Blaxploitation, 1971 to 1975

To crew Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) at a price he could afford, Melvin Van Peebles registered it with the unions as a pornographic production, which let him hire a mostly non-union crew below the going minimums. When the money ran out near the end he borrowed the last fifty thousand dollars from Bill Cosby to finish. No studio would come near the thing. He directed it, scored it, cut it and played the lead himself, a hustler who kills two cops beating a Black suspect and runs for the Mexican border, and shot the whole run in nineteen days.

The picture is formally berserk, closer to the avant-garde than to the drive-in, overdubbed and distorted until the chase turns into something like a fever. Van Peebles dedicated it on screen to every Black person who had had enough of the Man. The MPAA handed it an X, so he printed "Rated X by an all-white jury" across the poster and turned the insult into the ad campaign. It opened in two theatres, one in Detroit and one in Atlanta, and became one of the highest-grossing independent films made to that point, clearing well past ten million dollars. Huey Newton gave over an entire issue of the Black Panther paper to it and made it required viewing for the membership.

None of that was a Hollywood idea. Hollywood read the receipts.

Shaft rescued a studio that was auctioning its own furniture

In 1970 MGM was being taken apart for parts. Kirk Kerkorian had bought control and installed James Aubrey to strip costs, and the studio put its own history under the hammer. Dorothy's ruby slippers went for fifteen thousand dollars, the backlot was sold for housing tracts, and the proceeds were pointed at a hotel Kerkorian was building in Las Vegas. Into that walked Shaft (1971), a lean private-eye picture directed by Gordon Parks, the LIFE photographer who two years earlier, on The Learning Tree, had become the first Black American to direct a feature for a major studio. Richard Roundtree plays John Shaft as a man who owns whatever pavement he happens to be standing on. The mystery is nothing and it did not matter. Shaft took around thirteen million dollars against a budget of roughly a million, and for that year MGM was kept solvent by a Black detective. Isaac Hayes wrote the score, and his Theme from Shaft won the Academy Award for best original song, making him the first Black person to win a competitive Oscar outside the acting categories. He collected it in a floor-length coat over a chest of gold chains, which is the correct way to collect an Oscar.

Super Fly hired a composer to argue with its own hero

Super Fly (1972) was directed by Gordon Parks Jr, the son, and financed the way Sweetback was, outside the studios and partly on money raised from Black investors after the majors passed. On the surface it is a cocaine dealer's fantasy of one last score and a clean exit. Ron O'Neal's Priest glides through a real, filthy, beautiful 1972 New York in a hat and a car you are plainly meant to want. Then Curtis Mayfield's soundtrack settles over the whole thing and names the price. Freddie's Dead and Pusherman are the opposite of hero music. They itemise the cost of the exact life the camera is busy admiring, and Mayfield sings it straight, without a wink, over the glamour. The album went to number one and earned more than the film cost to make. The score is smarter than the script, and it knows it.

Pam Grier was a leading man a decade early

Pam Grier served her apprenticeship in Roger Corman's women-in-prison quickies, The Big Doll House (1971) and the rest, shot fast and cheap in the Philippines, before Jack Hill built Coffy (1973) around her. A nurse works methodically through the dealers who put her kid sister in a hospital bed, and Grier plays it with a flat, unbothered directness that leaves the men in her scenes looking like they are the ones auditioning. American International liked the numbers enough to want more at once. Foxy Brown (1974) was written as a straight Coffy sequel and retitled only because AIP had cooled on sequels, which is why it plays like the same film with the gain cranked. What both did, and what almost nothing else in American cinema was doing in 1973, was hand a woman top billing as the one dispensing the violence rather than absorbing it.

Hollywood decided a woman could carry an action picture when Sigourney Weaver picked up a flamethrower in Aliens in 1986. Coffy got there in 1973, with a shotgun and a fistful of razor blades hidden in her hair.

The word was an insult before it was a genre

Blaxploitation is not a name the films chose. It was coined against them, in 1972, generally credited to Junius Griffin, then head of the Beverly Hills and Hollywood branch of the NAACP, who called the pictures a form of cultural genocide and said they were selling Black audiences a diet of pimps, pushers and killers dressed up as pride. The NAACP, CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference formed a Coalition Against Blaxploitation to lean on the studios and rate the films before release. Then the objectors split, because the objection had two halves that would not sit together. One said the films were minstrelsy in wide lapels, the old stereotypes with a soul soundtrack laid over the top. The other, which took in a lot of the Black actors, directors and crew these films employed in an industry that hired almost nobody who looked like them, said a working Black film business that paid Black people was worth more than the purity of the content. Nobody won that argument. The films kept coming until the money stopped, on a schedule that had nothing to do with either side.

The template bolted onto anything with a body count

Once the formula existed, a Black lead, a city shot on real streets, a funk or soul score, a plot about staying alive between the cops and the crooks, it clamped onto every other genre in the building. Horror grabbed it first. Blacula (1972) gives its vampire an origin with real period nerve. Prince Mamuwalde sails to Transylvania in 1780 to ask Count Dracula for help ending the African slave trade, Dracula turns out to be a racist, and the curse is the punishment for asking. William Marshall plays it with so much Shakespearean weight that he almost drags the AIP budget up to his level, and the film did well enough to earn Scream Blacula Scream (1973), which drops Pam Grier in as a voodoo priestess. Behind it came the rest of the rack. Sugar Hill (1974) raises silver-eyed Haitian zombies for revenge. The Exorcist knock-off Abby (1974) got sued off the nation's screens by Warner Bros for the resemblance. Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973), an independently financed art film about addiction and communion, got hacked into a cheaper vampire picture and pushed out as Blood Couple when the Blacula its distributors thought they had bought failed to turn up.

The crime end produced the two most durable films in the cycle. Larry Cohen shot Black Caesar (1973), a Harlem rise-and-fall gangster epic, guerrilla-style on stolen streets with a James Brown score. Across 110th Street (1972), with Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto, is a bleak, first-rate crime picture whose Bobby Womack title song was good enough that Tarantino built the opening of Jackie Brown out of it twenty-five years later.

The rest ranged from studio couture to backyard. Warner Bros put real money behind Cleopatra Jones (1973) and dressed six-foot-two Tamara Dobson as a government agent in a wardrobe worth more than most of these films cost to make. The Mack (1973) shot half a documentary around its plot, casting real Oakland players and filming an actual Players Ball. Trouble Man (1972) carries the only film score Marvin Gaye ever wrote. Isaac Hayes scored Shaft, then walked in front of the camera to headline Truck Turner (1974) as a bounty hunter. At the cheap end Rudy Ray Moore made Dolemite (1975) with boom mics dipping into half the shots, and left them in and did not care. The ex-athletes moved in as well, Jim Brown and Fred Williamson out of the NFL and karate champion Jim Kelly straight off Enter the Dragon (1973), bolted together for Three the Hard Way (1974), whose villains are neo-Nazis plotting to poison the water supply of Black neighbourhoods.

The most radical film in the cycle got pulled from theatres

The genre's least comfortable possession sits at the far political edge. The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), directed by Ivan Dixon from Sam Greenlee's novel with a Herbie Hancock score, follows the first Black man recruited into the CIA as a public-relations token. He absorbs everything the Agency will teach him about sabotage and cell structure, then carries it home to Chicago and turns a street gang into a trained guerrilla unit. It is an insurgency manual with a story wrapped around it, and it played like one. United Artists pulled it from cinemas within weeks. Greenlee insisted to the end that the FBI had leaned on the studio, and the film vanished so completely that for three decades a worn bootleg was the only way to see it. It resurfaced on DVD in 2004 and entered the National Film Registry in 2012, a full generation after the studio that made it wanted it gone.

The majors left the moment they had what they came for

The studios were in it for one thing, the market a single self-financed film about a hustler outrunning the cops had proven was sitting there unserved, worth better than ten million dollars to whoever reached it first. By 1975 they had mined it out. Returns were thinning, the Coalition's protests had made distributors twitchy, and, more decisively, Jaws opened in the summer of 1975 and showed Hollywood a bigger and much whiter kind of money. The everyone-at-once blockbuster, aimed at the entire country, beat a chain of inner-city theatres that were themselves closing down. The retreat shows in the product. AIP spent 1975 filing the teeth off Pam Grier, chasing a family-friendly PG and sending her out softer with each picture, and inside a year the studio blaxploitation film had all but stopped being made. The audience these films were built for waited a long time for another wave aimed squarely at it.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song ends on a title card. WATCH OUT. A BAADASSSSS NIGGER IS COMING BACK TO COLLECT SOME DUES. Van Peebles collected his in cash, off a film he owned outright. The studios spent four years collecting theirs, and when the till was empty they went to see about a shark.