With fire in his belly and defiance in his eyes, Melvin Van Peebles rocked Hollywood and changed the history of American cinema 33 years ago.

He did it with a radical and raucous independent film called Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song.

It was a personal odyssey: Van Peebles wrote, produced, directed, edited, composed the score and starred in the searing, yet often sexy, and amusing drama as the title character.

That man was Sweetback, a reluctant black fugitive from corrupt white cops who were working for The Man.

Despite monumental obstacles -- no studio, no distribution network, no bankable stars, barely any budget, raw technical quality and tons of attitude -- Sweet Sweetback became the biggest indie hit of the year.

It happened because Van Peebles rewrote the book on the depiction of blacks in movies. It happened because the Black Panthers adopted the hip film -- especially during its first week at a theatre in Van Peebles' hometown of Chicago -- and because entire black neighbourhoods started pouring in once the film got wider distribution beyond its first two cinemas.

And it happened, Van Peebles says, because blacks no longer wanted to feel "anger and impotence" like he did as a kid when he went to movies showing black characters as racist stereotypes: "I wouldn't even know what it was. Finally I recognized it and it's called shame!"

There is no shame in being Sweetback in his movie. "It was an historical moment," Van Peebles, now 71, told the Sun during an interview on the Floating Film Festival, where he was given a career tribute and feted for an entire week for his accomplishments.

"I made movies like a cook. I put in what I liked in case nobody else did. I just put in everything I always wanted to see and never saw, you know what I mean?"

His son, actor-director Mario Van Peebles, knows what he means -- so much so that he made a film about the creation of his father's film, as well as the society of the time. Mario also plays his father in the funny, profane and fascinating drama that so effectively shows how Sweet Sweetback was a socio-political act as well as entertainment.

The Mario project, due in theatres next week, is called Baadasssss!, obviously a reference to part of the original film's title.

When Baadasssss! made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, it was called How To Get The Man's Foot Outta Your Ass, but that was changed because the MPAA in the U.S. refused to approve it. In 1971, Melvin Van Peebles would not even submit his film to the MPAA for approval and a rating of any kind.

"Yeah, I did big tough things in my movie but, if you don't go to the motion-picture association, you get an automatic 'X' if it's an American film," Melvin Van Peebles says. "And I wouldn't go to them because they were all white. So then I had a T-shirt made -- and I made a ton of money selling the T-shirts -- saying: Rated X By An All-White Jury!"

Sweet Sweetback launched a new era, the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. They were films made primarily by blacks for black audiences. Many of those films are also now back in the public eye, thanks to an avalanche of DVD releases by MGM and Warner Bros. earlier this year. MGM did a splendid job with its Soul Cinema series that included: Coffy, Cooley High, Foxy Brown, Hell Up In Harlem, Blacula, Scream Blacula Scream, Hammer, The Monkey Hustle and the 1988 blaxploitation satire I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.

Warner, which had already issued the complete Shaft series, followed this year with Super Fly and the Bill Cosby/Sidney Poitier series Uptown Saturday Night, Let's Do It Again and A Piece Of The Action.

Most of these movies were made on small budgets yet still broke ground as movies that depicted blacks for blacks with humour and sex.

The blaxploitation craze petered out -- "It went from shoddy to shoddier and from worse to worser," Van Peebles says of budget problems that compromised quality.

But their success eventually led to the contemporary era, where black filmmakers such as Spike Lee flourish doing the right thing, doing it their own way.

Van Peebles' own career suffered, however.

"I was ostracized in Hollywood," he says of the erratic course of his filmmaking since Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song.

"But I haven't sold out, and they've encouraged me to sell out. I was forced out of Hollywood. I expected that."

Radicals who defy the system are always marginalized, Van Peebles says without bitterness.

"I really don't have much sympathy for people who say there's no Santa Claus and sit by the chimney with their stocking.

"For me, it was a conscious decision. I made it possible for others."


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