You know the drill: can’t sleep, get up, start watchin’ TV. But one night I flipped past Turner Classic Movies and they had one of those great blaxploitation movies from the 1970s. Didn’t catch the title, but Fred Williamson was blastin’ pimps and the fuzz with a machine gun, beddin’ buck-naked babes and generally stickin’ it to The Man. Thanks, TCM, that sure fits my definition of “classic” and I wound up getting no sleep that night!
In the early 1970s, Hollywood determined there was an eager audience for movies made about black Americans. So they started crankin’ them out – most were cliché-filled, violent films that wildly played up the stereotypes of the day. You had yer revenge dramas, like Coffy, where a hot, sassy mama (Pam Grier) tracks down the dealers who got her sister hooked on the big H. And you had yer private dick dramas, like Shaft and Slaughter. You also had anti-heroes, like Ron O’Neal’s Superfly or Fred Williamson’s Black Caesar; they were the grandaddies of today’s gangstas. Of course each one had enough pimps, players, gunplay and get-nekkid women to keep the audiences coming back for more.
30 Days Out 
