Making Mookie : DO THE RIGHT THING <i> by Spike Lee with Lisa Jones (Fireside/Simon & Schuster: $10.95; 297 pp., paper) </i>

In his disarmingly candid tie-in with the film of the same name, movie maker Spike Lee (writing with Lisa Jones) happily functions as his own strongest booster. Journalist Joseph Gelmis, Lee notes, “considers me one of the most important film makers in the world today. . . . I’ve felt this, but hey, now somebody else has seen it also.” If self-confidence is the key to success (as the shrinks tell us), this guy will go far.

He already has, of course, and along the way he’s probably needed every ounce of that ferocious self-assurance. The sex comedy, “She’s Gotta Have It” (1987), and the campus musical, “School Daze” (1988), are milestones of black American movie making, produced on teensy budgets in the face of daunting obstacles and reaching wide mixed audiences.

There has never been anything quite like these films, with their undiluted expressions of black culture, outlook, anger. The films are made for a sophisticated black art-house audience--a crowd that the studios didn’t believe existed until Spike Lee brought it to them on a silver platter. “What we’re doing is revolutionary and courageous,” Lee writes, with some justice. “No other black people in the industry are doing what we’re doing.”

The “Right Thing” book contains Lee’s screenplay (which diverges from the finished product in interesting ways) and the journal he kept as he was writing it. The day-to-day record is full of fascinating false starts and variations. Lee himself was initially set to play the troublemaker Buggin’ Out, for example. As casting choices shift almost from page to page, the picture grows darker; characters evolve toward something more truthful, if less overtly “sympathetic.” The ending inexorably darkens. At one point, a character who dies and stays dead in the finished version was pegged to reappear--wearing a neck brace--for an upbeat finale.

Lee is a gifted manipulator of the film medium, and “Do the Right Thing,” despite some narrative clumsiness, is his most controlled and effective picture. His own pivotal performance as Mookie, a pizza delivery man, will cement the personal comic celebrity that has helped his career chug forward even between pictures. (Directors who are also ingratiating performers, from Woody Allen onward, naturally have a leg up.) Set in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section on a blisteringly hot day, “Right Thing” builds to a climactic race riot. (A few boneheads were even expecting that the movie would provoke violence. If anything, it will forestall some incidents, by offering an alternative catharsis.)

The book is instructive here: Lee is never seen wondering how race relations ought to unfold. He considers news reports about racial incidents in Miami and New Jersey, and struggles to honor the facts. His attitudes aren’t even ambiguous. He complains about blacks who blame all their problems on whites and on racism (although he has a knee-jerk tendency toward this sort of thing himself) and declares: “There are no winners in this one. Blacks burn down the pizzeria, but so what? . . . The conditions that we live under have not gotten any better.”

Lee knows better than anybody that a lot of youthful black energy is being misdirected. The movie is partly about how and why black rage gets sidetracked, deflected onto easy targets because the real culprits are too far away or too powerful. Only the tag-end quote from Malcolm X, who validates violence as self-defense, seems to blur the issue, because the riot in the movie scarcely qualifies.

Under the prideful surface of “Do the Right Thing,” some observers have detected a scathing strain of black self-criticism that goes way beyond the controversial depiction of a caste system dividing light-skinned and dark-skinned black collegians in “School Daze.” The book confirms that Lee was thinking hard thoughts even about the character he plays himself. Thus:

“(His sister) is bothered that Mookie--like many black youths--has no vision. (She) constantly yells at him that he can’t see beyond the next day, the end of his nose. It’s the truth. The future might be too scary for kids like Mookie, so they don’t think about it. They live for the moment, because there is nothing they feel they can do about the future.”

Lee’s drive to bring full-strength black material to American movie screens accounts for a lot of his appeal, and not just to black audiences. His “Afrocentricity” is crucial. The absence of crossover dreams gives his films a distinctive authenticity. There’s been no attempt to translate the story into homogenized “universal” terminology. The result of their specificity has been, oddly enough, to broaden their appeal: Pictures with a distinctive outlook are so rare in today’s happy-face Hollywood that we respond eagerly.

Lee’s isn’t the truth of objectivity and consensus--a journalist’s or sociologists truth. It’s an artist’s truth, roiling with fruitful contradictions. A personal frame of reference like this would not seem startling in an Italian-American or WASP director, but to the great discredit of the American film biz the black version is still a novelty.

Not for long.