Melvin Van Peebles, pioneering filmmaker, writer, and actor, dies at 89

Melvin Van Peebles, the pioneering African American auteur behind the 1970s films Watermelon Man and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, has died. He was 89.

Van Peebles died Tuesday night at his home in Manhattan. His family, The Criterion Collection and Janus Films announced his death in a statement.

“In an unparalleled career distinguished by relentless innovation, boundless curiosity and spiritual empathy, Melvin Van Peebles made an indelible mark on the international cultural landscape through his films, novels, plays and music,” the statement read. “His work continues to be essential and is being celebrated at the New York Film Festival this weekend with a 50th anniversary screening of his landmark film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song; a Criterion Collection box set, Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films, next week; and a revival of his play Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, slated for a return to Broadway next year.”

Melvin Van Peebles – The Godfather of Black Cinema

Considered by many to be the godfather of modern Black cinema, Van Peebles made a huge impact and was influential to a younger generation of African American filmmakers such as Spike Lee and John Singleton. The Chicago native also was a novelist, theater impresario, songwriter, musician and painter. And the father of actor-filmmaker, Mario Van Peebles.

Peebles first feature he wrote and directed, The Story of a Three-Day Pass, garnered him attention and put him on the radar at Columbia Pictures. The studio selected him to direct Watermelon Man (1970), a racial satire that starred Godfrey Cambridge as Jeff Gerber, a bigoted white insurance salesman who goes to the bathroom in his suburban home in the middle of the night and discovers he’s Black. Peebles achieved a major feat as very few African Americans were directing in Hollywood at the time.

Due to the success of Watermelon Man, Columbia offered Van Peebles a three-picture deal but wanted no part of his next project, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). With the help of Bill Cosby, Peebles secured a $50,000 loan from the entertainment mogul and wrote, directed, produced, scored and edited the revolutionary film while starring as its anti-hero, a ladies man with superhero lovemaking abilities who battles the corrupt white establishment in Los Angeles.

Van Peebles made Sweetback in 19 days for a reported $500,000. It opened in only two venues, in Detroit and Atlanta, but strong word-of-mouth from working-class African Americans and a soundtrack of music performed by Earth, Wind & Fire, the picture raked in more than $10 million, making it the highest-grossing independent film in history at the time.

In a 1997 book about the movie, his son Mario notes in the introduction that his father “was forced to self-finance, constantly on the brink of ruin, his crew got arrested and jailed, death threats, and yet [at first] he refused to submit his film to the all-white MPAA ratings board for approval. The film then received an X rating. My dad, true to form, printed T-shirts that read, ‘Rated X … By an All-White Jury,’ and made it part of 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 Sweetback ushered in the blaxploitation era in Hollywood.

After Sweetback, Van Peebles took Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, his musical about Black urban life, to Broadway and received Tony nominations for best book and best original score in 1972. A year later, he received another book nomination for Don’t Play Us Cheap!, about a devil who attempts to break up a party in Harlem. The two musicals garnered nine Tony nominations in total.

Van Peebles went on to direct a 1973 film version of Don’t Play Us Cheap! as well as the action comedy Identity Crisis (1989), which starred his son. He helmed and appeared with Mario in Posse (1993), a Western about African American soldiers who mutiny against their racist white officer, and contributed a song, “Cruel Jim Crow,” to that movie.

Van Peebles had a writing credit on Greased Lightning (1977), starring Richard Pryor, and adapted his novel about the growth of the Black Panther Party into a 1995 movie, Panther, that was directed by his son.

In 2003, he was portrayed by his son in the movie Bad Asssss.

Melvin Peebles was born on Aug. 21, 1932 in Chicago. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan in 1953 with a degree in literature, served in the U.S. Air Force and married a German woman. After his discharge, he worked as a portrait painter in Mexico, then moved to San Francisco, where he ran cable cars.

“Dad knew that 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 we see, thus we need to see ourselves being free. True liberation did not mean imitating the colonizer’s mentality. It meant appreciating the power, beauty and interconnectivity of all people.”