Spike Lee’s “L.A. Riots” This Year?

Producer Brian Grazer is saying that Spike Lee’s long-awaited film about the 1992 Los Angeles riots could start shooting this year, working from a John Ridley script Ridley’s work also makes reference to the Watts riots of 1965, the ignored warnings cops were giving their superiors and the maneuverings in the trial of the officers who beat down Rodney King. This is what he said about the project.

“The idea is to try to get as accurate a picture of how this happened as I can. Beyond race and the hot-button issues, it’s just these little things together that allow for chaos. It was a Katrina-type systemic failure. Literally and figuratively, it wasn’t just a black and white problem.”.

“To me this story is so real and so true that you don’t need to go out of your way to be provocative. There’s a level of balance in that everybody is a little embarrassed, everybody is a little outraged.”

Terry George, writer/director of Hotel Rwanda who worked with Lee on Inside Man, is on board to do a rewrite of the script. This is Grazer’s take on the project.

“It’s a war movie set in a modern city like Los Angeles,” he says. “There were 56 deaths, more than 2,000 buildings that caught fire and all sorts of horrific destruction. So we see the anger and the emotion, but the story enables us to see the strife from all perspectives. You get a close look at the sociopolitical dynamics from the perspective of the cops, the African Americans, the Koreans, from all these different people. And then you get to arrive at your own conclusions.”

Check out the trailer for Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna.