Psst. Got a great investment opportunity for you. You come up with X amount of money, with a guaranteed loss of 100 percent of whatever you put in. All of the cash goes to an Upper East Side zillionaire. Interested? Spike Lee’s operators are standing by, begging you to Do the Dumb Thing.
In recent years, Spike Lee has made two types of movies: On the one hand are the commercially viable for-hire projects based on (good) scripts written by others (like the 2006 bank-robbery hit “Inside Man” or the upcoming remake of the thriller “Oldboy”).
On the other hand, there are the deeply felt, highly personal, socially engaged and utterly unwatchable failures, like 2004’s “She Hate Me” (final gross: $366,000), 2008’s “Miracle at St. Anna” ($8 million) and last year’s “Red Hook Summer” ($338,000). These films are overlong, overbearing, self-indulgent and as artful as a crowbar to the coccyx, which is why you didn’t bother to see them.
In a plea for crowdfunding of his next movie on Kickstarter, Spike says he needs you to pay for one more of them. Because 20 aren’t enough.
According to the Web site celebritynetworth.com, Lee is worth some $40 million, so the easiest way for him to raise $1.25 million would be to spend one-thirtieth of what he’s got in the bank. In 1998, he bought, for $7.2 million, a monster double townhouse on the Upper East Side that he got from artist Jasper Johns: It’s a 9,000-square-foot, 32-foot-wide, quasi-Italian villa with a fountain. It’s the kind of thing Marie Antoinette would have thought was bad for her brand.
If you think putting intentionally bad grammar in his movie titles constitutes keeping it real, wake up: Spike Lee isn’t fighting the Man. He is the Man. He hosted President Obama and the likes of Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon for a $36,000-a-plate fund-raiser at his house last fall. At least guests there got to be part of a winning presidential campaign and got a chance to hobnob with the leader of the free world.
Now Lee is playing reverse Robin Hood and asking hoi polloi for donations. (And they are donations, not investments: Unlike real film producers, you don’t get a piece of the profits in return for ponying up, though Lee is offering signed posters of his movies and some other goodies.) In his Kickstarter pitch, Lee said, “Last week one of my students told me about two big developments with Kickstarter. There was a TV show called ‘Veronica Mars’ that was canceled, they raised FIVE MILLION DOLLARS on Kickstarter . . . And then Zach Braff from ‘Scrubs,’ he raised THREE MILLION DOLLARS for his film. So I heard about that, I said, ‘Oh snap.’ ”
In other words: Spike thinks that if people are dumb enough to give to other millionaires, they should be dumb enough to give to him, too. So don’t get on the bus. If you give to this inside man, it’ll just prove you’ve been bamboozled.