Tyler Perry Wants Spike Lee To “Shut The Hell Up!”

And in this corner….Two of the most successful Black filmmakers in Hollywood history are at one another’s throats again. It seems Tyler Perry never quite got over a 2009 interview in which legendary lensman Spike Lee quipped that Perry’s films “harken back to Amos n’ Andy.”
“Each artist should be allowed to pursue their artistic endeavors, but I still think there is a lot of stuff out today that is coonery and buffoonery,” Lee told 60 Minutes at the time. “I know it’s making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better. … I am a huge basketball fan, and when I watch the games on TNT, I see these two ads for these two shows (Tyler Perry’s ‘Meet the Browns’ and ‘House of Payne’), and I am scratching my head. We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?”
After nearly two years of keeping his silence, Tyler unleashed the beast on Spike during a press conference for his latest comedy, Madea’s Big Happy Family, opening in theaters this weekend.
Tyler calls out Spike by EURnews
“I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee,” Perry fumed. “Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, I am sick of him saying, ‘this is a coon, this is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: ‘you vote by what you see,’ as if black people don’t know what they want to see.”
Oh, but he isn’t done yet. Tyler followed up with: “I am sick of him – he talked about Whoopi, he talked about Oprah, he talked about me, he talked about Clint Eastwood. Spike needs to shut the hell up!”
Perry furthered lit into Spike in an email to EUR’s Lee Bailey. The For Colored Girls director simply can’t understand why he finds his biggest critics among other African-Americans.
“I’ve never seen Jewish people attack Seinfeld and say ‘this is a stereotype,’ I’ve never seen Italian people attack ‘The Sopranos,’ I’ve never seen Jewish people complaining about ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ or Dustin Hoffman in ‘Tootsie.’ I never saw it. It’s always black people, and this is something that I cannot undo,” he wrote.
“Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois went through the exact same thing; Langston Hughes said that Zora Neale Hurston, the woman who wrote ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ was a new version of the ‘darkie’ because she spoke in a southern dialect and a Southern tone. And I’m sick of it from us; we don’t have to worry about anybody else trying to destroy us and take shots because we do it to ourselves.”