Spike Lee can be called many things, but subtle isn't one of them.

Take the lead character of his new film, "He Got Game," a high school basketball star played by the Milwaukee Bucks' Ray Allen. On the eve of graduation from high school, he finds himself caught up in a vortex of agents, college recruiters, friends and family members. Everybody wants a piece of him.

Allen's character is called Jesus Shuttlesworth, which is a double whammy. There's the first name, which not only has obvious connotations, but was also a nickname for Earl "The Pearl" Monroe when he was coming up in North Philadelphia. And there's the surname, which is recognizable as that of Fred Shuttlesworth, the venerable Baptist pastor and civil rights leader.

The symbolism couldn't be clearer: Athletes have become secular saviors in late 20th century America, the repositories for the hopes, dreams and pride of their communities. Watching Jesus withstand increasing pressures and expectations, it's difficult not to speculate on parallels with the director himself.

Lee was only 29 when his feature debut, "She's Gotta Have It," was released in 1986, but overnight he became an elder statesman of African-American cinema on a par with Oscar Micheaux and Melvin Van Peebles. Ever since, Lee has churned out an average of one film a year, becoming prominent in the black community, a mentor for young black filmmakers and a spokesman willing to make any off-the-cuff comment, no matter how inflammatory. His films have taken on special iconic power: They're not just any movies, they're Spike's movies.

But during a recent Sunday, meeting the press in a New York hotel, Lee, who turned 41 in March, denied that the tensions visited on Jesus Shuttlesworth are in any way autobiographical.

"A savior?" he asks incredulously. "No, no. And even if I was given that role, I would never accept that at all." He paused. "Even if the pressure's there, I'm glad I didn't feel it, because sometimes the pressure can immobilize you."

The symbolism of "He Got Game," Lee had explained to a group of reporters earlier, is "really more a comment on the lack of leadership in the African-American community, or just American society in general, where athletes and entertainers are put on that level, whereas before it was religious leaders or political leaders.

"You know, I love Michael Jordan to death," continued Lee, who has directed and appeared with Jordan in several Nike commercials. "But he's the world's greatest basketball player. That does not mean that Michael is going to be politically astute [enough] to lead African-Americans in whatever direction we need to go."

Nattily turned out in an olive-green shirt and cream-and-black houndstooth jacket, a stylish goatee emphasizing his handsome features, Lee answers questions quietly and slowly, punctuating his responses with drawn-out pauses. His eyes, solemn and watchful behind his signature spectacles, rarely meet his interviewer's. The director's reputation as a prickly firebrand is belied by a shy, almost winsome demeanor.

Controversy

Throughout the afternoon, his voice grows audibly strained, but he lets rip with the occasional guffaw, especially when talk turns to the two "adult" film stars he used in a scene wherein Jesus is being aggressively courted by a university known as Big State.

The women have been hired to help convince the lad to attend, and their convincing gets pretty gamey. "That scene was longer, too!" Lee says when needled about the frank sexuality in "He Got Game." "We just showed the tip of the iceberg in terms of what happens in recruiting. That's light stuff. That's recruitment light." As steamy as they are, the nearly X-rated scenes in "He Got Game," which opened Friday, may not be the film's most controversial moments. At recent screenings in New York and Baltimore, filmgoers booed and shrieked "Nooooo!" when Denzel Washington, who plays Jesus' estranged father, kissed Milla Jovovich, who plays a white prostitute. "Denzel, you promised!" cried one despondent fan to the laughter of the crowd.

"Don't kid yourself, they were serious," Lee says of the audiences' response. "Denzel's their prince. So it's serious business when he's kissing a white woman."

Of course, if Lee had written the prostitute as black, that would have raised issues just as troubling. "You just can't run from stuff that's scary or upsetting all the time," Lee explains, citing love scenes with Washington and his white co-stars that were excised from "The Pelican Brief" and "Virtuosity." "Denzel and I knew this reaction would happen, but what can you do?"

Lee has been criticized in the past for writing shallow female characters. Is he bracing for another "woman problem" with "He Got Game"?

"No, I think women are going to have a problem with that scene, [but] I hope it doesn't escalate to having a problem with the movie," he says. "We knew that going in, the thought of Denzel kissing a Caucasian lady, even someone as beautiful as Milla "

Wait a minute. "As beautiful as Milla"? This from someone who called white women "mugly dogs" in a 1991 interview? "Now, that was a stupid statement," Lee says softly.

Spoken like an elder statesman, indeed.

"He Got Game," Lee's 12th feature film, epitomizes his life and career, both of which have been passionately entwined with his love of basketball. In his 1997 memoir, "Best Seat In the House," Lee wrote of following the New York Knicks while growing up in Brooklyn, one of five children of a jazz bassist and a teacher. "Looking back, it would be impossible to overstate the impact of sports on my life - and on many lives in Brooklyn," he wrote. "It may seem we had encyclopedic knowledge of sports; we were steeped in them."

Celebrating basketball

Lee continued, "The nature of basketball, the game, is such that you can put an individual stamp on it, and that's what the African-American has done to and in the game. There's something to be recognized, something unique that African-Americans bring culturally to music, to dance, to sports, to literature, to photography - whatever the medium is. This creativity shows in this game, basketball."

Lee celebrates basketball as a vehicle for black cultural expression in "He Got Game." But the movie also acknowledges that the sport has been something of a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it's an area of American life that African-Americans have greatly influenced and dominated. But African-Americans have yet to make significant inroads in the power-echelons of administration and team ownership. And, more subtly, the white fans' worship of Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant may reinforce the pernicious stereotype of black men as bodies, rather than black men as brains.

"There's some validity to that," Lee says. "Especially [in] the media, where they have these code words. For black athletes, it's 'great athletic ability.' [For] white ball players, 'Slow of foot, can't jump very well, but very intelligent.'"

In addition to investigating the role of basketball in the black community in "He Got Game," Lee acknowledges the sport's hold on Americans of all races, most eloquently in the film's opening sequence, a stirring montage of young people shooting hoops - girls, boys, white, black, on playgrounds, in gyms, against barn walls - set to the soaring strains of Aaron Copland's "John Henry" and "Appalachian Spring."

Lee chalks up the sport's popularity to its physical expressiveness - to which African-American players have made invaluable contributions. "Very few people can know what these football players look like," Lee explains. "One or two quarterbacks, and that's it. With basketball, the thing that makes it a great game is that you can tell somebody's personality just by the way they dribble, the way they shoot, the way they walk. I mean, those guys are naked, you know?"

The black budget gap

"He Got Game" is clearly a film Lee was born to make, but getting the film made "wasn't a slam dunk," he says (Sony, with whom the director has a "first-look" deal, passed on the project; Disney's Touchstone Pictures eventually produced the film).

Although Lee's films have made money in the past, recent efforts like "Clockers," "Girl 6" and "Get on the Bus" have been box office disappointments.

The fate of "Get on the Bus," the 1996 film starring Andre Braugher, Roger Guenveur Smith, Isaiah Washington, Ossie Davis and Charles Dutton, was particularly bitter for Lee. The ensemble drama, which was set against the backdrop of the Million Man March, was praised by critics, but filmgoers stayed away.

The film's failure had implications for black film production in general. "If 'Get on the Bus' had been more successful, more people would try to duplicate what we did on that film," Lee said, referring to the 15 black men - including attorney Johnnie Cochran and actors Will Smith, Danny Glover and Wesley Snipes - who ponied up the film's $2 million budget.

Such new financing strategies are crucial for black filmmakers, who face enormous odds in Hollywood. There is still no African-American executive at a major studio with the power to "green light" a film. And for all the success of films like "Waiting to Exhale," studios insist that black-themed movies don't

perform overseas. For that reason, they are rarely budgeted over the mid-range of $25 million.

In a post-"Titanic" era in which blockbusters and franchises reign supreme, "medium-sized films slip through the cracks," says Lee. His own $35 million-budgeted movie about Jackie Robinson has been in limbo for years, the victim of the black budget gap.

Two successful 1997 films, "Eve's Bayou" and "Soul Food," were the products of either their stars (Samuel L. Jackson in the case of "Eve's Bayou") or soundtrack composers (Babyface Edmonds the case of "Soul Food") becoming producers. Should black artists take it upon themselves to fund their own projects?

"It's going to take us, African-Americans who have money," says Lee. "I'm not really talking about artists, just people who have money and financially get together and do what has to be done."

Ambition and intensity

Lee is a famous workaholic. In addition to making a film a year, he manages to direct television commercials and music videos, runs his own ad agency (Spike DDB) and speaks often on college campuses. He also teaches film at New York University, his alma mater. Last year, Lee made his first feature-length documentary, "4 Little Girls," about the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four Sunday school students.

The film, which many critics consider Lee's best, was nominated for an Academy Award. Lee has been known to complain loudly when he's been shut out of the Oscars, but on this day he shows no trace of bitterness.

"We've gotten recognition. Sometimes we get overlooked," he says philosophically. "But that's not the reason why I'm a filmmaker. I think you get into dangerous territory if the reason why you make art is solely to get recognized."

Lee, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Tonya, 3-year-old daughter, Satchel, and nearly 3-year-old son, Jackson, imagines that as the kids get older he'll be working less frenetically. Still, he looks forward to starting his next film - even if he doesn't know what it will be.

"I'd hopefully like to shoot a film this summer. Then after we do that, in the fall, start shooting a documentary," he says. "We don't know what the film's going to be, but we know that on this day, we're starting."

Pub Date: 5/04/98