NEW YORK -
Spike Lee plans to return to New Orleans for HBO to follow up the stories told in last year's four-hour documentary about the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. ADVERTISEMENT



Lee, who accepted a Peabody Award at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on Monday for directing "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," said he's still not sure when that will be. Now is too soon, he said.

"The story is not over," he said backstage. "It's still something that's evolving and we want to keep on top of it."

His film was able to tell stories not often seen on television news because of the time he had to work with, and the ability to show things others couldn't. Some of his interview subjects asked if he minded if they cursed; he said it proved essential to conveying the anger of the event.

He collected footage of bloated bodies floating in the floodwaters near New Orleans, much of it taken by the BBC. American news networks could show little of it, he said.

Lee and his team were one of 35 winners of the 66th Annual Peabody Awards, given for excellence in electronic media. They included cable and network entertainment shows, as well as local and network news programs.

Onstage, he told his audience that he became friends with many of the people featured in the program.

"Most of them are still up the creek without a paddle, abandoned by their local, state and federal governments," he said. "We can't forget about them."

Get up, sir, and do as I order you, without noise, or I will send for a policeman to take you off my premises, and you may carry your stories into every pothouse in the town, but you shall have no sixpence from me to pay your expenses there.” Bulstrode had rarely in his life spoken with such nervous energy: he had been deliberating on this speech and its probable effects through a large part of the night; and though he did not trust to its ultimately saving him from any return of Raffles, he had concluded that it was the best throw he could make. It succeeded in enforcing submission from the jaded man this morning: his empoisoned system at this moment quailed before Bulstrode’s cold, resolute bearing, and he was taken off quietly in the carriage before the family breakfast time. The servants imagined him to be a poor relation, and were not surprised that a strict man like their master, who held his head high in the world, should be ashamed of such a cousin and want to get rid of him. The banker’s drive of ten miles with his hated companion was a dreary beginning of the Christmas day; but at the end of the drive, Raffles had recovered his spirits, and parted in a contentment for which there was the good reason that the banker had given him a hundred pounds. Various motives urged Bulstrode to this open–handedness, but he did not himself inquire closely into all of them. As he had stood watching Raffles in his uneasy sleep, it had certainly entered his mind that the man had been much shattered since the first gift of two hundred pounds. He had taken care to repeat the incisive statement of his resolve not to be played on any more; and had tried to penetrate Raffles with the fact that he had shown the risks of bribing him to be quite equal to the risks of defying him.