Melvin Van Peebles

Melvin Van Peebles has led a varied life, having traded stocks on the American Stock Exchange, published numerous novels, and directed, produced, composed, and starred in numerous American films and plays. He is an innovative and successful entrepreneur who has done much over the last forty years offering fresh, and sometimes controversial, images of African Americans. He is perhaps best know for his groundbreaking 1971 independent film, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.

The son of a black Chicago tailor, Van Peebles attended West Virginia State College, then earned a BA from Ohio Wesleyan. Van Peebles served three years in the Air Force as a navigator/bombardier. Out of uniform, Van Peebles pursued a painting career, made a handful of amateur films, and held down jobs as a postal worker and San Francisco cable-car grip. Refusing ever to allow grass to grow under his feet, he spent some time in Mexico, attended graduate school in Holland and picked up spare change (and a few overnight jail terms) as an unlicensed street entertainer in Paris.

Still a relatively young man, he remained in Paris to write five novels (all in English, because he never bothered to learn any French); one of these was La Permission, the story of a star-crossed interracial romance. On the strength of his book, Van Peebles became eligible for admission to the French Cinema Center as a director. Unexpectedly receiving a grant of $70,000, he converted La Permission into his first feature film, The Story of a Three-Day Pass.

Following his film, Van Peebles was courted by several Hollywood studios, who had no idea he was African American and assumed he was a French auteur. While few studios in 1968 were willing to take a chance on a black director, Columbia Pictures gave Van Peebles carte blanche to direct a satirical comedy-fantasy on the topic of black-white stereotyping, Watermelon Man. He kept the costs low on this project so that he could invest his salary into a privately financed labor of love, Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song. Crude and offensive by "establishment" standards, this tale of a black fugitive's one-man vendetta against Whitey proved to be an enormous hit with African American audiences. It also proved that Hollywood had itself a genuine "Renaissance man" in Van Peebles; he not only produced, directed, wrote and starred in Sweet Sweetback, but also edited and scored the film.

Having briefly satiated his filmmaking aspirations, Van Peebles turned to Broadway, writing and scoring the 1971 musical "Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death." His next theatrical project was 1972's "Don't Play Us Cheap," which won first prize at the Belgian Film Festival when a hastily produced movie version was offered in competition.

Since that time, Van Peebles developed a TV-movie pilot, Just an Old Sweet Song, and wrote and acted in a number of movie and TV projects, frequently in collaboration with his actor/director son Mario Van Peebles. As of this writing, Peebles' only movie directorial effort of the past two decades has been the hit-and-miss fantasy Identity Crisis.