Melvin Van Peebles

Film producer

• Born: August 21, 1932
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: September 22, 2021
• Place of death: New York City, New York

An artist in diverse media, Melvin Van Peebles has pushed the boundaries of art in film, music, and theater, earning many honors and awards. Although he is best known for his contributions to cinema, his career extends beyond film to everything from music to finance and more.

Areas of achievement: Film: acting; Film: direction

Early Life

Melvin Van Peebles was born in Chicago, Illinois, on August 21, 1932, and grew up on the South Side in an area first settled by people who escaped slavery. His father was a tailor. As a child, his interest in film began with triple-features at a theater the locals called “National Rat Alley.” At age twelve, Van Peebles became aware of the power of imagery when he realized the African Americans depicted on screen filled him with shame. The characters were unlike any of the individuals he knew in a neighborhood of self-sufficient African Americans who, despite the pressures of discriminatory housing restrictions, were interested in building lives.

The first in his family to go to college, Van Peebles joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at Ohio Wesleyan University. At age twenty-one, he graduated with a degree in literature as an officer in the U.S. Air Force.

Life’s Work

Van Peebles served well beyond his eighteen-month commitment as a celestial and radar navigator and bombardier, during which time he married a White woman whose father had taught at Harvard. They had three children: Megan, Max, and Mario. After his discharge, he was excluded from jobs in his field because the airlines barred African Americans from the cockpit. After a brief stint in Mexico painting portraits, Van Peebles moved to San Francisco, California, where he found work driving cable cars. He also altered his name, giving it gravitas by adding “Van” to Peebles.

Van Peebles published his first book, The Big Heart (1957), a mix of his personal experiences and cable car photographs by Ruth Bernhard. He taught himself filmmaking after a passenger commented that his book was like a film. He made three short films and took them to Hollywood, hoping for a director’s assignment, without success. In 1959, he took a boat to the Netherlands to enter graduate school in astronomy.

Soon, Van Peebles began working with Dutch theater before receiving an invitation to screen his films at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, France. Auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard frequented screenings at this noted film archive. Van Peebles stayed to make films but lacked the proper documentation to work in France. He became a street entertainer and spent nights in jail for performing without a license. He discovered that writers were given temporary residence, so he became a journalist for L’Observateur. The Harlem Renaissance by now had relocated to Paris, and Van Peebles became acquainted with a sizable community of African American writers and artists; at one point, he interviewed novelist Chester Himes.

Van Peebles published five novels in French. One, La Permission (1967; The Story of a Three-Day Pass), won him admission to the French Cinema Center as a director, with a grant to adapt it as a film. In 1967, it was entered as a French film in the San Francisco International Film Festival and won the Craft of Cinema Award, drawing the attention of Hollywood moguls who had no idea that Van Peebles was an African American.

Van Peebles found himself in Hollywood at last. African American directors had never worked there, and it had been years since the southern Black cinema of directors such as Oscar Micheaux had lost venues for their work. He made Watermelon Man (1970) for Columbia Pictures, then sought a project with which he could counter the paternalistic, demeaning depictions of African Americans in mainstream White cinema.

On his own and with few resources, Van Peebles left the studio system to almost single-handedly make the high-grossing, groundbreaking film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song in 1971. He pretended to be making a pornographic film in order to evade industry and union regulations. In the film, a coming-of-age story about Black rebellion against White oppression, the eponymous hero’s decision to protect a fellow African American man from police brutality launches him on a journey of self-discovery and newfound awareness of his potential. The film resists White structure in every mode, from film language to music and production. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song began a new era in film history in which Hollywood churned out blaxploitation films that distorted Van Peebles’s revolutionary message of individual empowerment.

Van Peebles went on to write and direct several more films over the subsequent decades, though none were as successful as Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. In addition to his work behind the camera he performed as an actor in other productions as well, mostly in cameos and minor parts in films such as Jaws: The Revenge (1987), the television miniseries version of The Shining (1997), Black, White, and Blues (2010), and Armed (2018). He also recorded several albums, combining funk and jazz with an early rap music style, wrote two plays that were staged on Broadway, and exhibited original visual art. He won awards in a range of media, including a Daytime Emmy for a CBS children’s special. Van Peebles also became the first African American trader on Wall Street and wrote a financial self-help book, Bold Money (1986), illustrating his wide range of interests and skills. He later published the joint father-son memoir No Identity Crisis: A Father and Son’s Own Story of Working Together (1990) and the novel Panther (1995).

The story of the making of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was depicted in the biopic Baadasssss! (2003), which starred Van Peebles's son Mario in the role of the filmmaker. His multifaceted life was explored in two documentaries in 2005, How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) and Unstoppable. In 2008 Van Peebles's film oeuvre was recognized with the Independent Filmmaker Project's Gotham Tribute Award, and in 2021 a retrospective of his film career, Melvin Van Peebles: Four Films, was released as a boxed set..

Significance

While America was in racial turmoil, Van Peebles made his stand against stereotypical Hollywood images of African Americans by making a film celebrating Black passion and power for Black audiences. He was the first to prove that African Americans could make up a significant segment of moviegoers, a revelation that sparked the development of the blaxploitation genre. Beyond directing, he also proved himself a truly diverse talent with achievements not only across the arts but in the business world as well. Van Peebles’s innovative creative works are full of the traits his life has demonstrated: resourcefulness and a drive for the power to define oneself.

Bibliography

Chaffin-Quiray, Garrett. “'You Bled My Mother, You Bled My Father, but You Won’t Bleed Me': The Underground Trio of Melvin Van Peebles.” Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking beyond the Hollywood Canon, edited by Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider. Wallflower, 2002.

Hartmann, Jonathan. “From Chicago to Watts by Way of Paris and Hollywood: Art-Film Influence on Melvin Van Peebles’ Early Features.” Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins, edited by Robert G. Weiner and John Cline. Scarecrow, 2010.

Jordan, Chris. "Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet 'Sweet' Song." USA Today, 20 Feb. 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/02/20/melvin-van-peebles-sweetback-show/5659255. Accessed 24 Mar. 2016.

Kellman, Andy. "Melvin Van Peebles." AllMusic, 2016, www.allmusic.com/artist/melvin-van-peebles-mn0000348593. Accessed 24 Mar. 2016.

Van Peebles, Melvin. “Lights, Camera, and the Black Role in Movies.” Ebony, vol. 61, no. 1, 2005, pp. 92–98.

Van Peebles, Melvin. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking Manifesto. Thunder’s Mouth, 2004.