one pass me by!!

Well during my daily reading I came across a very interesting and thought-provoking article in The Root titled "Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It Turns 25"by Salamishah Tillet...check it out here:

On the hot night of Aug. 8, 1986, a line of young black people wrapped around the corner of New York City's Cinema Studio 1, eager to catch Spike Lee's much-buzzed-about debut feature film, She's Gotta Have It. Eighty-five hot and sexy minutes later -- which included Mars Blackmon's carnal plea, "Please baby, please baby, please baby, baby, baby, please!" -- they weren't disappointed with Lee's cinematic achievement.

The following day, the New York Times review said that the movie "has a touch of the classic." And the Washington Post praised its "rare quality: a sense of place."

She's Gotta Have It is now cinema and book history, but back then, a 29-year-old Lee, wunderkind director and NYU film-school graduate, turned the Hollywood establishment upside down by setting the film in black Brooklyn, shooting it in 12 days on a starting budget of $20,000 (the final budget was $175,000), securing a distribution deal with Island Pictures, winning the Prix de Jeunesse at Cannes and grossing more than $7 million that year.

The provocative heroine of his film, Nola Darling, and its taboo subject matter, a black woman's sexual independence, marked a radical departure from anything ever seen on the American screen before. In the words of cultural critic and director Nelson George, who was one of the film's early financiers, on Aug. 8, 1986, "the first successful black cult film" was born.

A Revolution in Black Film

Twenty-five years later, it's clear that She's Gotta Have It was a hit for so many reasons. The plot, featuring a young woman, Nola (Tracy Camilla Johns), and the three lovers who courted her -- the romantic poet, Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks); the narcissistic model, Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell); and the now-iconic hip-hop bike messenger, Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) -- might have been anticipated by the prose of Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. The sexual context and contests of Lee's movie, however, were unchartered waters in black cinema.

For more check out The Root !! This is good stuff folks!