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Melvin Van Peebles, the pioneering African-American author behind 1970s films Watermelon man and Sweet Sweetback song Baadasssss, is dead. He was 89 years old.
Van Peebles, the father of actor-director Mario Van Peebles, died Tuesday night at his Manhattan home. His family, The Criterion Collection and Janus Films announced his death in a statement.
“During an unprecedented career characterized by relentless innovation, boundless curiosity and spiritual empathy, Melvin Van Peebles has left an indelible mark on the international cultural landscape through his films, novels, plays and his music, “the statement read. “His work continues to be essential and is celebrated at the New York Film Festival this weekend with a 50th anniversary screening of his flagship film. Sweet Sweetback song Baadasssss; a Criterion Collection box, Melvin Van Peebles: essential films, next week; and a cover of his play Ain’t supposed to die a natural death, slated for a return to Broadway next year.
Considered by many to be the godfather of modern black cinema, Van Peebles was an influential link with a younger generation of African-American filmmakers, including Spike Lee and John Singleton. The Chicago native was also a novelist, theater manager, songwriter, musician and painter.
Van Peebles was living in Paris when the first feature film he wrote and directed, The story of a three-day pass, grabbed attention and put it on the radar at Columbia Pictures. The studio chose him to realize Watermelon man (1970), a racial satire starring Godfrey Cambridge as Jeff Gerber, a fanatical white insurance salesman who goes to his suburban home bathroom in the middle of the night and finds he is black. Very few African Americans were directing in Hollywood at the time.
Building on the success of this film, Columbia offered Van Peebles a three-film contract but did not want to participate in his next project, Sweet Sweetback song Baadasssss (1971). Aided by a $ 50,000 loan from Bill Cosby, he wrote, directed, produced, branded and edited the renegade film while playing the role of its antihero, a female man with super loving abilities. -hero who fights the corrupt white establishment in Los Angeles.
Van Peebles does Soft in 19 days for a declared amount of $ 500,000. It only opened in two locations, in Atlanta and Detroit, but fueled by strong word-of-mouth from working-class African Americans and a soundtrack of music performed by Earth, Air and Fire, the film grossed over $ 10 million, making it the highest-grossing independent film in history at the time. (The opening credits indicate that the star of the film is “The Black Community”.)
In a 1997 book on the film, Mario notes in the introduction that his father “was forced to pay for himself, constantly on the verge of ruin, his team were arrested and jailed, death threats, and yet [at first] he refused to submit his film to the all-white MPAA rating committee for approval. The film then received an X rating. My father, true to his habit, printed t-shirts that read “Rated X… By an All-White Jury” and incorporated it into his marketing campaign. “
The New York Times called Van Peebles “the first black man in show business to beat the white man at his own game”, and Soft ushered in the era of blaxploitation in Hollywood. (Before his film, Tree was going to be about a White detective, he said.)
After Soft, Van Peebles brought Ain’t supposed to die a natural death, his musical about black city life, hit Broadway and received Tony nominations for Best Book and Best Original Music in 1972. A year later he received another book name for Don’t play us dear!, centered around a devil trying to break up a party in Harlem. The two musicals won nine Tony names in all.
Van Peebles also made a 1973 film version of Don’t play us dear! as well as action comedy Identity crisis (1989), which featured his son. He helmed and appeared with Mario in Detachment (1993), a western about African American soldiers revolting against their racist white officer, and contributed a song, “Cruel Jim Crow”, to this film.
Van Peebles had write credit on the stock car biopic Greased lightning (1977), starring Richard Pryor, and adapted his novel about the growth of the Black Panther Party into a 1995 film, Panther, which was run by his son.
In 2003, he was played by Mario in Baadasssss (2003), the homage of a son to his father. And two years later, Van Peebles was the subject of a documentary, How to eat your watermelon in White Company (and enjoy it).
Son of a tailor, Melvin Peebles was born August 21, 1932. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan in 1953 with a literature degree, served almost four years in the US Air Force, and married a German woman. After his release he worked as a portrait painter in Mexico, then moved to San Francisco, where he ran cable cars.
Van Peebles has also directed three short films, starting with Slice of Life. Three pickup men for Herrick (1957), which he hoped would serve as a calling card in the film industry. But when he couldn’t find a job as a director in Los Angeles, he, his wife and their children, Megan and Mario, moved to Europe. In Holland he studied with the Dutch National Theater, did theater and added “Van” to his last name.
After the dissolution of his marriage, Van Peebles traveled to Paris, where he wrote five novels and wrote and directed his first feature film, Permission, an adaptation of his novel about a love story between an African-American soldier and a Frenchwoman. It was acclaimed in Europe, was renamed The story of a three-day pass for American audiences and chosen as a French film at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1967.
He was well received by critics and festival-goers, but few knew the filmmaker behind Three-day pass was American and black.
In a wonderful 2014 interview, Van Peebles said he insisted the star of Watermelon man be a black actor (the character is only white in the first 20 minutes of the film). “Do you think a white can play black but a black cannot play white?” He asked Columbia executives.
It also altered the ending of Herman Raucher’s original screenplay, in which the fanatic wakes up from a nightmare and becomes a white man again. “Being black won’t be a bad dream,” he said. Van Peebles promised producers that he would film the original ending as well, giving them a choice but then “forgot” to do so.
A close-up of Cambridge’s butt is the first sign that informs the public that something crazy has happened to Jeff Gerber overnight.
Van Peebles also did the soundtrack for the film and appears in a cameo as a Sign Painter when Gerber opens his own business.
To open the owners – twin brothers – of the Detroit theater Soft, Van Peebles bet them a new costume, certain that his film would make more money than the film they had at the time. (He won.)
Ahead of the film’s April 2018 screening at the TCM Classic Film Festival, Van Peebles said, “I haven’t had so much fun with clothes in many years.”
Van Peebles has also starred in films such as Robert Atman’s OC and Stiggs (1985), Jaws: revenge (1987), Reginald Hudlin Boomerang (1992), Heroes of the last action (1993), The Hebrew hammer (2003) and Peeples (2013). On television, he starred with Mario in Stephen J. Cannell’s short-lived NBC comedy Sonny spoon and appeared on All my children, In the heat of the Night, Living Single and Girlfriends.
Van Peebles won a Daytime Emmy and a Humanitas Prize in 1987 for writing an episode of a CBS school holidays special, “The day they came to stop the books.” He was also the author of Bold money, a 1986 primer on how to trade stock options.
“Dad knew black images matter,” Mario said in a statement. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, what was a movie worth?” We want to be the success that we see, so we need to see ourselves free. True liberation did not mean emulating the mentality of the colonizer. It meant appreciating the power, beauty and interconnectivity of all. “
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
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