Check it out. It's a little uneven, but it's also probably the most inspiring film of the year so far. Mario Van Peebles plays his father Melvin. It's about Melvin making Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. All indie filmmakers should see it.
sweet sweet back wasn't a very good movie, not even in a 70s blaxpoitation kinda way.
Maybe not. But it was THE FIRST.
nope. ever heard of cotton comes to harlem?
They were made at basically the same time. It would be like saying Last House On the Left initiated 1970s low-budget horror, when The Texas Chain Saw Massacre would be pointed to by others. You have to respect how movies were made and the gradual manner in which they were released at the time. Especially indies. If you'd like to get technical by saying Cotton has a release of 1970, while Baadasssss was 1971, fine. But considering my point about it being a great example, in the new movie, of indie filmmaking, it WAS the biggest indie of 1971. And to push matters a step further, Ossie Davis, who directed Cotton, appears in Baadasssss! as Melvin Van Peebles' father.
Whether you like the 1971 film or not, this is a recommendation of the new film about its making.
I caught this flick at the Philly Film Fest. Got to meet Melvin and Mario Van Peebles. Very cool guys. The movie is also very entertaining and is a worthwhile flick to catch.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ropeofsilicon.com%2FImages%2FMoviePics%2Fb%2Fbadass.jpg&hash=994d98dd150b9285b754b1208324248bc8f3bd19)
Trailer here. (http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/syndication/trailers/baadasssss/baadasssss_300.mov)
I'm putting this higher up, because it deserves more buzz.
it's one of the featured films on this month's american cinematographer. pretty cool!
If you get to see it at a press screening, it has great press notes. Mario Van Peebles wrote an epic account of his experiences.
Van Peebles as Van Peebles: Sweet Sweetback's Funhouse Mirror
By CARYN JAMES
Published: May 9, 2004
HERE may be more explosive movies this summer, but none more likely to make your head spin than "Baadasssss!," Mario van Peebles's story of how his father, Melvin Van Peebles, wrote, produced, directed and starred in "Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song" and made Hollywood safe for blaxploitation films. Thirty-three years later, Mario is not only the writer, producer, director and star of "Baadasssss!" He is also a character, which means he sometimes talks to himself — that is, the real Mario, playing the fictional Melvin, talks to the fictional young Mario. The actor playing Mario as a boy looks nothing like the adult Mario in front of us, but then Mario looks nothing like Melvin, so at least the lack of resemblance makes sense.
You don't have to know "Sweetback" to appreciate "Baadasssss!" (May 28), but it helps. At times the new film recreates scenes from the original, as when Sweetback runs from the police, wearing a long gold vest that screams of the 70's. But "Baadasssss!" is mainly about how Melvin, flat out of money and luck, cobbled together an independent film that changed the industry.
Knowing the original film illuminates those struggles, not to mention the family dynamics. "Sweetback" began with Melvin's character as an adolescent being initiated into sex by a kindly prostitute. And that boy was played by, yes, the young Mario. "Baadasssss!" deals with that sex scene far less explicitly; instead, we see Mario's mother disapproving and hear Mario beg to be allowed to keep his huge Afro instead of cutting his hair for the part of young Sweetback.
Melvin and Mario, promoting "Baadasssss!" together, have talked about how tough the son was on his father, dealing bluntly with subjects like his womanizing. But Melvin comes off as a visionary, determined to make his movie at any personal or financial cost. Mario has created a loving homage to his father the hero.
In what other films have actors or actresses played their parents?
Quote from: RaviIn what other films have actors or actresses played their parents?
Desi Arnaz Jr. played his father in "Mambo Kings". Geraldine Chaplin played her grandmother in "Chaplin".
Neva Chonin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2004
Melvin Van Peebles didn't leave his heart in San Francisco, but this could be where he found it: It was while working as a cable car operator in the 1950s that the future father of independent black cinema began to explore filmmaking.
After relocating to France, he returned to San Francisco a decade later with his debut feature film, "Story of a Three Day Pass," the French entry in the 1967 San Francisco Film Festival. It won the critic's choice award.
On an April afternoon 37 years later, the Chicago-born Van Peebles, now 71, is back in San Francisco. He and his son, Mario, are ensconced in a suite at the Fairmont Hotel that boasts, among other things, a view of the Powell Street cable car line. The two are in town to promote Mario's new film, "Baadasssss!," a dramatization of the elder Van Peebles' struggle to make his signature 1971 picture, "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song."
Equal parts documentary, drama and social comedy, "Baadasssss!," which opens Friday in Bay Area theaters, has already earned accolades at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival and a standing ovation at this year's Sundance. The movie -- co-written and directed by Mario, who also stars in the role of his father -- is a personal and political testament, delivered in the raw, low-tech style of "Sweet Sweetback."
Mario, 47, figures the time was right for "Baadasssss!" to revisit the roots of black cinema and indie film. "I wanted to make the movie now, because the more things change, the more they stay the same," he says, settling onto a couch beside his father. "Some of the conditions under which my dad made his film -- repeal of funding for the arts, for instance -- are happening again, and with the current administration, there's an increasing sense of being disempowered."
Credited with breaking ground for independent filmmakers and inspiring the genre later known, dubiously, as blaxploitation, "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" told the story of a black porn performer who successfully battles the white-dominated system before vanishing into the sunset, fist held high. The first cinematic statement of black power, the film didn't pull punches. Neither did its director.
As captured in "Baadasssss!," Melvin's filmmaking struggles were legion. After writing and directed the hit 1970 comedy "Watermelon Man," Melvin was offered a three-picture deal with Columbia. Instead, he devoted himself to "Sweet Sweetback," a project whose racial politics were deemed too hot for any Hollywood studio to touch.
Made in just 19 days for $500,000, the self-financed film landed Melvin in trouble with creditors and his camera crew in jail. "Baadasssss!" shows how death threats flew, and how the cumulative stress caused Melvin to go temporarily blind in one eye. Once completed, the picture was slapped with an X rating. Distributors balked. In spite of everything, "Sweet Sweetback" went on to gross nearly $15 million (back when movies cost $1) in limited distribution.
"Sweetback's" success inspired a wave of black-centric movies that included "Shaft," "Superfly" and "Foxy Brown." While the gritty look was the same, the spirit had changed: Instead of a call to revolution, many post- "Sweetback" blaxploitation flicks featured protagonists who worked within the white power structure, not against it.
"I opened the doors. But of course they found the political agenda despicable, so they reduced that and made it cartoonlike, and you had blaxploitation," Melvin says. "However, one of my subplots worked perfectly: 'Sweetback' was so immersed in the 'hood culture that they couldn't fake it. They had to start hiring minorities."
The idea of making "Baadasssss!" came to Mario while he was playing the role of Malcolm X in 2001's "Ali." Preparation for the role led him to talk to his father, who had interviewed Malcolm X, and the younger Van Peebles began to see the connections between Melvin's cinematic revolution and the broader cultural upheaval of the '60s.
In making "Baadasssss!," Mario -- whose directing resume includes "New Jack City" and "Panther" -- found himself facing some of the same kind of resistance his father experienced three decades earlier. Studios tried to "Wonderbread" the project, first suggesting he gear it toward an independent film audience, then advising him to "take it to the hood" and make it a "Barbershop"-like comedy with a hip-hop cast. The studios also declared that "Baadasssss!" was too sexy, too political and hobbled by its unsympathetic lead character.
Mario ignored these hints and opted to follow in Melvin's footsteps by making the picture independently. In addition to providing a flashback to the social climate of the late '60s and early '70s, "Baadasssss!" explores the mercurial relationship between father and son, including a scene in which the driven Melvin pushes a 13-year-old Mario to play a sex scene in "Sweetback."
Mario has forgiven Melvin that particular transgression -- for his part, Melvin doesn't see that there's anything to forgive -- but this doesn't mean father and son don't occasionally lock horns. "We still have our differences," says Mario, laying an affectionate hand on his father's shoulder. "We got to the airport the other day and I'm pissed off because he forgot the cell phone. Then it turns out I forgot the tickets. So we still get on each other's nerves. But the important thing is that I'm proud of what he stood for. I'm proud of the changes he made, and I could not have made the film I made today if he hadn't blazed the trail."
Melvin, whose post-"Sweetback" career has included writing two Broadway plays and numerous books, composing music and continuing to direct independent films, says the pride goes both ways.
"People ask me what makes me most proud about Mario. I'm most proud that he could turn his back on the possibility of making a 'New Jack City 5' and make a film such as this. Many times I get young people asking, what do you think about black movies? And I say, what are you talking about? You mean Hollywood movies that have black people in them? It's gone back to that, and that's not the same thing as a black movie."
Great article! Thanks Mutiny.
Can Black People Fly? Don't Ask 'Soul Plane'
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: June 13, 2004
WEET SWEETBACK'S BAAD ASSSSS SONG" ends, famously, with a warning to the Man. The hero, a canny amalgam of Old West outlaw and third-world revolutionary, may have fled across the border into Mexico, but this is merely a tactical retreat. Before long, the words on the screen promise, Sweetback, the embodiment of and answer to centuries of insult and brutality inflicted on black Americans by their white oppressors, will return "to collect some dues."
Like many prophecies, this one, issued in 1971, has come true, though perhaps not quite in the way its author, Melvin Van Peebles, who wrote, directed and starred in "Sweetback," may have intended. In "Baadasssss," his stylish and thoughtful reconstruction of the making of "Sweetback," Mr. Van Peebles's son, Mario, portrays his father as a canny showman with a stubborn sense of political mission. Having directed an ethnic comedy called "Watermelon Man," the elder Van Peebles walks away from a three-picture deal with Columbia to make an independent film that he hopes will reflect, in raw, uncompromised and accessible form, the experiences and aspirations of African-Americans at a time of social upheaval and political confrontation.
"Baadasssss," which ends with the Detroit premiere of "Sweetback" before an ecstatic audience recruited by local Black Panthers, makes the case that he succeeded. The financial success of "Sweetback" — one of the highest-grossing independent pictures released here — brought 1970's Hollywood a belated news flash that has, unfortunately, needed periodic updating ever since: black people buy movie tickets.
To say that Sweetback collected his dues in the form of box office receipts is not to trivialize Mr. Van Peebles's accomplishment. The blaxploitation movies that "Sweetback" inspired may have been controversial at the time (and, like everything else in 70's pop culture, vulnerable to parody and condescension later on), but in appropriating the conventions of the western and the gangster film they nonetheless advanced the radical notion that black men on screen could be something other than buffoons, servants or model citizens. They could be action heroes — armed, dangerous, sexy and righteous leading men. It took a while, but that radical idea is at last beginning to look like conventional wisdom.
Which is not to suggest that Mario Van Peebles's history lesson should be taken as an invitation to complacency. According to "Sweetback," one of his father's grudges against the film industry in the late 60's was that, with a few exceptions, it shunted African-American artists into a low-comedy ghetto. The range of black pop-culture archetypes has expanded enormously in recent years, but the uncomfortable, double-edged legacy of minstrelsy nonetheless persists.
There is perhaps no more egregious recent example than "Soul Plane," a ragged, silly comedy that opened nationwide on the same day as "Baadasssss" made its art house debut. "Baadasssss" explores the obstacles facing a determined black man trying to make a film; "Soul Plane" (with Snoop Dogg as a stoned, ex-convict pilot) suggests that the idea that black people could run an airline, let alone fly a plane, is downright laughable.
Now, I don't want to sound like a scold. Without broad ethnic humor, American comedy would consist of one or two Ernst Lubitsch pictures and the collected monologues of Johnny Carson. And I won't deny that there are some funny jokes in "Soul Plane," including many that no anxious, well-meaning white person would ever admit to laughing at. But for all its boisterous sexual humor, the movie carefully avoids any real provocation, let alone insight. The airline's first-class passengers sip Champagne, while those in "low class" fight over fried chicken, but just about everyone is loud, crude, oversexed and liable to start dancing at the slightest provocation.
Except for the white people, who are represented by Tom Arnold, playing a guy named Elvis Hunkee. The Man, it seems, is no longer a scheming, cruel oppressor, but rather a hapless, sexless loser — not much of a man at all, really. And not much of a racist, either. He looks a little uncomfortable at first, but Mr. Hunkee is quickly swept up in the big, happy "Soul Plane" party.
Maybe this, like the easygoing acceptance of interracial romance at the movie's end, is a sign of progress. Perhaps the political passion that impelled Melvin Van Peebles to make "Sweetback," and that energized a later generation of black filmmakers (including Mario Van Peebles, who made "New Jack City" and "Panther"), is obsolete, and we can all sit back and laugh at each other. This is a seductive idea, but in the case of "Soul Plane" it is also a regressive one. Apparently we've come so far that we can now make jokes about lazy, incompetent and promiscuous black people, as long as some of them are also rich and good-looking, as long as the soundtrack has strong sales potential and as long as the movie is marketed primarily to African-American audiences.
"Soul Plane" almost seems to exist in a parallel movie universe, in which neither "Baadasssss" nor "Sweetback" ever existed because Melvin Van Peebles, on further reflection, decided to go ahead with a sequel to "Watermelon Man." Wherever he is, Sweetback still has some work to do, and some dues to collect.
Seriously, this movie rocks.
Right on. I've been trying to push this for a month now, but nobody's seemed to care much.
Here's my review (http://www.road-dog-productions.com/baadasssss.html).
Honestly, I don't think there's a better new release out there at the moment.
Dunno if you caught a press screening or saw it in the theater, but the press notes were great. Mario took time and wrote them himself.
it's playing at the "indie" theater that I work at, which also screens Saved at the moment. And I realize prior to every screening of Saved, some clever college kid must walk by the Baadassss poster and either try to over pronounce the word or they wanna say something "hip hop" like "ohh snap" or "bling bling." Every screening.
Thought yesterday there was an old foreign (French maybe?) lady who asked me what was "Bah-Dahs" and I explained to her it's pronounced "Baadasss", then she asked me what it was about, I explained it to her, and then ten minutes she came back and said "Is 'Bah-dahsss' subtitled?" I thought that was cute.
Quote from: mutinycoDunno if you caught a press screening or saw it in the theater, but the press notes were great. Mario took time and wrote them himself.
I missed the various screenings, but the press agent told me she'd get me the press kit. I keep forgetting to get it from her. She said it was a good fifty pages or so.
Yep. That and Riding Giants are the thickest I've seen in a while.
the director from riding the giants came tonight, all these surfers were there, totally lame, hobbyiest weekend surfers.
but back to baadasss, it didn't seem that good--Mario Van Peebles was overacting, the cinematography was really annoying, and the narration was pretty unnecessary.
The Film That Made 'Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song' Possible (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/movies/van-peebles-three-day-pass.html)
By Nicolas Rapold
May 6, 2021
I don't think anyone who sees the title "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" forgets it. The eye-popping film made Melvin Van Peebles a pioneer of 1970s American cinema and pure independent hustle. But a few years earlier, Van Peebles directed his first trailblazer in France: "The Story of a Three Day Pass," his feature debut, which was released commercially in 1968 and is opening at Film Forum on Friday in a new restoration.
It's the deceptively simple story of Turner (Harry Baird), a Black American G.I. on weekend leave in Paris. But Van Peebles threads Turner's hopes and joys with seemingly inescapable aggressions against him as a Black man and societal anxieties surrounding race. The story's romantic idyll is shot through with a prickly visual style and a biting candor — all in a film that pointedly couldn't happen in the United States.
By the 1960s, Van Peebles, a Chicago native and Air Force veteran, had made some short films and published a memoir about working on a San Francisco cable car. But in Hollywood, doors were still closed to Black filmmakers, despite changes in the air and cultural upheaval across the nation. So like many Black artists before him, Van Peebles headed to Europe. He studied for a doctorate in astronomy in Amsterdam, wrote more, and found a fan in Henri Langlois, head priest of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.
"The Story of a Three Day Pass" was based on one of the novels Van Peebles wrote in French, winning him a grant and a spot in the country's directors' guild. In 1967, he premiered the feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival — as part of the French delegation — next to art-house giants like Satyajit Ray and Agnès Varda. The movie's title in French was "La Permission," but Van Peebles took permission for himself.
Turner's weekend leave should be the most ordinary thing in the world — a soldier's escape. But it can't be carefree for Turner, whose white commanding officer makes a big deal of trusting him with a promotion and a three-day pass. In a mirror, the goofily hopeful Turner sees his sarcastic reflection talking to him: the promotion, his mirror self says, is just a reward for being an obedient "Uncle Tom." Van Peebles pits the two Turners against each other in a bewildering split screen.
That kind of double consciousness, and the feelings it churns up, loom over Turner's journey. The soldier does have one perfect moment, early in his Paris trip. He steps into a bar, shades on and ready to unwind. Except he doesn't walk — he glides. The camera keeps him at center, poised and cool, as he moves through the drinkers and dancers. You might recognize the same dolly shot from Spike Lee's movies, transporting you into the dream of a moment. But here it is in 1967 — the unmistakable flourish of a Van Peebles joint.
At the bar, Turner picks up a demure Frenchwoman, Miriam (Nicole Berger, who co-starred in the French new wave classic "Shoot the Piano Player"). There's a sweet, awkward innocence to their flirting across language differences and dancing to the turtlenecked house band. They plan a trip to the countryside the next day. But Van Peebles shows how their experiences couldn't be more wildly different.
The two get settled in a Normandy inn, and their inner monologues are revealed in fantasy sequences during sex. You might say Van Peebles doesn't mince images: Turner visualizes himself as a squire returning to his estate and his maid Miriam, while Miriam sees herself running through a jungle, seized by African tribesmen, one played by Turner. When it comes to technique, Van Peebles is fearless, using hard cuts in edits and Godardian music cues, as well as collaborating on the score.
Turner and Miriam do have a lovely time in the village, until a musician in a bar refers to them as "Miss Big Eyes" and "Señor Blackie." Then on the beach, they run into soldiers from his base. Word gets back about his fraternizing, and his promotion is revoked. (Van Peebles keeps us on our toes with a deus ex machina: a visiting church group from Harlem.)
For Van Peebles, the studio movie did finally come next: "Watermelon Man," starring Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white suburbanite who one day wakes up to find he's Black. "Sweetback" followed ("rated X by an all-white jury," said ads); then playwriting, leading to several Tony nominations; and a stint as a trader on Wall Street. You can see Van Peebles's influence in Lee and really any filmmaker who truly goes for broke (like the anticolonialist French-Mauritanian director Med Hondo, who is said to have hosted Van Peebles in Paris).
"I never decided to become a director," Van Peebles, now 88, said in a Directors Guild of America interview conducted by his son, the filmmaker Mario Van Peebles. "I just decided to show folks, especially minorities, like I saw them, not like they kept being shown around in cinema." With "The Story of a Three Day Pass," Melvin Van Peebles shattered the usual mirrors presented in movies, with a crash that reverberated far beyond one soldier's weekend off.
<3 4ever a true original and just this aspect of his story was glossed over there
Quote"I went down to Hollywood and asked for a job (as a filmmaker)," he says. "They offered me a job as an elevator operator."
Accepting the assessment that he had no talent, he moved to Holland, where he planned to pursue a doctorate in astronomy, his second love. The school, he says, laughing, "assumed I was from an old Dutch family because of my name, and they accepted me."
But then the Cinématheque Française, the famed film archive in Paris that nurtured and inspired young filmmakers of the French New Wave, learned of his short movies through Amos Vogel, a supporter of experimental cinema who later co-founded the New York Film Festival.
"So I hitchhiked to France," Van Peebles says. His films were well-received, so he decided to stay in Paris and pursue a creative career, even though he didn't speak French and had no job. He became a beggar, "singing La Bamba in the street" for money.
"They'd given me hope," he says. "They had said to me it wasn't impossible."
After teaching himself French, he wrote and published five French novels and worked as a journalist. Then he made his first full-length movie, Story of a Three-Day Pass.