Video Gallery

Full-length trailer from How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It).

Roadkill featuring Brer Soul at Fez, NYC, August 1998: Melvin Van Peebles and his band perform a soulful version of the R.E.M. hit. Michael Stipe, eat your heart out!

Roadkill featuring Brer Soul at Fez, NYC, August 1998: Melvin Van Peebles and his band perform one of his classics. To listen to the original version from the Brer Soul album, click here. Also, check out this cool remix from British producers Carmine and Cornell.

Roadkill featuring Brer Soul at Fez, NYC, August 1998: Melvin Van Peebles and his band perform one of the numbers from his 1972 Broadway musical, Dont Play Us Cheap. To hear Joshie Jo Armstead's show-stopping version from the original cast soundtrack album, click here.

In 1986, Melvin Van Peebles was hired as an on-air guest commentator for Channel 5 news in NYC. What started as Wall Street analysis (Melvin was working as an options trader on the American Stock Exchange at the time, and had just written the best-selling book Bold Money) quickly evolved into pointed, off-the-wall diatribes against…well, whatever was on Melvin's mind! This is the full-length version of the segment from How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It) in which Melvin tackles "the housing solution." It's proven to be an audience favorite at film festivals!

One of the toughest decisions we had in the edit room was choosing which clip to use from Melvin's mid-'80s stint as a Channel 5 news commentator in NYC. This was a leading contender. In it, Melvin recalls the effects of the "harmful" movies he saw as a child—a topic he discusses in How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It). This segment planted the seeds for Melvin's own 1998 documentary, Melvin Van Peebles' Classified X, in which he examines the representation of African-Americans in American cinema.

Another outtake from How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It). In this episode of Melvin's on-air news commentaries, he recounts a late-night political discussion with a "lady of the evening."

As Spike Lee says in How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), "Melvin was a great self-promoter." He was as comfortable discussing race relations on the Charlie Rose Show as he was plugging a new musical on Midnight Blue, New York City's legendary late-night cable-access porn show. Here, he does just that in an interview with "anthropologist/ex-pornographer" Richard Milner (as he's identified in the documentary) followed by a tune from his Broadway show The Waltz of the Stork—with a special guest! This is the full-length version of the clip used in How to Eat Your Watermelon…. To skip the interview and go straight to the song, click here.