MICHAEL JAI WHITE doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who plays dress-up in his spare time. Mr. White, 6-foot-2 and 225 pounds, typically appears in films as a no-nonsense bruiser. His breakthrough role came as Mike Tyson in a 1995 HBO biopic, and in the years since he has brawled onscreen opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme, David Carradine and Steven Seagal. In between roles, he has earned black belts in seven martial arts.
But in early 2006, Mr. White donned an Afro wig, a bright blue leisure suit dotted with rhinestones and a fake mustache roughly the size and shape of a croissant. He gripped a revolver in one hand and nunchucks in the other, and took a scowling photograph that he described as “totally ridiculous.”
“I’d been listening to James Brown’s ‘Super Bad’ on repeat,” Mr. White, 40, said during a recent telephone interview from his Los Angeles home, “and the idea for this character popped into my head”: a ninja-slaying, lady-melting, blaxploitation-style hero he would eventually name Black Dynamite. Mr. White decided to build a movie around the character, and the portrait became his pitch.
“When Mike showed that picture to me, just off the visual alone, I said, ‘This is a movie we can get made,’ ” recalled the director Scott Sanders, who cast Mr. White as a class-obsessed thug in the 1998 crime comedy “Thick as Thieves” and who immediately signed to direct the new project.

Written by Mr. White, Mr. Sanders and the actor Byron Minns, “Black Dynamite” will arrive in theaters on Friday. Set in 1970s Los Angeles, the movie spoofs blaxploitation cinema at its least polished, nodding to ambitious films like “The Mack” and “Shaft” but hewing closer to daffier specimens like “Coffy” and “Willie Dynamite.” The plot is ludicrous (it involves a heroin epidemic among orphans and a government conspiracy to sell African-Americans poisonous malt liquor); fourth-wall-busting mistakes accumulate gleefully (a boom mike makes a cameo early on); and the acting comes in two flavors: hammy and hammier.
None of which, Mr. Sanders stressed, would be very much out of place in a film like “Dolemite” from 1975.
“We tried to have a light touch with the satire,” the director said. “It’s funnier that way, because at a certain point blaxploitation movies were almost parodies of themselves.”
The blaxploitation era was short but robust. It began in the early ’70s with “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and the blockbuster “Shaft.” Six years and many dozens of films later, the phenomenon had effectively run its course, but blaxploitation has never fully dropped out of the popular imagination, thanks to parodies like “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” by the Wayans brothers, caricatures like Tim Meadows’s purring ladies’ man on “Saturday Night Live” and rappers like Snoop Dogg, who makes reference to the style, slang and values of ’70s pimps.
“These days, you can go to Halloween shops in the suburbs and buy pimp costumes,” said Arsenio Hall, who shows up in “Black Dynamite” as a flamboyant procurer, remarking on how blaxploitation imagery has permeated popular culture. “I saw one with a little white kid on the package, wearing a red suit and a big hat.”
But Mr. Sanders explained that “Black Dynamite” sprang, in part, from a sense that recent homages ( “Undercover Brother” is another example) were incomplete. “There have been tangential riffs, that’s it; a whole bunch of details hadn’t been covered,” he said. “We wanted to make the most direct blaxploitation movie since they made blaxploitation movies.”
Blaxploitation’s legacy goes deeper than Afro-sporting ladies’ men and Cadillac-driving pimps. The genre threw open Hollywood’s gates for the first time to wide-scale African-American participation.
“All of a sudden you saw black people filling the screen with black images, black stories, black music, black style, black fashion,” said Manthia Diawara, the director of New York University’s Institute of Afro-American Affairs and the editor of “Black American Cinema.”
Not everyone saw this as cause for celebration. The term “black exploitation” was coined by the N.A.A.C.P., which argued that the films trafficked in negative stereotypes and offered black creativity a circumscribed freedom at best.
In “Black Dynamite,” though, it was by inhabiting a decades-old stereotype of the brawny, black fisticuffs artist that Mr. White was able to transcend his own present-day pigeonholing as, well, a brawny, black fisticuffs artist: his performance radiates a sly wit and charisma other roles haven’t allowed him to express so fully.
Born in 1969, Mr. White was raised in Brooklyn by his mother, a schoolteacher. He discovered the genre in early adolescence. “It was the first time we saw black alpha males in movies,” he said. “Before, black men were depicted as buffoons, servants. I remember watching blaxploitation and logging all the dead white people, like, ‘Wow!’ I’d never seen movies where a black guy killing white people was permitted.”
That transgressive streak, Mr. Diawara said, linked the genre to the late-’60s paroxysms of the civil rights movement. “Black power had been suppressed, either by the F.B.I. or just because black people wanted to integrate into mainstream American society,” he said. “The hero in blaxploitation movies carries the black-nationalist baggage, but sometimes he wants to get rid of it, too, to get his own pleasure in the system.”
“Black Dynamite” may be a lark, but the film pays winking tribute to the politics of the period. At one point, Black Dynamite reluctantly teams up with a group of quixotic black militants. “That whole concept in blaxploitation movies of five random black guys plotting to overthrow the government is funny to me,” Mr. Sanders said. “We could overthrow the government from my living room — if only we all knew karate!”
Mr. Sanders, 41, whose grandfather E. V. Wilkins was the first black mayor of Roper, N.C., and whose mother currently holds the same office, said that unlike Mr. White, his appreciation for blaxploitation has always been tongue-in-cheek. “Even when I was 12, I felt like I was watching something from the past that was funny,” he said.
Jon Steingart, who produced the film with his wife, Jenny, said a similar reaction would help “Black Dynamite” connect with younger audiences. “The movie reminds me of amateur filmmaking on YouTube, where people get off on seeing imperfections,” he said. “These days, with films like ‘Avatar’ and ‘Transformers,’ the technology’s so good it’s totally immersive. This is the other end of the pendulum, where you see all the seams.”
Shooting “Black Dynamite” in 22 days on a budget of $2.9 million, Mr. Sanders found imperfections easy to come by. “We made it like they made blaxploitation movies, shooting quick and coming up with solutions on the fly,” he said. “We weren’t faking being broke. We were really broke.” (The money for the film came from Mr. Steingart, his wife and several of their friends, including one of the founders of the clothing line Alice + Olivia.)
There was one unforeseen development the filmmakers particularly enjoyed: the election of Barack Obama as president. For Mr. Sanders and Mr. White, much of the appeal of the movie — which features a climactic kung-fu showdown at the White House between Black Dynamite and Richard Nixon — lies in the differences between the world it evokes and the world today.
“People in the ’70s who made these movies never imagined they would see a black president, that the culture would change that much,” Mr. Sanders said.
Still, some things never change, and at least one aspect of blaxploitation is as relevant in 2009 as ever: contempt for The Man. “There are always powerful evil dudes” for the rest of us to hate, Mr. Sanders said, adding: “These days, Wall Street functions really well as The Man. Bernie Madoff would make a great blaxploitation villain. Except it’s not just black people who want to beat him up.”
Da The New York Times, 11 Ottobre 2009