Word: sweetback
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Cotton had merely been a successful novelty for Hollywood. Then, in Sweet Sweetback's Baadaasssss Song, Melvin Van Peebles gave white film makers a revelation, earning several million with a low-budget opus that was furiously and uncompromisingly black. But it was Shaft that put the message across. Photographer-Author-Composer Gordon Parks' action film about a black New York James Bond cost $500,000 and was one of three movies that made any profit for MGM last year: an astonishing $ 13 million gross in the U.S. alone...
...Peebles, famed for his movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (TIME, Aug. 16), has brought his bile into the theater, but left his craft at the stage door. Aint is a series of street sketches featuring pimps, whores, hustlers, drug addicts, corrupt cops, Panthers and jailbirds?all the characters who would be promptly denounced as racist stereotypes if a white playwright dared to suggest their existence. Inevitably, there are quite a few moments of truth, a quite poignant one when a country boy (Ralph Wilcox) finds out that his sister (Barbara Alston) who fled to the city has become...
...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...
Yeah Inc. By anybody's adding machine, Van Peebles is a successful man. Sweetback has grossed nearly $10 million. Yeah Inc., the one-man corporation he formed to finance Sweetback, is a busy business: there is the film and the sound-track album. A paperback of the movie is already "making some good bread." T shirts, sweatshirts and nighties announce I AM A SWEETBACK. This fall his play Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death opens on Broadway. Coming up: Sweetback douche powder. Boasts Van Peebles: "You are looking at a black conglomerate." But he still considers...