Word: sweetback
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Trouble came fast when Van Peebles set out to make Sweetback from his own screenplay. Industry credit dried up with a reading of the script's first three paragraphs. Union wages priced camera crews beyond his budget. Van Peebles, however, was ready for a hassle. He used nonunion crews, throwing the unions off the scent by letting it be thought that he intended to do a quickie porno romp, not worth their while. The first takes reduced his net worth to $13, but Soul Brother Bill Cosby answered an S O S with a $50,000 loan...
Once the filming was finished, Van Peebles and Sweetback had another round of problems: no distributor would take a chance on the film. Only two theaters in the country would book it. When the talk shows blacked him out, and newspapers ignored Sweetback, Van Peebles took to the street corners "with friends, and chicks I was sleeping with," and passed out handbills touting the film. Van Peebles' fast talk, plus audience word of mouth, made it a limited success. But that was enough. Sweetback will reopen next month in 60 theaters in the greater New York area alone; another...
...Hollywood began hustling him. Columbia came up with a black-white satire called Watermelon Man, a dark-toned comedy about an obnoxious white man who turns black. "I thought I had to make Watermelon Man in order to do the films I really wanted to do," Van Peebles said. Sweetback was just a camera cue away...
...jive and his expatriate status, he insists that he is deadly serious about his black identity. His phrases are familiar: "Of all the ways we've been exploited by the Man, the most damaging is the way he destroyed our self-image. The message of Sweetback is that if you can get it together and stand...
...like? That's your problem," he says. When his assistant director threatened to quit, Van Peebles reasoned with him in typically Sweetback fashion: he began banging his head on the floor. Even the challenge stamped on his body flaunts his cool: above a broken blue stripe tattooed around his neck is the inscription "Cut along the dotted line...