Baadasssss! (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna

Scoop's comments in white.

Sometimes the right ingredients just come together.

When Mario van Peebles was 13 years old, he watched his father Melvin go through the painful experience of financing and creating the first major independent movie made by a black man for black audiences, Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song.

Son Mario played a couple of parts in the film, even doing a sex scene with a plump, older woman. Father Melvin produced, directed, starred, and wrote a lot of the music for that 1971 film. Later, Melvin wrote a book about his fascinating experiences. Some thirty years later, a grown-up Mario has written and directed his own film about his father's film. He has combined his own memories and his father's book into Baadasssss!, a movie in which he also stars as his father.

The father's film, truth be told, was not much of a film at all. (Review here.) It was shot in 19 days on a minimal budget with a non-union crew, family, friends, amateurs, and volunteers. As filmmaking, it is about on a par with Manos, the Hands of Fate. It was more of a social statement and an entrepreneurial success than an artistic achievement. The lead character, for example, is on screen for nearly the entire film and only has about six lines. The dominant action in the film - more than thirty minutes - consists solely of Melvin looking over his shoulder, jogging wordlessly through various urban and rural landscapes, accompanied by a jazzy, looping musical score. A good chunk of the rest of the film consists of explicit sex and nudity.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song may not have been a very good film, but it was a cultural phenomenon.  Just as Easy Rider had established the existence of a lucrative hippie market, Sweetback turned out to be an enormous financial success which convinced the Hollywood suits that there was a large, untapped black market. Although Sweetback itself was a labor of love and not an exploitation picture, its success identified the market for a solid decade of blaxploitation to follow, and the story behind the father's film made a helluva story for the son's film, Baadasssss.

Unlike his dad's film, Mario's Baadasssss! is a genuinely good movie, not so much because it is executed well as because it just had such a ripping yarn and colorful characters to start with.

• Melvin couldn't sell his story to the Hollywood suits. They had no interest in a story about a non-political black man radicalized into a police-beating rage when he witnesses corrupt police violence against another black man, especially since the black man is unrepentant and escapes scot-free at the end. With the Hollywood Boulevard of cash blocked off, Melvin had to find some other route toward financing, and that process provides Baadasssss with some of its best laughs. Melvin's hopes are raised and dashed several times, the worst shock coming after he got a drug dealer to finance the film, only to find out a few days later that the dealer had been arrested and was headed to prison. Melvin was without financing, although the crew had already been hired and the shooting schedule had already been laid out.
• When the actual filming got started, the wild times really began. Melvin had to browbeat his crew into 18 hour days. He had to outsmart the unions by pretending to shoot a porn film. (The unions didn't mess with porn, so Melvin needed to convince them it was a skin flick in order to avoid paying union wages.) He had to commandeer a hooker on short notice to play a role which his would-be star refused at the last minute. He had to use his son in a scene which would be considered kiddie porn today. He had to take an emergency $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby to finish the film. He even beat the crap out of his editor when the kid threatened to quit.
• When the film was completed, Melvin couldn't get anyone to distribute it. It opened on two screens: one in Detroit and one in Atlanta, and there was no money to advertise it to its target market. Somehow, against all odds, black people did eventually find out about the film, and took to it, just as the youth market had taken to Easy Rider. Sweetback ended up one of the top grossers of its year, possibly the biggest moneymaker, considering its shoestring budget.

Baadasssss! (2004) is a film by Mario van Peebles about his father Melvin making a 1971 film called Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, which was the first strong black film with attitude, and a very early indie.

Van Peebles senior had finished Watermelon Man and was offered a three picture contract with a studio, indicating that he had arrived in Hollywood. The studio suits expected him to make more stereotypical black comedies, but he had a different idea, and proceeded to do it outside the studio system when the bosses found it too radical. He decided early to use a 50% minority crew, and so had no union support, so he went to the porn industry to find qualified crew. Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song turned out to be a major success, partly because black audiences were looking for a film that portrayed real black people, and partly because of a lot of support from the Black Panthers.

Mario based the film on a book written by his father, and on his own personal memories of the experience. In a full length commentary by Van Peebles Jr. and Sr, Melvin frequently comments favorably on the accuracy of the story. Mario created some composite characters based on real people, but essentially told an accurate story of the making and marketing of the film. Mario not only co-wrote and directed but also played the part of his father as his father, and his father as Sweet Sweetback, even going so far as to use some of the original 1971 costumes.

The story is more than a documentary. It is a great yarn, and is well told. Baadasssss!, like Sweetback's Baadassss Song was made in a short time on a very low budget, but even with the paltry $1M budget, the film looks great, and held my interest start to finish. The limited domestic gross shows that people weren't as taken with it as I was, but it is one of the better films I have seen this year.