While I am extremely grateful to the Reader for the “highly recommended” rating given to Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies in last week’s CUFF reviews [August 17], I feel compelled to respond to the implicit charge of racism in your writer’s criticism of the fact that “blaxploitation directors like Melvin Van Peebles are conspicuously absent” from our work.
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Aside from a highly questionable labeling of Van Peebles as a “blaxploitation” filmmaker (the only one of his films that falls anywhere near that category is Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and Van Peebles himself doesn’t see that one as a “blaxploitation” film, or so he told me when I interviewed him for a magazine piece in 1998), your writer seems to have failed to notice that Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies examines exploitation filmmaking within a specific time frame: the era of the studio Production Code, which came to an end in 1969. Sweetback, the radical Van Peebles masterwork that inadvertently touched off the “blaxploitation” craze by becoming an indie smash, was released in 1971, and is therefore outside of our time line.
Hope this clarifies.
