Versus: Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood, Werner Herzog and Abel Ferrara.

2008-06-10 17:00:02

In the left corner, you have the highly quotable, controversy-courting filmmaker Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee. In the right, the generally taciturn but sometimes just as headline-quote worthy actor-director Clinton Eastwood, Jr. At stake: the accuracy of the racial makeup of the casts of "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima." Lee threw the first punch at a Cannes press conference on the film he's just finishing up, "Miracle at St Anna," a drama about four "Buffalo Soldiers" in the 92nd Division fighting in Tuscany during World War II that he suggests is a corrective to films like Eastwood's: "There were many African-Americans who survived that war and who were upset at Clint for not having one [in 'Flags of Our Fathers' and 'Letters from Iwo Jima']. That was his version: the negro soldier did not exist. I have a different version.... It's not like he could say he...

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