Word: sweetback
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...movie was produced, written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles, who also stars as Sweetback, the outraged and outrageous hero. The scion of a Los Angeles whorehouse, Sweetback graduates to an obvious profession: pimping. He "goes bad" while watching two white policemen cudgel a black youth wrongly accused of inciting riot. Sweetback reacts by mashing the cops' skulls with their own handcuffs. He then sets off on a ghetto version of the traditional Wild West chase. He fights and fornicates, leaving behind a trail of bodies in various stages of disrepair. When cornered by two cops, Sweetback responds with...
Chartreuse Suits. An aggressive and often affronting movie, Sweetback is also irreverent, scatological and crude. "It's for those dudes in the chartreuse suits," explains Van Peebles. "Those cats who want to be card-carrying whites -man, they...
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...