The story of Edmund Perry had an influence on filmmaker Spike Lee that would emerge in the plot and underlying social attitudes of the film Do the Right Thing. Lee used the basic story of Perry as his primary plot and embellished it with his own understanding of the neighborhood, the kinds of people who live in that area, and the nature of the racial and social tensions that beset the neighborhood. The Perry story took place in 1985, and the film came out four years later when that story was still fresh in Lee's mind.
Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing is a panoramic film that presents in great detail the life of a black neighborhood in Brooklyn on a decisive day for the people and for race relations between the residents and an Italian merchant who runs a pizza shop in the heart of the neighborhood. This is a film that toys with certain generic conventions while also avoiding most of the cliches of this type of film, and Lee also uses the conventions and the general story structure to build to a violent climax that emphasizes and strengthens the theme of the work, a theme related to race relations in America and to the manner in which differences are always magnified even by the well-meaning. Lee sees a division between black and white in America that is not easily bridged, for there is always a sense of difference that determines the course of relations between the races. This sense of difference affects both groups (and "black" can be considered here to be a representation of minority groups as much as black people alone, since some in this neighborhood are Puerto Rican and yet are part of the same racially-powered mix). It is significant in fact that the whites in the neighborhood are Italian, since the Italians were once subject to massive discrimination and separation in American society. The "third" force in the neighborhood is Korean, and here Lee shows how all racial groups exploit one another in some degree in a socie...