Spike Lee to give voice to Katrina's victims

Spike Lee was in Venice, of all places, when the levees broke. Sitting in his hotel room in the submerged Italian city, where he was attending a film festival, Lee flipped back and forth between BBC and CNN, riding the roller coaster of emotions over what man and nature had wrought in New Orleans.

“I was really mad and sad,” Lee told TV critics during a session to promote “When the Levees Broke,” his upcoming HBO documentary. “I wanted to do something about it.”

Sad because, despite being a New York homeboy, Lee considers New Orleans America’s most distinctive city. Seeing it underwater broke his heart.

Mostly, though, Lee was, and is, angry at a country that let this happen, at a government that reacted indifferently to the suffering of black people in the Crescent City and at a short-attention-span culture that has already consigned Hurricane Katrina to the history files.

That’s how the celebrated director, who is not known for making nonfiction films about current events, decided to undertake what became a four-hour docu-opera, subtitled “A Requiem in Four Acts.” It airs in two parts, Aug. 21 and 22, repeating in full Aug. 29, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans.

While Lee resisted attempts by reporters to pry details about the four-hour documentary, he said it would rely heavily on the first-person recollections of the city’s African-American population, who suffered the cruelest of the hurricane’s aftermath when the Ninth Ward was flooded.

He said that the anger of these citizens, many of whom have yet to return to New Orleans, would be given its full measure in “When the Levees Broke.” Lee will even give ample time to those who think that the levees did not collapse under the weight of the water but were detonated, perhaps by the government.

“I know this may be hard to understand,” Lee said to the nearly all-white assembly of TV critics, “but if you’re African-American, you don’t put anything past the United States government. Anybody know about something called the Tuskegee experiment?”

The 40-year “study” by the U.S. Public Health Service allowed 399 black men to die of syphilis so their remains could be studied.

“We gave time to people to say what they feel, and (more than) one person said they heard an explosion” at the levee, Lee said.

That’s one reason he wanted to do the film for HBO. After producing a documentary about the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, “Four Little Girls,” Lee knew the network would let him do the film his way. But there was another reason HBO was the place for Lee.

“When people are mad, they curse,” he said. “They’re profane, and I did not want to censor anything these people had to say.” He recalled interviewing one woman who, explaining her frustration trying to get help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, asked on camera, “Tell me who I have to have sex with,” only it was more randy than that.

For the most part, Lee was pleased with media coverage of the Katrina disaster. He saved his harshest criticism for President Bush, FEMA and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who stayed in New York, “buying Ferragamo shoes on Madison Avenue and then (going) to see ‘Spamalot’ ” while New Orleans was suffering.

“No one, still, has explained why there was not a food-and-water drop right away,” he said. “People did not have to die. It’s very important we realize that. It was not a natural disaster. It was a manmade disaster. … It’s criminal. I think somebody has to go to jail, somehow, for what happened.”