Melvin Van Peebles (born 1932), the godfather of ghetto-punk cinema, has assumed many personas in his decades-long career as an artist and self-reinventing iconoclast. But he long ago earned cine-immortality as the writer-director and revolutionary spirit behind Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the independently financed, anti-establishment 1971 film that broke box office records and established, for better and worse, the lucrative template for blaxploitation film. Made for $500,000 (including a $50,000 contribution from Bill Cosby), the film depicted a mustachioed sex-show hustler who goes on the run–and keeps running–after assaulting a pair of racist cops. Even with its fragmented, Nouvelle Vague-style aesthetics and a daunting MPAA rating (“Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury” was the movie's tagline), Sweetback's made morethan $10 million upon its release, mostly from African-American audiences who had never before seen such a vivid, angry expression of black-rebel consciousness on the big screen.

In May 2004, I sat down to chat with Van Peebles and his actordirector son, Mario (born 1957), whose own projects (New Jack City [1991], Posse [1993], Panther [1995]) reflect a conscientious attention to racial disparity, civil rights history and the persistence of hoary old African-American stereotypes in mainstream Hollywood film. The pair were in New York promoting Baadasssss! (aka How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass!) (2003), Mario's Oedipal docu-fiction homage to his father's personal struggles in making Sweetback's, in which he cast himself as Melvin and his own son as a 13-year-old version of himself.