(2 of 2)
When he heard that Jewison had the go-ahead for the project, Lee waged a protest campaign, arguing in the press that only a black director could do the right thing with Malcolm's story and pestering Worth with countless phone calls, insisting, "I'm the guy, I'm the guy." Worth finally relented, and Jewison bowed out. Warner Bros. agreed to finance the Baldwin script, as rewritten and directed by Lee, starring Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington. "I think they felt it would be more of an event with Spike," Worth says.
Certainly it was a financial event. Lee, who had never spent more than $14 million on a film, demanded $40 million in order to portray four distinct periods in Malcolm's life and to go on location for such crucial sequences as his pilgrimage to Mecca. When the studio refused, Lee trimmed his budget to $33 million. Sorry, said the studio, but $20 million was as high as it was willing to go. Lee made up some of the difference by selling the foreign rights for $8.5 million, then went ahead with shooting based on his $33 million projection. He hoped that Warner would come through once filming was under way. It didn't -- a decision that Lee attributes to racism. "There are two realities in Hollywood, one black and one white," he says. "Unless you're Eddie Murphy, there's a glass ceiling on how much they're going to spend on black films."
Still, Lee is so determined not to make compromises that he has taken the unusual step of investing a sizable amount of his reported $3 million salary in the project. Malcolm X once famously said blacks would achieve their rights "by any means necessary." Lee clearly feels the same way about his movie.