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A hero of black cinema still going strong!
The MVP of Black Cinema
At 73, the original baadasssss shows no signs of slowing down
by Greg Tate
January 13th, 2006 6:45 PM
Melvin Van Peebles: "I wasn't going to be their one little genius nigger."
photo: Nicholas Burnham
See also:
New Doc Examines Van Peebles's Essential Cool
by Joshua Land
Melvin Van Peebles is still free.
One of the last free Black men on earth, in fact-an elite category of uppity,
accomplished, streetwise aristocats whose ranks include Cecil Taylor, Gordon
Parks, David Hammons, and not too many more. Distinguished gentlemen of color
unafraid of dirt beneath the fingernails who've made the world watch them do it
their way for longer than some of us have been alive. Men who've even, on
occasion, made the watchers pay handsomely for the privilege. Now 73, Van
Peebles is still doing his thing, signifying, storytelling, and combating white
supremacy on the sly.
At the end of 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, we're told this badass
nigger will be back to collect some debts. Turns out the badass in question
wasn't the film's brother with no name but its
writer-director-star-composer-producer, who defied odds and saw Sweetback
become the most profitable indie film of its day. He seems as busy and as in
our faces as ever, thanks to 2004's revival of his 1971 hit musical Ain't
Supposed to Die a Natural Death, and to Joe Angio's new How to Eat Your
Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), a riveting and uproarious
documentary on Van Peebles's life, playing at Film Forum this week as part of
its Van Peebles fest. There's also Bellyful, the French-language feature he
made a couple years ago about a pregnant young African woman's travails in
Paris. Most excitingly for Brer Soul's music fans is the promise of a
double-album collaboration with indie hiphop production wizard Madlib. He's
also shooting and starring in a new semi-biographical feature, Memories of an
Ex-Doofus Mother. With a two-man crew, he's prepping his Columbus Circle
apartment for a scene to be shot there within the coming days.
We can't call this a comeback. Van Peebles, like hiphop, doesn't know the
meaning of stop. He's never stopped working multiple hustles on multiple
fronts. Some boomers will recall that after Sweet back he had two
Tony-nominated Broadway musicals, that he took screenwriting credit for Richard
Pryor's Greased Lightning, that in the '90s he reinvented himself as the first
Black floor trader in history at the American Stock Exchange, and that he
adapted the script for his son Mario's Panther from his own novel. Though Van
Peebles has only made four features since Sweetback, he ain't been collecting
dust like some ol' godfather of blaxploitation bust on the mantel. In 2003 he
appeared as himself in a futuristic Isaac Julien video installation where he
has an anti-climactic encounter with a sexy temponaut and his own wax
effigy-but no one has yet invented a future he can't keep up with or hasn't
already seen.
Van Peebles's hustling credentials go back to age nine, when his father gave
him a toy wagon and some old clothes to sell instead of giving him an
allowance. He has always been an autodidact. In Paris, he decided to become a
French novelist in order to qualify for the filmmaking grant responsible for
his feature The Story of a Three-Day Pass. That film led to Van Peebles being
approached by Hollywood. "I kept turning them down because I wasn't going to be
their one little genius nigger that they used to beat on the heads of everybody
else," he says. "And what happened was that two guys who'd been out there for
years butting their heads against a wall got work-Ossie Davis got
Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Gordon Parks got to do The Learning Tree. I later
agreed to do Watermelon Man under the condition that I got to shoot it out in
Hollywood, where they were shooting everything else, and not on location. This
also got me into the directors union, which had never taken a brother before
then."
After Watermelon Man, Van Peebles shocked his handlers by deciding to go
independent, risking all his salary from the studio project to make Sweetback,
which remains the most gigantic fuck-you ever mounted against the Hollywood
business, on every level that matters-from financing, scoring, shooting, and
union dues to its exhibition and distribution. The fuck-da-police politics of
its rebellious hero are matched by every aspect of the means of production Van
Peebles seized by balls, fist, or gunpoint.
What the film also identified was the ravenous appetite that the 'hood had to
see its own manners and mores satirized and surrealized on de big screen.
Sweetback is a runaway-slave narrative whose adherence to the conventions of
screen pleasure are few and far between; its sex scenes may be the most
anti-erotic ever shot, though the one with the biker chick bears the
distinctive honor of depicting maybe the first occasion, real or imagined, in
which a Black man screws his way out of a redneck lynching. Far more delirious
passion gets portrayed in its various cop-killing sequences.
Today, in a time more peppered with Black billionaires than ever, the cinema
produced by Black America still seems as underdeveloped and dependent on
Hollywood welfare as in the '70s, and just as stocked with Hollywood clichés.
What Van Peebles realized in the making of Sweetback was how much our
liberation from Hollywood would depend on freebooting creative and economic
models derived from an oppositional relationship to Hollywood. Van Peebles
knows he's paid a price for defying the unions and for owning the rights to his
product, but there's nothing beat-down or bitter about him. Surveying his
spacious but humble working-artist digs, he says, "As you can see I have no
need to live ostentatiously."
He continues to be the indomitable, upbeat, energetic workaholic he's always
been. While the world makes plans to put him under glass or carve him in stone,
he's as enthusiastic about what's next as your average whippersnapper hustling
for a whiff of that first big paycheck. This is especially the case with the
new film, a project for which he's yet again done the unthinkable and recorded
his audio track first-sound, narration, music, dialogue, the whole
megillah-without an investor in sight. (A word to the wise for all you
luxurious hiphop moguls out there: Van Peebles is on record as saying he will
not decline your investment in Memories of an Ex-Doofus Mother.) "Fortunately
I'm in excellent condition because despite all the accolades it's still just me
plodding along," he says. "So the new film will get done when it gets done.
Every time I do something it's ahead of the curve so people still ask 'How you
gonna do that' because just like Sweetback they've never seen anybody do it
before."
Tracking Shots
New Doc Examines Van Peebles's Essential Cool
How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
by Joshua Land
January 17th, 2006 3:07 PM
Film Forum
How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
Directed by Joe Angio
January 20 through 26, Film Forum
Far from fading quietly into the lifetime-achievement mists, Melvin Van Peebles
has lately come to be recognized as the very essence of cool. Recent years have
seen him showered with festival awards, sampled on Quasimoto tracks, and evoked
by son Mario in the docudrama Baadasssss!-in each case lending far more in
hipness-by-association than he's received. While Baadasssss! focused on the
landmark production of 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Joe Angio's
new documentary How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy
It)-screening at Film Forum with Baadasssss! and four of the senior Van
Peebles's features-takes a broader view of a remarkable life.
Glossing over an air force tour in Korea and a stint running cable cars in San
Francisco, How to Eat follows Van Peebles to Europe, where he cranked out five
French-language novels, one of which became his feature debut, The Story of a
Three-Day Pass (1968), a fragmented interracial (and multilingual) romance shot
in nouvelle vague style. While the independently made Sweetback is justly
remembered as Van Peebles's definitive work, it's the 1970 Watermelon Man, a
studio comedy about a bigoted insurance salesman who wakes up one morning as a
black man, that epitomizes the Van Peebles strategy of outwardly embracing
stereotypes only to subvert them from within. The director recounts his
difficulties convincing the studio to accept a black lead actor (Godfrey
Cambridge, who spends the first 20 minutes in whiteface), and wryly recalls
"forgetting" to shoot the obligatory "happy" ending-in which the salesman turns
white again.
Happily, How to Eat ventures well beyond MVP's cinematic output, recapping his
credentials as a rap-music forefather and his groundbreaking Broadway
successes, as well as unlikelier pursuits like trading on Wall Street and
singing "Achy Breaky Heart" onstage. Largely content to bask in the great man's
glow, Angio provides generous clips and soundbites alongside fond
reminiscences, but the celebratory tone leaves room for darker reflections. As
skilled a self-promoter as he is, Van Peebles has always entwined the personal
with the political. But if the Huey Newton-endorsed Sweetback made it cool to
be a revolutionary, its lesser progeny did the same for pimps and dealers,
reasserting the dead-end "positive image" discourse that Sweetback's empowering
vision of black masculinity seemed to have blown away for good. How to Eat is
finally nostalgic, albeit less so for Van Peebles, who at 73 remains active on
multiple artistic fronts, than for a lost era when brash individualism and
radical politics seemed to go hand in hand.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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