Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Okay … Maybe I am a bit ‘thick’ … but tell me again ….

BTW, I was in DC in March … There is plenty of Spike’s designated “chocolate” there …

Examiner -

Hundreds of Spike Lee fans began lining up as much as two hours before his appearance Thursday night at the Silverdocs film festival in Silver Spring. After running the gauntlet of cameras on the red carpet, Lee was treated to a montage of his own work before settling in to a chat with Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy.

An expert on Hurricane Katrina thanks to his film “When the Levees Broke,” Lee said the same problems are affecting Missouri right now.

“The money’s going to other things,” he said. “That’s going to change though.” As applause escalated, he added, in a clear reference to Barack Obama, “We’ll have a real chocolate city.”

Next up for Spike: a film in which he shot Kobe Bryant with 30 cameras before and during a Laker game in April. He said he was inspired by a similar film he saw about French soccer star Zinedine Zidane at Cannes. “I thought, ‘But this would work better with basketball,’ ” he said.

Earlier Thursday, Washington Mystics president and BET co-founder Sheila Johnson spoke at the festival and confessed to being new to and nervous about this whole “filmmaker” thing.

“It was like giving birth,” she said of producing her film, “A Powerful Noise.”

But at least she’s in good company. She told the crowd, “A couple months ago, I met with Whoopi Goldberg and she said, ‘My dear, welcome to my island.’ ”