Two Van Peebles, one very ‘Baadasssss’ family

Father-son filmmakers discuss their newest joint venture. By Kyle smith

When asked what would have happened if his landmark 1971 film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” had flopped, Melvin Van Peebles answers immediately in startlingly ghoulish fashion — “I’d be dead.”

Van Peebles, patriarch of the modern independent cinema and demigod among black filmmakers, tells no lie. “My friends who loaned me the bread, other people … If I didn’t pay them, they’d kill me,” he says.

“He had $13 left. It was ‘game over’ time,” Melvin’s son Mario Van Peebles adds.

Looking at the 71-year-old Melvin Van Peebles, you feel like you’re in the presence of someone who really knows sacrifice. Melvin, a dirty gray beard framing his frail face, sits as if he’s in a director’s chair rather than at a conference table — his crossed legs expose weathered purple socks. He, fittingly, wears a loose gray shirt stamped with a defiant “Baadasssss!,” the name of Mario’s new film about his father’s experience making “Sweetback.”

Mario says, “Mark Twain said something to the effect of, ‘All my life my father was an idiot, and at 21 I discovered he was a genius.’ I came to understand him by walking in those shoes.”

The opening Depression-era scene in “Sweetback” sees the titular character, a ripe preteen, losing his virginity to a prostitute. Melvin Van Peebles cast young Mario in the role, beginning a long, and often bizarre, collaboration between the two. “Baadasssss!” has Mario playing his father, who, over the course of “Sweetback,” served as writer, director, star, composer, editor and producer.

Mario tells an anecdote exemplary of their ongoing father-son collaborations. “To research playing Brother Malcolm (in 2001’s “Ali”), I talked to one of the journalists who talked to him, who happened to be my father. And Brother Malcolm had said, ‘If they don’t want you to build a restaurant, build a restaurant,’ and Melvin said, ‘If they don’t want you to make a movie, make a movie.'”

“Sweetback” was revolutionary in countless ways. Besides being one of the first (and ultimately, most successful) independent films ever, “Sweetback” is partly (along with “Shaft”) responsible for the rash of “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s. It was, in many ways, the first film truly directed at a black audience.

“The distributors wanted to change the title, and the guy said ‘I don’t understand the title,’ and I said ‘You don’t have to understand it, motherfucker.’ I wrote it to talk to my folks, to my audience, who will understand it,” Melvin says.

“‘Sweetback’ made being a revolutionary hip,” says Mario. “The subsequent films made being a cop, or a drug dealer, hip. The studios said ‘Lets make the money, but lets dilute that revolutionary core.’ You start with content, but you get drawn to bitches and hoes and 40s and blunts, and the content is diluted out.”

Mario is part of a group of middle-aged black filmmakers — among them “The Italian Job’s” F. Gary Gray and “2 Fast 2 Furious'” John Singleton — who, despite their successes, still struggle to find attractive projects. “(We) look around and realize, wow, look at this, most of us knew who our fathers were, most of us weren’t in a gang, most of us went to college, and we can’t make movies about guys like us.”

Melvin, visibly upset at Mario’s admission, shifts in his seat. Thirty years after he broke through with “Sweetback,” even the most privileged of black filmmakers is regulated to the wishes of the studio, a manifestation of the omni-powerful “Man” Van Peebles famously railed against in “Sweetback.”

“If we got to a certain point as filmmakers, we would have to step outside and direct films about the dominant culture,” Mario says. Which is good, to step out and do the big studio flick that’s not about ethnic people — I want to do that!” He continues: “If we were to do something that still had black folks in it, then we would still have trouble because our audience was considered to have baggy pants and sneakers. Where’s our ‘Lost in Translation’ and ‘Good Will Hunting?’ There’s a complexity we can’t get.”

Mario has done most of the talking during our interview; after all, “Baadasssss!” is his film. “I just liked it 100 percent,” Melvin comments, “I didn’t try and second guess him. I have enough trouble trying to come back from the toilet without my pants getting wet.” But although Melvin sits quietly, he is imposing and intimidating. At one point he invokes a complex scientific metaphor (he uses the phrase “hydroscopic nuclei” repeatedly) about the contrails that emerge from airplanes, and how, much like water forms around these nuclei to make the vapor trails we see in the sky, a film’s success and value depends on who forms around the film, making it visible.

Melvin seems to be thinking of this as he goes, but its beautiful and eloquent — like listening to an expert elaborate on a hypothesis. And finally, he concludes, “You are the contrails, (‘Sweetback’) is something you can form around. That’s how it works. But it’s an implicit way of keeping feeling powerless. Independent film just hasn’t made the other important nucleus for Hollywood: money.”

“At the end of the day, what I liked about the lead in this movie, the original badass here,” Mario says, gesturing to Melvin. “When I grew up with him, he was pissed off at systemicisms, be that sexism, racism, or whatever. But he wasn’t pissed off at people. He had friends and still has people of all colors around him, all the time. And I like that — he didn’t let that battle make him bitter.”