Still Superbad After All These Years

Some of the biggest and baddest icons of old-school black action movies are reuniting--not for a new movie, but to get serious props from fans next weekend in Tarrytown, New York, at the first-ever convention (www.theshop.net/trnsgres/70s/) celebrating the stars, styles and sounds of this unique film genre.

Guests include Fred Williamson, the Harlem underworld boss who dropped a severed ear into a mafioso's pasta in Black Caesar (1973); Richard Roundtree, immortalized as John Shaft, the "black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks"; Isaac Hayes, who wrote the Oscar-winning Shaft theme and starred in Truck Turner (1974); Antonio Fargas, aka Huggy Bear on TV's Starsky and Hutch and a drug dealer named Doodlebug in Cleopatra Jones (1973); and Gloria Hendry, onscreen love interest to Williamson and Jim Brown, and Scatman Crothers' karate-kicking daughter in Black Belt Jones (1974).

"An event of this kind is overdue," says Rudy Ray Moore (www.dolemite.com), one of the convention's star attractions and the self-described "baddest muthafucka the world ever seen." Moore, an X-rated stand-up comic, spent $90,000 he'd earned from the sale of numerous "party records" to make his debut film, Dolemite (1975), the story of a profanity-rhyming pimp, who, with the aid of kung-fu fighting prostitutes, reclaims his turf and exacts revenge on the racist cops who framed him.

'70s Exploitation/Cult Cinema, TV & Music Convention, February 12-14
Tarrytown Hilton Hotel
Info: 203-230-9863
Hours: Fri. 4 p.m.-10 p.m.
Sat. 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
Advance tickets (through Feb. 6): $15/day or $35/weekend;
Door: $18/day; $40/weekend "Back in the 1970's, it was mostly all-black audiences coming into the theaters," says Moore. "So, we presented stories they could relate to. I didn't have the kind of budget to compete with the big studios, therefore I had to make my films more outlandish, more outrageous. Today, my films are being discovered by new audiences, even by whites, and they're still going strong on videocassette."

The nostalgia is partly attributable to filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who cast blaxploitation goddess Pam Grier in Jackie Brown. But much of the newfound fascination, which has seen movies rereleased, books published and hundreds of Websites launched, seems to focus on the kitsch factor--outdated clothes, dialogue (a Superfly pusher digs his "eight-track stereo in every room"), cars, etc.--overlooking the fact that the genre had politically charged origins.

Blaxploitation--a term coined by a reviewer back in the day, and much-disliked by Williamson and other stars--began with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971), the story of a superstud-on-the-run "dedicated to all the brothers and sisters who had enough of The Man." Even with independent distribution, the film made enough money to catch the attention of the major studios.

MGM released Shaft (1971) and Warners dropped Superfly (1972), unleashing a flood of early films that were often brutal takes on ghetto life, full of pushers, pimps, ho's, junkies, racist cops, and black militants. Some films were dissed by African-American groups (ironically, a pre-mayoral Marion Barry decried Superfly for glorifying drugs) and white liberals for supposedly promoting negative stereotypes, even though many of the flicks were simply violent action pictures starring black actors instead of Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood.

But soon, the genre was fully coopted by white Hollywood, becoming saturated with martial-arts films, westerns and horror movies (Blacula, Blackenstein). By 1975-76, blaxploitation burned out; since then, some stars, like Roundtree and Grier, have succeeded as character actors while others, like Ron O'Neal (Super Fly), Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones) and Max Julien (The Mack), were seldom seen again.

Like bell bottoms, the Brady Bunch and all else '70s, blaxploitation is making a mass-market comeback. John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood) is redoing Shaft, and there is talk of new takes on Cleopatra Jones, The Mack, and Get Christie Love.

All of which means that fans will probably be quoting their fave lines of dialogue, like, "How long is your phallus?" (from Shaft in Africa) at conventions like this one for several years.

Can you dig it?