by JULIET WATERS

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto has a message: "This book - like the film - is dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of the Man." First published in the '70s to accompany the film of the same name, it was written for readers who wanted more of one particular man, director/actor/writer Melvin Van Peebles. After the success of Baadasssss!, Mario Van Peebles' recent film tribute to his father, the book has now been revised for readers who want more of both men.

In 1971, after a couple of successful Hollywood films, Van Peebles Sr. walked away from the industry to produce, direct and act in one of the first independent American films every made. He knew that as long as there was studio financing, any film he made for the black community would have to condescend to whites. Resistance to this film was big, and initially there were only two theatres in the U.S. that would show it. By the end of its first run, however, it ended up outgrossing Love Story.

In Baadasssss! Van Peebles Jr. plays the role of Van Peebles Sr. In real life, Van Peebles Jr. starred in his father's film, in a scene about losing his virginity at age 13. The use of black male teenagers in sex scenes is hardly the main reason Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song is considered the genesis of blaxploitation. The story of a pimp who kills a cop in self-defence and gets away with it is loaded with as much sex and violence as Van Peebles could possibly fit in. There was at least one practical reason for this, other than the need to make serious money. To avoid pressure from unions to pay scale wages he couldn't afford, Peebles had to convince them he was making more of a porno than a feature.

It's a great story, whether you learn it from this book, or Baadasssss! What you get in the book, however, is a sense of Van Peebles Sr., the man and the artist, in ways that don't fit so neatly into his son's feature. Van Peebles Jr. clearly isn't so recalcitrant about meeting mainstream tastes and rating boards criterion. (One of Van Peebles Sr.'s glory moments is exploiting the censorship of his film by using it in the advertising: "Rated X by an All White Jury!") Badasssss!, for example, does not include the true-life moment when Van Peebles Sr. literally comes up with the idea for the film while jerking off in the Mojave desert.

The language of "Ideas," the long essay in which Van Peebles Sr. writes about the making of his film, is impressionistic, hardcore and eccentric in a way that a parallel essay by Van Peebles Jr. doesn't match. There's an important layer to Van Peebles Sr. that's never touched in Baadasssss! In the film, he's pictured as an often-hard man driven mostly by the painful realities of black culture. But his cultural education extended way beyond Black America. Van Peebles Sr.'s original training ground was Paris, where he was a filmmaker for years before moving back to the States. His vision of what was possible is obviously grounded in reality he'd experienced elsewhere. His manifesto is the language of a richly layered realist. The kind of man who knew he had to make a film that was: "ENTERTAINMENT-WISE, A MOTHER FUCKER. (I had no illusion about the attention level of people brain-washed to triviality.) The film simply couldn't be a didactic discourse which would end up playing (if I could find a distributor) to an empty theater except for ten or twenty aware brothers who would pat me on the back and say it tells it like it is."

Baadasssss! is a hugely entertaining film. But the book is where to go if you want the whole story, truly told like it is.

Sweet Sweetback'S Baadasssss Song by Melvin Van Peebles. Thunder's Mouth, pb, 216pp, $19.50