From Rush & Molloy, New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
Actresses still steaming
over Spike's sex scenes
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005
With films like "Malcolm X" and "Get on the Bus,"
Spike Lee has established himself a provocative explorer of America's racial divide. But as a young director, Spike didn't know jack about shooting a sex scene.
Rosie Perez still shivers when she remembers the "very disturbing" sequence in "Do the Right Thing" in which Spike, playing her boyfriend, rubbed ice cubes all over her body.
"I had just lost my virginity in college," Perez recalls. "I found [the scene] much more exploitative than what I had read [in the script]. … Eventually I burst into tears and I said, 'Don't keep filming.'
"It was irresponsible to put me in that position. He was the older person, the captain of the ship."
To Spike's credit, Lee includes Perez's complaints in his new memoir, "That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It."
The book also quotes Lee's sister, Joie, saying her sex scene with Denzel Washington in "Mo' Better Blues" was nothing less than "horrible. [It was] just humiliating, humiliating. I seem to experience that a lot with my brother."
Likewise, Annabella Sciorra has unpleasant memories of her "Jungle Fever" romp with Wesley Snipes.
"I called 'Cut!' because Wesley took off my underwear and I didn't have anything on underneath," says Sciorra. "And to my knowledge that's not what we were doing."
Spike's mind may have been elsewhere. Randy Fletcher, assistant director on "Jungle Fever," recalls one morning when Spike asked him a question: Why hadn't Fletcher told him that Spike's then-girlfriend, Veronica Webb, who was in the film, had "gone to bed with a few people we know"? (Webb wrote in her own 1998 memoir that Spike put "sexual pressure on me," causing her once to swing a Louis XIV lamp at him.)
Spike found no more joy getting into bed - in a business sense - with Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein. Lee says Weinstein warned that he wouldn't make "Girl 6" unless Spike cast another former Lee flame, Halle Berry. Lee finally landed her, but says he still branded Weinstein a "fat bastard."
Of course, Harvey's trimmer and friendlier now.
Plump Jackson tidbit
Janet Jackson is denying reports that she and ex-husband James DeBarge have a secret 18-year-old daughter. But could the R&B diva be expecting a baby with current beau
Jermaine Dupri?
For four days, Jackson tried to ignore a claim by former brother-in-law Young DeBarge that she was a mother. Yesterday, she finally told "Access Hollywood": "I do not have a child, and all allegations saying so are false." Neither of the DeBarges could be reached for comment yesterday. But some Janet-watchers have already moved on to another rumor - that she's pregnant.
Dupri, 33, and Jackson, 39, have been an item since 2002, and fans noticed a plumpness about her.
Meanwhile, Jackson's lawyers are reportedly trying to block the Internet posting of a video that's said to show her sunbathing nearly naked. MSNBC.com's Jeannette Walls reports that you also see her slapping her own buttocks "bongo style." Word is that the woman who flashed her breast at the Super Bowl isn't worried so much about the nudity as the fact that she looks overweight.
A rep for Jackson and Dupri did not return calls yesterday.
Surveillance ...
Don't mess with
Bryant Gumbel. "When I was growing up, people called me nicknames like 'Gumby,'" Gumbel told Webster Hall's Baird Jones at the Alliance Francaise benefit. "No one ever survived who called me Gumbo." 