TRANSCRIPT A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH MELVIN AND MARIO VAN PEEBLES Legendary maverick Melvin Van Peebles is a novelist, composer, and filmmaker who has also worked in television, popular music, and theater. After spending the 1960s in Paris, he returned to the United States and made the groundbreaking 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song . The stunning box-office success of this subversive and sexy film paved the way for filmmakers such as Mario Van Peebles, who directed New Jack City and Panther . Mario paid tribute to his father with his 2003 movie Baadasssss ; in this lively discussion, Van Peebles père et fils share a lifetime of experience and a playful father-son rivalry. A Pinewood Dialogue following a screening of course, when I made my first films, I went down to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song , Hollywood and they offered me a job, but as an moderated by Chief Curator David Schwartz elevator operator. I said, “No, I don’t want—I want (May 8, 2004): to really be in front of the camera or doing creative things.” And that was—they offered me a job as a SCHWARTZ : Please welcome Melvin and Mario Van dancer. Peebles. (Applause) Anyway, long story short, I went to Holland. Melvin, your first experience in Hollywood was Through another fluke that’s too long to go into doing comedies. Of course, you did Watermelon here, my short films that had been turned down in Man . I guess you were with Universal for a while; Hollywood were seen in France, and France invited you were signed on. There was a front-page story me. So I came to France, and I taught myself in Variety that “Universal Hired Its First Negro French. There’s a French law that a French writer Director” and that you were working on a television can get a director’s card, so I wrote some novels in project. So to just sort of go from that to making French and then asked for a director’s card. And so this film————from the mainstream comedies to making I got a director’s card. So after I got the director’s a film that was so radical, both in how it was made card—but my objective was always the same— and the subject matter and all that… after I got a director’s card, I won the San Francisco Film Festival as a French delegate. A lot of funny MELVIN VAN PEEBLES : Well, the actual truth was, it stories, but too long to go into, that were was my idea to do this all along. But I had to play surrounding that. But Hollywood was immensely my cards or do my pretend. In 1957, I started embarrassed by having the only black American making short films in San Francisco, because I was director a French director, and so it was at that tired of seeing what I was seeing in the theaters. It’s juncture that the first crack actually happened in just that simple. However... Hollywood. SCHWARTZ : The images of blacks, you mean, on I was given job offers. But if I had taken those job screen. offers, I felt that you would have the one Negro threat under wraps, and no one else would ever get MELVIN VAN PEEBLES : Yeah, the images of a shot. So I refused. And it’s at that juncture that minorities: “Yes, sir; no, sir,” and always hung with Gordon Parks and Ossie Davis were discovered. the Bible. They didn’t—they didn’t have any Then I said I would do something in Hollywood. I resonance with any of the people that I knew would do a film—if I could shoot it in Hollywood growing up in the hood in Chicago and elsewhere instead of on location, as the other two films had to around America. And so I wanted to change all be done—and that film was Watermelon Man . Then that. And I set myself the task of changing that. Of after I made Watermelon Man , I had a three-picture deal with Columbia for other films. And it was at if this theater were to catch on fire, our differences that juncture that spelling Baadasssss [ Sweet would be eclipsed by a bigger event: that we’ve got Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song ] takes over. You—I to get out of a theater that’s on fire. And if we get used my muscle, what little bit of it I had, and my out and we decide to put ourselves in harm’s way understanding of Hollywood, to make the film. to come back in and help other folks get out, then That’s—but it was not a departure at all. I had to do you know something about my character in a very the steps I had to do to get to where I wanted to go. short period of time, and I know something about you. SCHWARTZ : Yeah. And I just looked here a little bit more. I love the ending of the film, the success the And in that short period of time, that summer, I got movie has at the theater in Detroit. It goes to the to learn a lot about him, because he insisted that number-one film. At the time it was number one in his crew look like America. A third of the crew the country, it was actually only on less than twenty hadn’t seen a camera. It was like film school. So screens. It was such a different time than now, they had women and Hispanics and Asians and where every movie goes out on thousands of black folks and white folks together. As time went screens, it seems. on, it sort of—the dynamic switched, and I think I—I thought that I—I wanted to help. And when your MELVIN VAN PEEBLES : Yeah, it only opened—there dad starts getting death threats for what he were only two theaters in the United States that believes in, it eclipses all the other: “Well, you put would show it at the opening. But, you know... me in a sex scene,” or “You gonna cut my ’fro,” or “You gave away that bike.” (Laughter) SCHWARTZ : But it did very well. It broke all the records, at least the Detroit theater. SCHWARTZ : (Laughs) So you were working some things out with your dad at this time. MELVIN VAN PEEBLES : Oh, yeah. Exactly as Mario showed in Baadasssss! That is, the first showing, MARIO VAN PEEBLES : Yeah, well, it’s a trip. As I look two people came in, and two people walked out at the film now, on some levels it’s like therapy you and asked for their money back. A lady and her could eat popcorn to. mama. Second screening, there was nobody. And the third screening was what you saw, with lines SCHWARTZ : (Laughs) Actually, you should make around the block and everything. Just how it the film from Mario’s viewpoint now, somehow. happened. And it’s just like—every now and then, God gets it right. Not that often, but every now and MARIO VAN PEEBLES : Yeah, and you play me. then. (Laughter) (Laughs) SCHWARTZ : [To Mario] From your perspective at SCHWARTZ : Yeah. (Laughter) that time, as a thirteen-year-old, I guess you had a pretty bohemian upbringing, and you had some MELVIN VAN PEEBLES : Mmm…okay! (Laughter) idea of the politics of the film and what was going on. But what did it look like to you, in terms of how SCHWARTZ : Are most of the incidents in the film important this film was or what the film was trying to based on real life? One little thing that jumped out do? was the rope scene. I thought that was so interesting. MARIO VAN PEEBLES : This was my first time really spending this kind of time with my dad. My dad had MARIO VAN PEEBLES : Absolutely, man. That been in France climbing the cinematic mountain, as happened, down to the pistol in the prop box, the he said. And so this was my summer with Pop. secretary who knew Maurice White. Sometimes (Laughter) And he was working on this movie. And truth is stranger than fiction. And not only were the we—you saw what I thought; we didn’t always get incidents real, but we went back to some exact along. But what happened was, as time went on, I locations to film where we—the part where we saw what he was up against. And it’s almost as if... shot—where Melvin goes into that proverbial It’s almost as if you and I have our differences, but TRANSCRIPT: A PINEWOOD DIALOGUE WITH MELVIN AND MARIO VAN PEEBLES PAGE 2 looking glass and the whole world becomes black my dad was kind of like growing up with the Big and white. Fish , because you don’t what stories are live and which are kind of Memorex.. So he had told me that SCHWARTZ : That’s great. Yeah. he’d interviewed Malcolm when my dad was a journalist in France. He did . Turns out he did. So MARIO VAN PEEBLES : Thank you. That’s all shot on I’m sitting down with him, asking about Malcolm, the street that he lived on. The actual very same and it starts to hit me that Malcolm had said, “If street. We shot in the Crenshaw District. There’s a they don’t want you in their restaurant, build your little place that time forgot, right behind the Magic own restaurant.” And my dad had said, basically, “If Johnson Theater—if you know L.A., that’s L.A.’s they don’t want you in their movies, build your own hood.