FILM · 1994
Crooklyn
14 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (14)
- #001
The disorienting look of the family's time in the country was achieved by shooting in widescreen without adjusting the image anamorphically.
- #002
Cinqué Lee and Joie Lee first wrote the script as a pilot for Nickelodeon. A test pilot was screened for inner-city kids, who disliked it. The Lees then turned their idea into a screenplay.
- #003
The film is generally based on the lives of Spike Lee and his siblings, who co-wrote the screenplay with him.
- #004
According to Delroy Lindo, he was very afraid of working with children because he had not worked with them before and did not have children of his own at the time.
- #005
After years of hard work and arguments over Malcolm X (1992), Spike Lee wanted to make a smaller-scale film with a lighter tone, which led him to this project.
- #006
Although no specific year is stated at any point in the film, the events were most likely intended to take place in the spring and summer of 1973 for the following concrete reasons: 1.) Clinton, the eldest son and a New York Knicks fan, chose to attend the final game of the NBA Finals instead of his father's concert. He later reluctantly told his family that the Knicks had won, and the only years the Knicks won in the 1970s were 1970 and 1973, but….. 2.) The TV series Soul Train (1971), in which the children are seen dancing late in the film, went on national television in 1971, thus ruling out Clinton attending the 1970 NBA Finals.
- #007
A scene in which the family's oven explodes was shot (possibly the reason Nate has a cast on his arm) but was deleted. It was based on a real event in Spike Lee's life.
- #008
This was the first feature film acting role for Zelda Harris, Maurie A. Chandler and Bokeem Woodbine. For Chandler, it was her screen debut.
- #009
Delroy Lindo and Isaiah Washington would later appear together again in Romeo Must Die (2000).
- #010
Less than a year after this film was made, Alfre Woodard and Zelda Harris would again act together, also playing mother and daughter, in the TV film The Piano Lesson (1995).
- #011
The cast includes one Oscar winner, Spike Lee, and two Oscar nominees, Alfre Woodard and Delroy Lindo.
- #012
According to the commentary, the NBA Finals game Clinton attended, which the NY Knicks won, was the 1973 final. The NY Knicks had last won a final then, until they won again in June 2026, 53 years later.
- #013
As in his earlier films such as School Daze, Do the Right Thing and She's Gotta Have It, Spike Lee appears in Crooklyn. He plays Snuffy, a young glue sniffer who likes to bully the local kids.
- #014
Crooklyn is a 1994 American comedy-drama film produced and directed by Spike Lee, who wrote the film with his siblings Joie Lee and Cinqué Lee. Set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 1973, the film focuses primarily on a young girl named Troy Carmichael (played by Zelda Harris in her first film) and her family. Troy learns life lessons through her rowdy brothers Clinton, Wendell, Nate and Joseph, her loving but strict mother Carolyn (Alfre Woodard) and her naive, struggling father Woody (Delroy Lindo).
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