Before Spike Lee there was Melvin Van Peebles, one of the greatest black actors, filmmakers, playwrights, novelists and composers who talks about how difficult it was to get his movie Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song into commercial theaters in the early ’70s.
The movie was rated X by the MPAA which prevented his movie from being advertised in the commercial newspapers before it was rated. Here he explains the politics he had to encounter as a black filmmaker in the early 70s