Good Morning POU!
It’s a look back at the history and legacy of the blackety-black blackest era of “Getting Back at the Man!
Blaxploitation is a term coined in the early 1970s to refer to black action films that were aimed at black audiences. Featuring African-American actors in lead roles and often having anti-establishment plots, the films were frequently condemned for stereotypical characterization and glorification of violence. Critics of the films saw them as morally bankrupt and as portraying black actors in the most negative way. However, not everyone in the black community agreed as they provided black audiences with cinematic heroes up on the silver screen in a more honest portrayal of urban life unseen in most Hollywood pictures prior to that time.
It is important to note that Blaxploitation arose at a critical juncture for the Hollywood film industry. The 1960s were a turbulent time in American race relations, and the civil rights movement exploded into the national consciousness. As the decade wore on, cries of “Black Power” were heard from the ghettos across America, it became increasingly difficult for Hollywood studios to ignore black society. While black political activists battled in the courtrooms and the streets for the end to segregation, for voting rights, and for equal rights, black filmmakers and actors began to infiltrate Hollywood.
By the late 1960s, the major Hollywood studios were still reeling from the profound effects of a two-decade old Justice Department lawsuits that involved their profitable theater monopolies. Combined with the insurgence of television, and the drop in the audience popularity for “The Musical” the film industry was losing millions of dollars, forcing many to face the distinct prospect of bankruptcy.
The civil rights movement and some bad luck for Hollywood studios would come together at just the right moment and Blaxploitation would be born.
Enter Melvin Van Peebles, the first modern-day folk hero of black cinema. As writer, producer, director, soundtrack composer, and star, he lit the fuse of Blaxploitation in 1971 with the independently financed film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.
Shot on a miniscule budget in little more than two weeks, the film and its provocative depiction of a black man fighting the system, and winning, understandably struck a chord with African-American audiences around the country. That the film was “rated X by an all-white jury” only helped the film and by the end of 1971, Sweetback had grossed $10 million, a huge success for the era.
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The Making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (which is a movie itself!)
After Melvin Van Peebles had completed Watermelon Man (the story of an extremely bigoted 1960s era White insurance salesman named Jeff Gerber, who wakes up one morning to find that he has become Black) for Columbia Pictures, he was offered a three-picture contract. While the deal was still up in the air, Van Peebles developed the story for Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. The initial idea for the film did not come clearly to him at first. One day, Van Peebles drove into the Mojave desert, turned off the highway, and drove over the rise of a hill. He parked the car, got out, and squatted down facing the sun. He decided that the film was going to be “about a brother getting the Man’s foot out of his ass.” Columbia refused the film and because no studio would finance the film, Van Peebles put his own money into the production, and shot it independently. Van Peebles was given a $50,000 loan by Bill Cosby to complete the film. “Cosby didn’t want an equity part,” according to Van Peebles. “He just wanted his money back.” Van Peebles wound up with controlling ownership of the film. Several actors auditioned for the lead role of Sweetback, but told Van Peebles that they wouldn’t do the film unless they were given more dialogue. Van Peebles ended up playing the part himself.
According to Van Peebles, during the first day of shooting, director of photography and head cameraman Bob Maxwell told him he could not mix two different shades of mechanical film lights, because he believed the results would not appear well on film. Van Peebles told him to do it anyway. When he saw the rushes, Maxwell was overjoyed, and Van Peebles did not encounter that issue again during the shoot. Van Peebles shot the film over a period of 19 days in order to avoid the possibility of the cast, most of whom were amateurs, showing on some days with haircuts or clothes different from the prior day. He shot the film in what he referred to as “globs,” where he would shoot entire sequences at a time. Because Van Peebles couldn’t afford a stunt man, he performed all of the stunts himself, which also included appearing in several unsimulated sex scenes. At one point in the shoot, Van Peebles was forced to jump off a bridge. Bob Maxwell later stated, “Well, that’s great, Mel, but let’s do it again.” Van Peebles ended up performing the stunt nine times. Van Peebles contracted gonorrhea when filming one of the many sex scenes, and successfully applied to the Directors’s Guild in order to get workers’ compensation because he was “hurt on the job.” Van Peebles used the money to purchase more film.
Van Peebles and several key crew members were armed because it was dangerous to attempt to create a film without the support of the union. One day, Van Peebles looked for his gun, and failed to find it. Van Peebles found out that someone had put it in the prop box. When they filmed the scene in which Beetle is interrogated by police, who fire a gun next to both of his ears, it was feared that the real gun would be picked up instead of the prop. While shooting a sequence with members of the Hells Angels, one of the bikers told Van Peebles they wanted to leave; Van Peebles responded by telling them they were paid to shoot until the scene was over. The biker took out a knife and started cleaning his fingernails with it. In response, Van Peebles snapped his fingers, and his crewmembers were standing there with rifles. The bikers stayed to shoot the scene.
Sweetback’s Theme
Since Van Peebles did not have the money to hire a composer, he composed the film’s music score himself. Because he did not know how to read or write music, he numbered all of the keys on a piano so he could remember the melodies. Van Peebles stated that “Most filmmakers look at a feature in terms of image and story or vice versa. Effects and music […] are strictly secondary considerations. Very few look at film with sound considered as a creative third dimension. So I calculate the scenario in such a way that sound can be used as an integral part of the film.”
The film’s music was performed by the then-unknown group Earth, Wind & Fire, who were living in a single apartment with hardly any food at the time. Van Peebles’ secretary was dating one of the bandmembers, and convinced him to contact them about performing the music for the film. Van Peebles projected scenes from the film as the band performed the music. By alternating hymn-based vocalization and jazz rhythms, Van Peebles created a sound that foreshadowed the use of sampling in hip hop music.
Van Peebles recalls that “music was not used as a selling tool in movies at the time. Even musicals, it would take three months after the release of the movie before they would bring out an album.” Because Van Peebles did not have any money for traditional advertising methods, he decided that by releasing a soundtrack album in anticipation of the film’s release, he could help build awareness for the film with its music.
Response To The Film
The end of the film was shocking to black viewers who had expected that Sweetback would perish at the hands of the police — a common, even inevitable, fate of black men “on the run” in prior films. Film critic Roger Ebert cited the ending as a reason for the film not to be labeled as an exploitation film. Critical response was mixed. Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times described the film as “a series of stark, earthy vignettes, Van Peebles evokes the vitality, humor, pain, despair and omnipresent fear that is life for so many African-Americans”. Stephen Holden in The New York Times called it “an innovative, yet politically inflammatory film.”
Huey P. Newton, devoting an entire issue of The Black Panther to the film’s revolutionary implications, celebrated and welcomed the film as “the first truly revolutionary Black film made […] presented to us by a Black man.” Newton wrote that Sweetback “presents the need for unity among all members and institutions within the community of victims,” contending that this is evidenced by the opening credits which state the film stars “The Black Community,” a collective protagonist engaged in various acts of community solidarity that aid Sweetback in escaping.
Newton further argued that “the film demonstrates the importance of unity and love between Black men and women,” as demonstrated “in the scene where the woman makes love to the young boy but in fact baptizes him into his true manhood.” The film became required viewing for members of Black Panther Party.
A few months after the publication of Newton’s article, Lerone Bennett responded with an essay on the film in Ebony, titled “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,” in which he discussed the film’s “black aesthetic”. Bennett argued that the film romanticized the poverty and misery of the ghetto and that “some men foolishly identify the black aesthetic with empty bellies and big bottomed prostitutes.” Bennett concluded that the film is “neither revolutionary nor black because it presents the spectator with sterile daydreams and a superhero who is ahistorical, selfishly individualist with no revolutionary program, who acts out of panic and desperation.” Bennett described Sweetback’s sexual initiation at ten years old as the “rape of a child by a 40-year-old prostitute.” Bennett described instances when Sweetback saved himself through the use of his sexual prowess as “emancipation orgasms” and stated that “it is necessary to say frankly that nobody ever fucked his way to freedom. And it is mischievous and reactionary finally for anyone to suggest to black people in 1971 that they are going to be able to screw their way across the Red Sea. Fucking will not set you free. If fucking freed, black people would have celebrated the millennium 400 years ago.”
Black nationalist poet and author Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) agreed with Bennett’s assessment of the film, stating that it was “a limited, money-making, auto-biographical fantasy of the odyssey of one Melvin Van Peebles through what he considered to be the Black community.” In another review, Times critic Clayton Riley explained that “Sweetback, the profane sexual athlete and fugitive, is based on a reality that is Black. We may not want him to exist but he does.” Critic Donald Bogle states in a New York Times interview that the film in some ways met the black audience’s compensatory needs after years of asexual, Sidney Poitier-type characters and that they wanted a “viable, sexual, assertive, arrogant black male hero.
The Legacy of Sweetback
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song is considered to be an important film in the history of African American cinema. Hollywood studios were led to attempt to replicate the film’s success by producing black-oriented films such as Shaft and Super Fly. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was credited by Variety as leading to the creation of the blaxploitation genre. As Spike Lee states, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song gave us all the answers we needed. This was an example of how to make a film (a real movie), distribute it yourself, and most important, get paid. Without Sweetback who knows if there could have been a […] She’s Gotta Have It, Hollywood Shuffle, or House Party?”
In 2004, Mario Van Peebles directed and starred as his father in Baadasssss!, a biopic about the making of Sweet Sweetback. The film was a critical but not commercial success.
Official trailer for the 1971 release