School Daze Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stuart Mieher

SOURCE: "Spike Lee's Gotta Have It," in The New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1987, pp. 26-9, 39, 41.

In the following essay, Mieher discusses the making of Lee's School Daze and his emerging success as a filmmaker.

The scene is an old fairgrounds building in Atlanta, now Madame Re-Re's Beauty Salon, a surreal creation of plywood, plaster and paint. The set has been packed with a score of dancers, a film crew and the director Spike Lee, all of them sweating under 140,000 watts of lighting to piece together a production number. Now the crew is taking a break. The dancers, overheated, head for cooler air outside.

Lee wanders out too, a short, spindly figure in black trousers, black sneakers and a Mets baseball cap. He is looking for an audience, and he finds one, a visitor. He asks, "Did you hear we got kicked off campus?" The campus...
(read more)