Hollywood Everafter

A verbal fisticuffs between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee has erupted.

It’s a war of words over war movies.

While out promoting his own war flick, “Miracle at St. Anna,” which features a WWII unit comprised of African-American soldiers, Lee complained about the absence of African-American actors in Eastwood’s films, “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.”

Lee told the press, “That was his [Eastwood’s] version. The negro version did not exist.”

Eastwood gave a “Dirty Harry”-type response. He told Lee to “shut his face.”

The steely actor-director told the U.K. Guardian that, in the “Flags of Our Fathers” storyline and famed flag-raising picture, “they [African-American GIs] didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people go ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”

Lee pulled out all the stops in his response to Eastwood.

“First of all, the man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either,” he told ABC News. “I didn’t personally attack him, and a comment like ‘a guy like that should shut his face…’ come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man.”

Spike went on to say that he could get together a group of African-American soldiers who fought at Iwo Jima, and that Clint could tell them “what they did was insignificant and they did not exist.”

“I’m not making this up. I know history. I’m a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to World War II,” Lee noted.