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NBC Spikes Post-Katrina New Orleans
Spike Lee is adding a fifth act to his cinematic chronicle of the Big Easy, post-Hurricane Katrina.
The Inside Man auteur, whose most recent effort was the four-part HBO documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, is set to return to New Orleans to develop a series for NBC about how the city's residents are coping with life after one of the most devastating natural disasters ever to hit U.S. soil.
"It's a show about the city trying to rebuild itself and the people who are trying to put their lives together," Lee told the Hollywood Reporter. "It's our goal to make great cinema for television."
While NoLa--the city's moniker in local slang--is going to be a drama, the show will also feature Lee's pointed, satirical brand of humor that has shown up in his films ranging from 1989's Do the Right Thing to 2000's Bamboozled.
"We don't have to build sets," Lee said, as if on cue. "Things there still look like the city's been bombed out."
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the 49-year-old filmmaker, who will executive produce the series and direct the pilot if the project gets picked up, is traveling to New Orleans this week with writer Sid Quashie to interview residents.
"I thought it was a fantastic opportunity for a great television series," Quashie told the trade. "This is such an important subject, and New Orleans is such a seminal American city."
In keeping with his work on When the Levees Broke, Lee is going for a cinéma vérité look at life in the Big Easy, from the economic and political state of the city to the psychological and moral state of its people.
The director also plans to add authenticity and local flavor to NoLa by writing some of the more memorable folks from his documentary into the series' script as supporting characters.
This would be the first fictional series to take place in post-Katrina New Orleans and have the hurricane's aftermath function as one of the driving forces of the plot.
Lee had the idea for a scripted drama while he was shooting When the Levees Broke, a story he felt compelled to delve into for a number of reasons.
"When Hurricane Katrina went through New Orleans or around it, I was in Venice at a film festival," Lee said in a making-of interview for HBO. "It was a very painful experience to see my fellow American citizens, the majority of them African- Americans, in the dire situation they were in. And I was outraged with the slow response of the federal government.
"And every time I'm in Europe, any time something happens in the world involving African-Americans, journalists jump on me, like I'm the spokesperson for 45 million African-Americans, which I'm not. But many of them expressed their outrage too. And one interesting thing is that these European journalists were saying the images they were seeing looked like they were from a third world country, not the almighty United States of America."
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