“Never meet your heroes,” the old warning goes. “You’ll only be disappointed.” Whoever came up with that was someone no doubt chagrined by the look, the creative output or the personal behavior of one of the icons he or she once revered. But it ain’t necessarily so. Some of us manage to keep moving, in the time-honored tradition of a shark; some of us push back against the expected lethargy of the tide of years.
Melvin Van Peebles was one such baadasssss. The filmmaker, writer and native of Chicago exploded into the mainstream popular culture in the volatile, unpredictable early ‘70’s with his first independent feature,
Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadassss Song (1971), a raw, wild film that pushed every button in the finger-wagging majoritarian culture, a motion picture created by a filmmaker determined to tell a story “about a brother getting the Man’s foot out of his ass.” ...
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