Baadasssss!

1970. Melvin Van Peebles has a studio deal in Hollywood and walks away from it. He wants to make a film nobody will finance: a black man beats the police, runs, and is not caught. He cannot raise money, the union will not permit it, no distributor wants it. He gets around the union rules by presenting the shoot as pornography, puts in his own money, and puts his thirteen year old son in a scene. Mario Van Peebles directs, wrote the screenplay and plays his father Melvin. The thirteen year old boy depicted in the film is also him. The production being described is Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the independently made film that took unexpectedly large money and set off the blaxploitation wave. This film does not celebrate that story. Melvin is shown as stubborn, selfish and irresponsible towards his family, and a father treated this harshly in a film directed by his son is the most striking thing about it. The form is mixed: mock documentary interviews and real footage of the period are cut between the dramatised scenes. The cast includes Joy Bryant, Nia Long, David Alan Grier and Terry Crews. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of independent film and in black American cinema of the seventies. Who it is not for: some passages lack context without the original film, and the narrative turns at times into a private family reckoning.