2 Aug 2024

Lee Daniels’s Closet Picks

The writer-director talks about how Federico Fellini and John Waters gave him the passion and confidence to become a filmmaker, shares his poignant experience watching Claudine as a young man, and selects favorites such as Pickup on South Street, Do the Right Thing, and The Piano.

Lee Daniels: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices

9

8 single, 1 box set

single films

8

chosen on their own

box sets

1

one choice, many films

films reached

21

the same visit, box sets opened

Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com

This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.

140 8½ 1963 SET Essential Fellini 97 Do the Right Thing 1989 1221 Querelle 1982 929 Female Trouble 1974 224 Pickup on South Street 1953 1110 The Piano 1993 1052 Claudine 1974 105 Spartacus 1960

single film, with its spine number box set

	Chose	Director	Year	Taken by
1	8½	Federico Fellini	1963	18
2	Essential Fellini box set, 14 films			16
3	Do the Right Thing	Spike Lee	1989	20
4	Querelle	Rainer Werner Fassbinder	1982	2
5	Female Trouble	John Waters	1974	8
6	Pickup on South Street	Samuel Fuller	1953	7
7	The Piano	Jane Campion	1993	5
8	Claudine	John Berry	1974	9
9	Spartacus	Stanley Kubrick	1960	3

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1953 to 1993, box sets 1950 to 1987

Essential Fellini

a single film, at its year a box set, across the years of its films the collection, by decade

The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.

How long this haul is

Its 21films run 41.7 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 278.1 minutes of film for each of its 9 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.

How unusual this haul was

Its 9 choices had been taken by 9.78 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Querelle, taken by 2 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of John Waters, through Female Trouble, who has been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com