Released in 1986, She’s Gotta Have It was Spike Lee’s debut feature. It was celebrated as a groundbreaking film which helped pave the way for African American filmmakers and for independent filmmaking in the 1980s.
The film was shot on a shoe string budget and is about a self-assured artist living in Brooklyn named Nora (Tracy Camilla Johns). She has three lovers – a ‘gentlemanly’ banker, an egotistical model, and an immature, back-talking younger man (played respectively by Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell, and Lee) – and no plans to settle down anytime soon. However, the men are not happy with this arrangement.
Netflix has ordered a 10 episode-long (each 30 mins in length) series. Most exciting of all, Spike Lee himself has signed on to direct all the episodes as well as to executive produce with his producer wife Tonya Lewis Lee. It will be the writer-director’s first TV series.
The series will be a contemporary update of the original. Lee has said that: ‘We are getting an opportunity to revisit these memorable characters who will still be relevant and avant-garde three decades later.
‘With all that said it was my wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, producer in her own oright, who had the vision to take my film from the big screen and turn it into an episodic series. It had not occurred to me at all. Tonya saw it plain as day. I didn’t.’
Via Deadline
