No one could ignore the success of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, certainly not MGM, which was eager to capitalize on alt-art cinema when it could—leading to such unusual collaborations as a three-picture deal with Michelangelo Antonioni. It was easy enough to turn Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft into “the black private dick who’s a sex machine to all the chicks.” And while Shaft may have turned revolutionary “baadasssss” cinema into blaxploitation, it also looked ahead to some of the great innovations and reestimations of genre cinema in the seventies: Tidyman wrote screenplays for The French Connection and High Plains Drifter and Isaac Hayes won an Oscar for his score. Along the way director Gordon Parks not only makes a cameo, but strategically places copies of Essence magazine in the film (Parks had co-founded it).