Brands: How "Its Gotta Be The Shoes!" Became an enduring Catch-Phrase

-COMPLEX

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. For character inspiration, as he did for his location, Lee turned to what he knew. “Mars was this cat I would see around Brooklyn,” he explains. “You gotta compensate when you are a little guy when it comes to sports and all that stuff, and Mars was funny. 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. Because one man is not enough, she needs three.

Lee found perfect people for the other roles, but knew he’d have to fill one himself. “I knew I was going to play Mars because I couldn’t afford to pay anybody else,” he says. “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. But it worked. I was born to play Mars.”

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. 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. 

“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... it was their idea to pair Mars with Michael Jordan,” Lee says. “So they called me up, introduced themselves, said they loved the film, and said they were thinking of doing a commercial with me and Michael Jordan and I would direct it in black and white. I said, ‘what? Let’s go!’ But there is one hitch, Mike hasn’t seen the film so he doesn’t know me and, at the time, Mike had just signed his new deal and had director’s approval.

“They didn’t say it was going to be a series, they said they wanted to do one commercial. They wanted to do one commercial to see if the shit worked, if the shit don’t work then arrivederci. And I would have been happy with that, if I would have just done one I would have been happy.”

It turned out to be much more than that, of course. Riswold wrote the commercials, Davenport produced them, and Lee shot the first two in December of 1987. Jordan didn’t speak much in those first commercials—“back in the day he had that Carolina thing,” Lee says—but Mars, he spoke enough for both of them. You no doubt remember the lines. “Is it the shoes? It’s gotta be the shoes!” Within two years, Mars Blackmon had gone from Jordan worshipper to Jordan co-star. And when Air Jordan exploded across the world thanks in part to those cinematic commercials, Mars Blackmon blew up right along with him.