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| | Premiere Magazine: Power to Van Peebles |
 | | Before that, the 47-year-old Van Peebles, who majored in economics at Columbia, was a budget analyst for the city of New York during the Koch administration. |
| | Melvin’s signal achievement, though, is writing, producing, directing, and starring in the 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, the story of, as Melvin puts it, the transformation of a hustler into a revolutionary. |
| | It’s a warts-and-all portrait of a driven artist (much is made, for example, of Melvin’s decision to depict a young Sweetback’s initiation into manhood by using a then 13-year-old—and nude—Mario in the scene). |
| www.premiere.com /article.asp?section_id=6&article_id=1575 (244 words) |
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