Baadasssss!

Baadasssss!

Movies are often created in the spirit of Truffaut’s “Day for Night” idealistic and romantic or Minnelli’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” glamorous and full of intrigue. However, sometimes they are made like Mario Van Peebles’ “Baadasssss!” with desperation, deception and cunning. This is one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen about making a movie: it’s Mario’s fictionalized eye-witness account about how his father Melvin Van Peebles made “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song”, which is considered to be one of the first black movies.

The original 1971 film was rough around the edges, telling the story of a kid born in a brothel who at 12 years old gets introduced to sex and grows up as an urban survivor only to beat up two racist cops and escape from them. The fact that Sweetback got away with it thrilled early audiences, who were drawn by taglines like “Rated X by an All White Jury”. It wasn’t classified as exploitation but rather credited by Variety for giving birth to blaxploitation which in turn gave us Pam Grier, Shaft (1971) et al., along with an entire wave of African-American directors entering into Hollywood mainstream consciousness.

That a blockbuster actioner today without any black actors involved seems inconceivable reflects directly back upon Melvin Van Peebles’ rickety $150K backyard production. ‘Sweet Sweetback’ did gangbusters; it revealed there existed a robust market for films made by/for/about African-Americans. When this picture was released at Chicago’s Oriental Theater during its initial run there (where it played for five months straight), they had changed their marquee lettering to read: ‘THE ORIENTAL IS YO-RIENTAL NOW!’

Mario was 13 when Sweetback shot; dad tapped him to portray Sweetback as a boy. This meant that he had to do a scene with an actual hooker in the brothel something that Mario obviously still harbors some ill will towards today, because in ‘Baadasssss!’ he makes it a point to show us that one of his father’s girlfriends; Sandra (played by Nia Long), along with some crew members protested against it.

But Melvin was a force of nature; a cigar-chomping polymath who knew how to get what he wanted. The production would have died but for sheer force of will: “Sweet Sweetback” teaches you everything about guerrilla filmmaking from the ground up, no textbook required.

Melvin knew that he could never afford to pay union wages (some days, he paid no wages at all) so he pretended the movie was a porno to avoid following union rules. He has sex with a girl in one of the scenes while the reps are there, a little more graphic than what he would use in the movie. He wanted his crew to be 50% minorities (most were all-white) so he trained some of them on the job. At the end of “Baadasssss!” a white sound man hires his assistant, a tough black street guy who doubles as security, to be his partner; like most of this movie, it’s true. “No crew has ever looked like this,” Melvin says when he looks around.

Mario plays Mario in the movie and Khleo Thomas plays Mario. It’s apparent that (the real) Mario loves his father and resents him for being so willfully single-minded about people at once. We see Melvin bounce checks, lie, rough up a crew member who wants to quit and take a free shot courtesy of the Los Angeles Fire Department when their trucks respond to an alarm for a car fire; the car got blown up for a scene in the movie and Melvin kept the cameras rolling until they arrived.

Mario livens up his large cast as director from Melvin’s sexy but exasperated assistant Priscilla (Joy Bryant) to his long-suffering agent Howie (Saul Rubinek), hard-pressed producer Clyde Houston (David Alan Grier) and Bill Cosby (T.K. Carter), whose $50,000 check bails out Melvin at one point but there is no double role better than Len Lesser as Manny and Mort Goldberg: Detroit movie exhibitors who premiere “Sweetback” and are ready to close it after one screening until they see lines around the block.

Mario could make another movie about the rest of his father’s life, which has included being an officer in the U.S. Air Force, making art films in Paris, working as a trader on Wall Street, composing he’s a surprisingly good singer and winning the French Legion of Honor. The last shot is a wink and a cloud of cigar smoke from this living legend: 71 years old this year.

All low budget films are like this to one degree or another, people on the cast and crew getting beat up hard for little money in service of a director with an ego. That feeling of family that forms on a movie set, Mario Van Peebles captures it here the moments of despair, when it seems impossible to go on, the sexual intrigue and (always) the bitching about the food. “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” was an important film historically, but in another sense, it was just another low-rent fly by night production. “Baadasssss!” gets both those things exactly right.

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