text: ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- In 1989, the warnings were dire. The Spike Lee film "Do the Right Thing," critics and columnists said, would provoke violence and disrupt race relations. 
  
  Spike Lee: "I wanted to do a film that would try to show what was happening at the time." 
  
  "This movie is dynamite under every seat," wrote Newsweek's Jack Kroll. 
  
  Other commentators believed the film would harm the candidacy of David Dinkins, an African-American who was running for mayor of New York. It might even spark riots at movie theaters, they thought. 
  
  Instead, what the film provoked was ... talk. There were no riots. Dinkins was elected. "Do the Right Thing" had a successful run at the box office -- if not as successful as Lee and his supporters hoped -- and was nominated for two Academy Awards. 
  
  Twenty years later, the film still maintains a hold on the imagination. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it as one of the 100 best American films. Roger Ebert, who has written he cried when he first saw the film at the Cannes Film Festival, still considers the film a wonder: "Spike Lee had done an almost impossible thing. He'd made a movie about race in America that empathized with all the participants," he wrote in 2001. 
  
  So what is the thing about "Do the Right Thing?" Watch Spike Lee describe things in his own words » 
  
  Part of its staying power is in its boldness, both in look and action. Lee's first two films, "She's Gotta Have It" (1986) and "School Daze" (1988), had marked him as a rising young filmmaker. But it was "Do the Right Thing," made when Lee was just 32, that showcased his confidence, from the deliberately striking color scheme (bright reds and oranges that make a hot day seem even hotter) to its heightened -- sometimes stagy -- atmosphere, to its grim, documentary-style riot climax. 