While Melvin Van Peebles is best known as a filmmaker—and for the legendary 1971 picture Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song—movies
are just a small part of his professional and creative life. He's also
been a trailblazing musician, playwright, novelist (having written five
books in French, no less), Air Force pilot, Wall Street trader and
more—all of which is recounted in the film How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It). (Read the film's synopsis. )
If there's one thing that unites Melvin's many and diverse pursuits,
however, it's a burning desire to level the playing field. His ethos is
best described in a statement from Melvin Van Peebles' Classified X,
a documentary that examined the representation of African-Americans in
American cinema. "The very first thing we must do is reconquer our own
minds. The biggest obstacle to the Black revolution in America is our
conditional susceptibility to the white man's program. In short, the
fact is that the white man has colonized our minds. We've been violated,
confused and drained by this colonization and from this brutal,
calculated genocide. The most effective and vicious racism has grown,
and it is with this starting point in mind and the intention to reverse
the process that I went into cinema in the first fucking place."