By BEN SISARIO

Ask Melvin Van Peebles about his legacy, and you get a snort, a grimace, a wave of the hand and a finely punctuated “come on.”

“I didn’t even know I had a legacy,” he said between rehearsals for his latest project, a musical-theater adaptation of his 1971 film “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” “I do what I want to do.”

But his reputation is formidable. As the writer, director and star of “Sweetback,” he is a godfather of black cinema. His stage musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death,” also from 1971, brought unsparingly gritty portraits of black urban life to Broadway. He is a novelist, a composer, an entrepreneur, a veteran of both 1960s Paris and 1980s Wall Street. “He is a great example of an American artist who has never stopped pushing himself or others,” the cultural critic Nelson George said.

“Sweetback,” which grossed more than $10 million, broke every rule in Hollywood, and its story of a black man who successfully resists white authority shocked and exhilarated audiences.

Now 77, Mr. Van Peebles is still a gadfly and an outsider. In 2004 he revived “Ain’t Supposed to Die” with the Classical Theater of Harlem, and in 2008 he made “Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha,” a “Sweetback”-like picaresque that some critics have praised for its gumption, if nothing else. His “Sweetback” adaptation opened at the Sons d’Hiver Festival in and around Paris, with workshop performances at BRICstudio in Brooklyn.

In person Mr. Van Peebles is a throwback to the era of Afros and revolutionary rhetoric. “I want people to be empowered and also have a damn good time,” he said .

“The key to empowerment is no more complicated than what Jesse Jackson said: We are somebody,” he continued, referring to “I am somebody,” Mr. Jackson’s chant of selfrespect, most famously led at the Wattstax concert in Los Angeles in 1972. “But the ‘We are somebody’ I would like to be in the larger sense, not just the urban African-American but homo sapiens in general: We are somebody.”

Yet it’s a long way from the early 1970s, when the Black Panthers endorsed “Sweetback,” and The New York Times called Mr. Van Peebles “the first black man in show business to beat the white man at his own game.” A black man is now president. And the blaxploitation genre that briefly flowered after “Sweetback” (“Shaft,” “Cleopatra Jones,” etc.) rendered many of Mr. Van Peebles’s innovations ripe for parody: a jivetalking outlaw hero, declarations of war against “the man.”

All of this has only strengthened Mr. Van Peebles’s resolve as artist and provocateur, and his new “Sweetback” adapts to the present while standing as a defiant reminder of everything that should have changed but hasn’t.

“Sweetback” is the story of a Los Angeles ladies’ man who becomes a fugitive after attacking two crooked cops and escapes to Mexico, vowing to return and “collect some dues.”

Mr. Van Peebles was quite clear in saying that as long as he was able to continue creating, commercial or critical success did not matter. Having complete ownership of his works means a sufficient income, he said, and his mind is always reeling with new projects anyway, like an autobiography that he has never gotten around to completing.

Which brings the subject back to the question of legacy.

He thought about it for a moment. “That’s a very colored word,” he said.


“I want people to be empowered and also have a damn good time.” / RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES