On the commentary track of Jim Brown: All-American, director and producer Spike Lee notes with exasperation that the film's subject is known primarily for doing two things: being the greatest football player of all time and allegedly throwing a woman off a balcony. To Lee, however, he remains as remarkable for what he did off the field as what he accomplished on it. In his adoring biography Jim Brown: All-American, Lee argues that Brown represented a revolutionary new kind of black celebrity: cocky, brash, overtly sexual, and unwilling to conform to white society's conception of what a black man should be. It's no wonder that when the blaxploitation boom rolled around, Brown loomed large as one of its marquee names.
