The Blaxploitation films in the decade of the 1970’s are one of the greatest examples of Hollywood benefiting from the independent film industry. African American viewers were demanding to see black actors cast in more prominent and leading roles within films, and Hollywood responded by creating movies specifically for urban black audiences. These Blaxploitation films followed a specific outline that changed the traditional characteristics of the typical white male hero by, "substituting a highly sexualized black male hero who exercises power over white villains as an attempt to recode the Hollywood image of black men" (Lott, 226). The Hollywood film industry took the Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) by Melvin Van Peebles and utilized
