it was their idea to pair Mars with Michael Jordan,” Lee says. “Jim Riswold and Bill Davenport, two guys, white men, who worked for Wieden & Kennedy in Portland saw She’s Gotta Have It and it was their idea, not mine, not Phil Knight’s, not Michael’s. The character also caught the eye of a couple of guys in Oregon who had an idea of how they could give Mars an even bigger role.
Mars’ repetitive delivery and love for his sneakers-he didn’t even take his Jordans off in bed-made the character the film’s most memorable, even ahead of Nola Darling, the “She” of the title. “It worked because sometimes I have trouble remembering my lines so I repeat myself, and that’s Mars-because I couldn’t remember the lines. “I knew I was going to play Mars because I couldn’t afford to pay anybody else,” he says. “He loves sneakers, he loved Michael Jordan, so Mars had to wear Jordans.”Īs far as casting, Lee found perfect people for the other roles, but knew he’d have to fill one himself. “Mars to me, I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but he was the original B-boy, the sneakerhead,” Lee continues. Because one man is not enough, she needs three. And the key thing is it wasn’t Mars alone, I had to show three different black men, each distinct, that Nola puts together as one. “You gotta compensate when you are a little guy when it comes to sports and all that stuff, and Mars was funny. “Mars was this cat I would see around Brooklyn,” he explains. For character inspiration, as he did for his location, Lee turned to what he knew. She’s Gotta Have It was filmed in the summer of 1985, over a two-week period in Lee’s neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. But the new Mars Blackmon exists in a world that, without the old Mars, might not even exist. He’s still in Jordans, still in Cazals, still rides a bike. Thirty-odd years after Blackmon’s entrance, he’s being reintroduced, this time played by Anthony Ramos in Lee’s Netflix-series adaptation of his first film. Blackmon’s crashing entrance belied a surprising longevity.
Blackmon, played by Lee, rides his bike straight into the camera-crash!-as jumpcut stills showed his haircut, his nameplate chain and belt, and, of course, his Air Jordans. It’s around the 11-minute mark when Mars Blackmon literally careens into She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee’s 1986 directorial debut.
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