If ever there were two men known for their strong personalities and not holding back on their opinions, those would be film director Spike Lee and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Lee, 58, is from New York City, and Emanuel, 55, is from Chicago.
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Recalling the meeting, Lee mentioned that Emanuel’s concerns about the title of his film are rooted in it affecting Chicago’s “economic development”.
Albany Park landlord Helen Slade said that’s bad news for a few of her tenants. “Do I have the guns?” My tactic with the mayor-any bully-is to come out swinging.
“His whole thing was, the title is going to hurt tourism, the title is going to hurt economic development”. But what tourism is he talking about?
“You ask us to do a little bit”.
That history is that during the one-month period he was filming, Lee told the magazine, “331 people got wounded, 65 murdered”. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35), one of the no votes, said he was saddened by the passage of this budget, and compared the mayor’s proposal to a bully taking money on the playground. The Huffington Post notes that alderman William Burns weighed in on the film’s title this spring as he labeled it as a “slap in the face” to residents who pay their taxes and work to clean up the city’s negative image.
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“New York City has three times the population of Chicago; Chicago has more homicides than New York City”, he said of Chicago, which boasts a few of the most stringent gun control laws in the country. “What I do have issue with is using a title for a movie that offends many people on the South Side, makes it harder to bring economic development to those neighborhoods and to give someone a tax subsidy to do it”. She says she supports the budget because the revenue will help keep city services going.
