20 years after his first film, Spike Lee tells the untold stories of Katrina

Jet, August 28, 2006 by Adore D. Collier

A year ago, as America was glued to its TV sets, stunned by images of Blacks being airlifted from rooftops, struggling at the New Orleans Superdome and dying in the Ninth Ward in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Spike Lee was stuck in Venice, Italy. Helpless.

"I was in Venice, Italy--another city of water--for the Venice Film Festival and I wasn't doing the gondolas or the restaurants," he told JET. "I wasn't doing any of those things last September. I was in my hotel room mesmerized, watching CNN and BBC (British Broadcasting Corp.) and seeing those images. I said, 'This is going to be a defining moment in American history.'"

A year later, the waters have receded, but the pain still lingers. And Lee has set about documenting the disaster and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in an HBO documentary, When The Levees Broke, a film that brings to light what really happened, and who should be held responsible in one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.

For the film, which runs four hours, Lee talked to federal, state and local officials as well as a wide range of New Orleans residents--college professors, journalists, musicians, engineers, and numerous displaced Black and White residents.

He came back and immediately went to HBO where he had done two previous documentaries--Four Little Girls, about the Ku Klux Klan's 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, AL, that resulted in the deaths of four Black girls, as well as a film on the career of NFL great Jim Brown.

"This is an epic! We started out thinking it was going to be two hours, but as we began to shoot, we said, 'We can't tell this story in two hours.' And we're grateful to HBO for giving us the extra money so that we could expand it to four hours."

In the documentary, officially titled When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, Lee personalizes the tragedy by showing elderly residents as they break down emotionally when they return to homes they'd lived in for 30 years or more, displaced residents who vow to return, and others who say they'll never come back. And White females with nothing left but the foundation of their homes who hurl government-attacking insults into the camera.

In the midst of shooting the film, Lee told JET: "I'm bipartisan, but it definitely has a point of view. The present administration does not look good. The National Guard is there for national disasters. They were in Iraq. And a lot of money that could be spent on levees is going for the military. And companies like Halliburton (where Vice President Dick Cheney worked) got no-bid contracts in Iraq and down in New Orleans."

Lee spares no one in his film's condemnation of the amazingly slow response to the tragedy.

New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco are criticized in the film for poor communications.

However, FEMA(the Federal Emergency Management Agency) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are singled out for some of the harshest blame. He points out in the film that days went by and the death count increased before FEMA became significantly involved. It is pointed out that help reached southeast Asia following the devastating Tsunami two days after it struck while the bulk of federal help didn't reach New Orleans until four or five days later.

The Corps of Engineers belatedly acknowledges the pre-disaster construction of the levees that hold back the waters around New Orleans were a "catastrophic" failure. One engineering professor questions if the revamped levees are still safe.

Commentaries are offered by Wynton Marsalis, Michael Eric Dyson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Harry Belafonte, Tulane University Professor Doug Brinkley, actor Sean Penn, CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien, trumpeter Terence Blanchard and musician Kanye West.

The first two hours of the documentary were set to premiere on HBO Aug. 21, with the second part to air the following night.

"New Orleans is fighting for its life," Lee said. "These are not people who will disappear quietly--they're accustomed to hardship and slights, and they'll fight for New Orleans. This film will showcase the struggle for New Orleans by focusing on the profound loss as well as the indomitable spirit of New Orleanians."

The documentary comes while Lee celebrates his 20th anniversary as a filmmaker. When the Levees Broke is his 20th film as well.

He grins when he looks back on his first film, She's Gotta Have It. That film, shot in 15 days, focused on a confident Brooklyn woman (Tracy Camila Johns) who juggles three boyfriends (Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell and Lee).

"We had a budget of $175,000," he recalled. "I never had that money in one lump sum. We started with a $10,000 grant from the Jerome Foundation and the rest was put together nickel by nickel. We had deferred salaries. Vendors let us go until we got some money."

He said he was so inexperienced when he shot that film that it's still "painful" for him to watch. "To tell you the truth, I didn't know what I was doing as a director until I did Do the Right Thing, my third film. She's Gotta Have It and School Daze were on-the-job training. I was scared to talk to actors the first two films. I didn't know how to approach actors. It took me that third film to feel at ease with actors."