These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. 

At his very best, Spike Lee is a helluva filmmaker: daring, uncompromising, and astute. He’s precisely the sort of cinematic creator who deserves the lifetime honor recently bestowed upon him by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Although he’s got a couple of flat-out triumphs in his filmography, it the accumulated authority of his work that elevates him among his peers.

When it comes to ingenious personal hucksterism, on the other hand, Lee has no rival. Way back when I was one half of the team that delivered a weekly movie reviews and news radio show on a little college station in the Midwest, one of the first interviews I produced for air was with one of Lee’s siblings, who had just taken over managerial duties on a freshly opened storefront in Brooklyn, well before the modern hipster Renaissance. Spike’s Joint, audaciously, was devoted to celebrating (and further profiting off of) the career of a filmmaker who had signed his name to a total of four features, none of which had the cultural penetration of the Nike commercials he directed and starred in at about the same time.

Lest it seem as though I’m dismissing this as cheap braggadocio on the part of Lee, I’ll make it plain that I thought the conceit was terrific. I owned and proudly wore a Spike’s Joint t-shirt for years. (In Baltimore, it once prompted an attractive woman to ask me if I was a filmmaker. Her visible disappointment in my answer in the negative and then prompt disinterest in me only made the experience more memorable.) If anything, it represented Lee’s most visionary accomplishment as a member of the creative community, neatly anticipating the time when celebrity was best leveraged as an opportunity for everlasting hustle.

Spike’s Joint has been closed for a decade, but its entrepreneurial soul was reincarnated online. As Lee well knows, the sell never stops.