'A Guy Like Him Should Shut His Face'

'I know what you're thinking, punk. Why does Eastwood
have all the talent and I have none?'

Clint Eastwood lays a smackdown on mini-racist Spike Lee.

CLINT Eastwood has fired back at Spike Lee, who criticized the multiple Oscar winner for not employing any black actors in his two World War II movies, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."

"A guy like him should shut his face," Eastwood told Britain's The Guardian. "Has he ever studied history?"

Last month - while Lee was at the Cannes Film Festival trying to drum up interest in "Miracle at St. Anna," his movie about four black GIs trapped behind enemy lines in 1944 - Lee whined, "His version: The Negro soldier did not exist . . . It's not like he could say he didn't know. It was a conscious decision not to have any black people."

Eastwood said he was well aware there was a small detachment of black soldiers on Iwo Jima, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is 'Flags of Our Fathers,' the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate."

Hey, why have accuracy when you can live in a fantasy world like Lee?

The bad blood goes back to 1987, when Eastwood was directing "Bird" about jazz legend Charlie Parker. "[Lee] was complaining . . . Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else."

Eastwood, who won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for both "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," said Lee shouldn't expect to see any black faces in "The Changeling," either, since his upcoming film is set in Los Angeles in the '30s before the black influx to that city.

"What are you going to do . . . make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game," Eastwood growled.

Ouch.