event Do The Right Thing

Spike Lee’s 1989 breakthrough, Do The Right Thing, is a sun-touched slice of life that roils with racial tension. The film takes place on the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where tempers flare around Sal’s Famous, a local pizza-by-the-slice joint managed by Italian-American Danny Aiello, whose contempt for his almost exclusively black clientele leads to trouble. There are at least a dozen other subplots, too, all leading toward an explosive finale that had some critics at the time clucking their tongues and wondering if the film would incite riots.

Spike Lee’s 1989 breakthrough, Do The Right Thing, is a sun-touched slice of life that roils with racial tension. The film takes place on the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where tempers flare around Sal’s Famous, a local pizza-by-the-slice joint managed by Italian-American Danny Aiello, whose contempt for his almost exclusively black clientele leads to trouble. There are at least a dozen other subplots, too, all leading toward an explosive finale that had some critics at the time clucking their tongues and wondering if the film would incite riots.