Hes Got It Bad or Baad for His Art
He's Got It Bad, or 'Baad,' for His Fine art
Inquire Melvin Van Peebles about his legacy, and you get a snort, a grimace, a moving ridge of the paw, a game-show error buzz and a finely punctuated "come up on."
"I didn't even know I had a legacy," he said betwixt rehearsals for his latest project, a musical-theater adaptation of his 1971 film "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song." "I do what I want to do."
But his reputation is formidable. As the author, managing director and star of "Sweetback," he is a godfather of black cinema. His phase musical "Ain't Supposed to Dice a Natural Death," also from 1971, brought unsparingly gritty portraits of black urban life to Broadway. He is a novelist, a composer, an entrepreneur, a veteran of both 1960s Paris and 1980s Wall Street. "He is a great example of an American creative person who has never stopped pushing himself or others," the cultural critic Nelson George said.
"Sweetback," which grossed more than than $10 meg, broke every rule in Hollywood, and its story of a black man who successfully resists white say-so shocked and exhilarated audiences. At present 77, Mr. Van Peebles is withal a gadfly and an outsider. In 2004 he revived "Ain't Supposed to Die" with the Classical Theater of Harlem, and in 2008 he made "Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha," a "Sweetback"-like picaresque that some critics have praised for its gumption, if nada else. Next month his "Sweetback" adaptation opens at the Sons d'Hiver Festival in and around Paris, with workshop performances on Feb. three and 4 at BRICstudio in Brooklyn.
In person Mr. Van Peebles is a throwback to the era of Afros and revolutionary rhetoric. His beard has gone ash white, but he still sports black leather vests and pants, imperial-shaded glasses and vintage high-tops. He is rarely without a soggy cigar — occasionally lighted — or a bellicose zinger, like: "If somebody messes with me, information technology's not a lecture they need. Information technology's a brick."
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"I want people to be empowered and likewise have a damn good time," he said in a recent interview at his compact flat in Midtown while proofreading "Sweetback" revisions and fielding calls from his volume publisher and DVD benefactor. His immature assistant waited adjacent door, in a space that Mr. Van Peebles has turned into a gallery of his ain whimsical artwork, like "Ex-Voto Monochrome (A Ghetto Female parent's Prayer)," a painting with angelic wings attached to the frame.
"The key to empowerment is no more complicated than what Jesse Jackson said: We are somebody," he continued, referring to "I am somebody," Mr. Jackson'southward dirge of self-respect, most famously led at the Wattstax concert in Los Angeles in 1972. "But the 'We are somebody' I would similar to be in the larger sense, not just the urban African-American just human being sapiens in full general: We are somebody."
All the same it'southward a long way from the early 1970s, when the Blackness Panthers endorsed "Sweetback," and The New York Times chosen Mr. Van Peebles "the first blackness man in show business to beat the white man at his own game." A black human is now president. And the blaxploitation genre that briefly flowered later on "Sweetback" ("Shaft," "Cleopatra Jones," etc.) rendered many of Mr. Van Peebles's innovations ripe for parody: a jive-talking outlaw hero, declarations of war against "the man."
All of this has only strengthened Mr. Van Peebles'southward resolve as artist and provocateur, and his new "Sweetback" adapts to the nowadays while standing as a defiant reminder of everything that should have changed but hasn't. Some of his alterations are surgical. He identified 17 minutes xx seconds of action that required rewriting, and worked with Burnt Sugar, an experimental jazz-funk band, to expand the original score.
At a reading of the script at the Apollo Theater last year Mr. Van Peebles found that at points "some of the younger people were slightly adrift." The problem wasn't the dated slang, he said, only situations of racial conflict and discrimination, which 1970s audiences had understood instinctively. So Mr. Van Peebles added scenes to give necessary context. For example, a scuffle between the police force and some militants — brief and obliquely shot in the film — is now a full street rally, with a speech communication about struggling in vain for a slice of "that sugariness old utopian American apple pie."
Much like his work Mr. Van Peebles's life is a study in the contrasts between ambitious fine art and the barbarous realities of race in America. The son of a Chicago tailor, he joined the R.O.T.C. and went to Ohio Wesleyan University, and after graduating in 1953 with a caste in literature, he entered the Air Force. "When I was in the Air Strength," he recalled, "if I walked into a eatery, in about 8 or nine minutes the Thou.P.'south would show upwards and elevate me out considering someone had called, saying that someone was impersonating an officer."
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His post-Air Force adventures took him eventually to Paris, where he wrote five novels and made a feature film, "The Story of a Three Day Pass" (1968), that got him noticed by Hollywood. He signed with Columbia and made "Watermelon Man" (1970), about a white bigot's metamorphosis into a blackness man, merely his tussles with the studio over artistic control led him to a lifetime of stubborn independence.
"Sweetback" is the story of a Los Angeles ladies' man who becomes a fugitive after attacking two crooked cops and escapes to Mexico, vowing to return and "collect some ante." Equally seen in "Baadasssss!," a lovingly detailed biopic by his son Mario Van Peebles, "Sweetback" was made on slightly less than a shoestring — its budget has been estimated at $500,000, but Mr. Van Peebles insists he has never disclosed its price — and to contemporary eyes it can look jagged and amateurish. Yet the editing is virtually psychedelic, with images fading in and out of focus and lines of dialogue echoed and stuttered in a way that seems to anticipate hip-hop.
"When you lot come across information technology now, you lot see that it's actually an advanced film," said Mr. George, whose books include "Greasepaint: Reflections on African Americans and the Movies." "It'southward very French New Wave: the mad jump cuts, the crazy double exposures. It's nothing like the more formulaic Hollywood films that came later. This aspired to be fine art."
The film'southward raw portrayal of sex has fatigued plenty of criticism over the years, only Mr. Van Peebles'due south stage adaptation does not tone things downwards (although actors do remain clothed). In rehearsal at BRICstudio, a broad, depression-ceilinged room in Fort Greene, Mr. Van Peebles painstakingly coached the actors on the pitch and enunciation of every profanity and squealed orgasm.
In the motion picture Sweetback has simply a scattering of lines, and his transformation from cool-eyed keen to violent rebel happens in an instant, without caption by Sweetback or anybody else.
"It is a wonderful Rorschach test of what people idea they saw," Mr. Van Peebles said of Sweetback'south silence. "Normally, classic American, we shut upward, and we know what the hero is going to do. Who knew that Sweetback was going to go berserk? He didn't fifty-fifty know it. He didn't finish and say, 'Well, one day America is going to be this,' or 'I hit the guy for that.' People had to internalize it and come up with a reason."
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Tracy Jack, the 28-year-quondam choreographer of the new accommodation, said that when she was a teenager in the S Bronx, her mother showed her "Sweetback," but its meaning eluded her. Now, in its slightly more explicated form, she said, it rings true as a cri de coeur virtually the black feel. "The law brutality, the whole group of people considered second-class citizens and not treated equally past the justice system: those bug are however the same," Ms. Jack said. "Information technology's notwithstanding relevant."
Mr. Van Peebles's uncompromising stance has made him a hero of guerrilla filmmaking, merely it has also cost him. After "Sweetback" he made a pic of his Broadway show "Don't Play Us Cheap" and had a writing credit in the 1977 Richard Pryor film "Greased Lightning," just he didn't direct another movie until "Identity Crisis" in 1989. He said Hollywood was non willing to accept him, and still isn't. He can't get broad distribution for Confessions of a Ex-Doofus-Itchy Footed Mutha," which has made the festival rounds.
"Hollywood doesn't desire you lot to exist a Melvin Van Peebles," or anyone "who does information technology on their own terms," said Samuel Pollard, a veteran film editor and a professor at New York Academy.
But Hollywood is also interested in quality films that appeal to a big market, and Mr. Van Peebles'southward current work is oftentimes but as rough equally "Sweetback." A sympathetic critic at The Los Angeles Times said "Confessions" "badly needs tightening." Not all reviewers take been so kind.
Seated in his apartment, where the closets are filled with canisters of his movies, the shelves sag with the chief tapes of his albums and a tiny office is crammed with awards, Mr. Van Peebles was quite clear in saying that as long every bit he was able to continue creating, commercial or critical success did non matter. Having complete ownership of his works means a sufficient income, he said, and his mind is always reeling with new projects anyway, similar an autobiography that he has never gotten around to completing.
Which brings the subject area back to the question of legacy.
He thought almost it for a moment. "That's a very colored word," he said.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/theater/24vanpeebles.html
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