Mario Van Peebles, a noted filmmaker in his own right, remembers his father publicly for the first time since his death on Tuesday.
made working with the man hip. Andmade dealing drugs against your own people — poisoning your own people for the man — hip. What the Panthers posited was that once the system — the studios — got hold of the formula, they would take the revolutionary core out of the cake. They would leave the icing — a nice empowered Black character, cool clothes, great music — but slowly they would make him more cartoony, more goofy and take the revolutionary core out of it.
What a lot of people don’t know about Melvin was how kind he was. I remember going in my teens with him and my sister to a bar mitzvah that we were invited to. We didn’t really know what it was, but we went, and at the party the kids were standing around and seemed rather shy, so my sister and I — we looked like the Jacksons with our big fros — got on the dance floor and killed it. Everyone started clapping and watching us.
There’s an old saying that “if we don’t learn to live together as brothers and sisters, we are going to perish together as fools.” As soon as he could make his movies independently, my father got folks to work together behind the camera and in front of the camera in harmony — people who were hippies, from the porn industry, students, Black, Latino, gay, straight, you name it. And then, slowly, Hollywood began to follow suit.
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