Film director Spike Lee’s new joint, Highest 2 Lowest, lands us amid the charmed life of music tycoon David King, played by Denzel Washington. King is perched in his luxurious Dumbo penthouse, finessing a deal to buy back shares of his record label. His wife Pam (Ilfenesh Hadera) is prepping for a board meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she’s planning to pledge “the same sum,” and his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph) is heading out to basketball practice. Calamity may be calling, but for now, King reckons, “it’s a beautiful day.”
It’s beautiful inside, too. King’s apartment is furnished to be fit for, well, royalty. It is a vast space, sumptuous with wood paneling, its windows offering a glorious view of Lower Manhattan from across the Brooklyn Bridge. “He was the king of New York,” Washington said in production notes, “so he’s gotta be on the throne.”
Denzel Washington and Ilfenesh Hadera in Highest 2 Lowest (2025). Photo courtesy of A24.
Spread throughout the residence is King’s art collection, an enviable gathering of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley, Deborah Roberts, Gordon Parks, Henry Taylor, and more. They mark a man with taste. To create King’s collection, production designer Mark Friedberg didn’t have to search far for inspiration—Lee’s own trove of art provided the blueprint.
The filmmaker’s massive collection had its most prominent outing at the 2023 exhibition “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” at the Brooklyn Museum. Some 450 objects were featured—from paintings and movie posters to apparel and musical instruments—highlighting the artists and artworks that have shaped Lee’s own creative vision. “Spike’s collecting is 360-degrees,” the show’s curator Kimberli Gant told me at that time.
Spike Lee at the opening of “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” at Brooklyn Museum, 2023. Photo: Nina Westervelt / Variety via Getty Images.
“Coming out of Spike’s own retrospective of his art collection at the Brooklyn Museum, we decided that David also would have an elaborate art collection, something very similar or inspired by Spike’s collection,” Friedberg said.
Reproductions of selected artworks were created for the film: “They were not the real McCoys,” Lee noted. Among them are several Basquiats, including Horn Players (1983) and Now’s the Time (1985), both odes to jazz; Tim Okamura’s 1993 portrait of Toni Morrison, who is name-checked elsewhere in the film; and selections from Andy Warhol’s “Muhammed Ali” series from 1973.
Kehinde Wiley, Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia (2005). Collection of Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee. © Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Wiley’s Investiture of Bishop Harold as the Duke of Franconia (2005), a splendid portrait of baseball icon Jackie Robinson that Lee had commissioned, dominates the Kings’ living room, as does Frederick J. Brown’s nod to jazz legends, Billie, Lester, Fats, and Duke (1993).
Elsewhere are hordes of photographs, from Parks’s electric image of Malcolm X to Jim Britt’s picture of Marvin Gaye in the studio in 1973, which was used on the sleeve of Let’s Get It On. A print of Shepard Fairey’s Kamala Harris “FORWARD” poster hangs in Trey’s room. Lee owns a screenprint of Fairey’s early Barack Obama “PROGRESS” artwork, which the artist inscribed with “Spike, thanks for the inspiration.”
LaChanze, John Douglas Thompson, and Dean Winters in Highest 2 Lowest (2025), with a reproduction of Basquiat’s Now’s the Time (1985) in the background. Photo: David Lee, courtesy of A24.
These artworks, said Friedberg, “set the baseline of color for the movie.” The walls of King’s apartment were painted in rich tones to not just complement the paintings, but to reflect the man’s presence and character.
“We wanted David King to be clearly a man of wealth, but also a man whose creativity is quite apparent just to look at,” Friedberg explained. “By virtue of how his apartment is dressed and designed, we see right off the bat who this man is, how he is.”
Denzel Washington in Highest 2 Lowest (2025). Photo: David Lee, courtesy of A24.
Lee’s film, a reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s taut 1963 drama High and Low, eventually tests that mettle, pitting King’s wealth against his integrity. Hours into his day, King learns a kidnapper has abducted his chauffeur’s son, having mistaken him for Trey, and is demanding a $17.5 million ransom for his return. The mogul faces a moral quandary: Will he use the money he’s set aside for the major buyout to save another man’s child?
King agonizes over the choice in his handsomely appointed study. At one desperate point, he turns to his photo wall of music heroes, asking: “What do I do, James? What do I do, Aretha? What do I do, Marvin?” Lee punctuates each plea with cuts to portraits of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Marvin Gaye. Alas, they offer no response.
As Seen On explores the paintings and sculptures that have made it to the big and small screens—from a Bond villain’s heisted canvas to the Sopranos’ taste for Renaissance artworks. More than just set decor, these visual works play pivotal roles in on-screen narratives, when not stealing the show.