Melvin Van Peebles wrote, directed, produced, edited, and scored Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song, a searing, violent, frequently vulgar assault on corrupt white society in which, for the first time in such incendiary terms, an African-American anti-hero "stuck it to 'The Man.'" The film's runaway box office success virtually created what came to be called Blaxploitation films, inspiring the Hollywood studio productions Shaft and Superfly. Van Peebles' independence in creating, developing, and financing Sweet Sweetback placed him immediately in the vanguard of "guerilla cinema" in the early 1970s, while also ensuring him totemic status as "The Father of Black Films" to a future generation of African-American filmmakers, including the Hughes Brothers, Reginald Hudlin, and Spike Lee. Released in the aftermath of the convulsive race riots of the late 1960s and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Sweet Sweetback story of an African-American hustler running for his life from murderous white law enforcement officials hit a nerve with black moviegoers -- dramatically articulating their rage while simultaneously illustrating the "buying power" of a segment of American society usually forgotten by Hollywood. Crude, rude, raw and Baadddd with a capital "B," Sweet Sweetback's was impossible to ignore and impossible to feel indifferent about. Now, more than thirty years after its release, its "in-your-face" power to provoke, offend and exhilarate are even more remarkable in an age when a televised glimpse of Janet Jackson's bare breast seems to threaten the very foundations of the republic.