How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)

Multi-talented and prolific, Melvin van Peebles defies categorization, boasting a life and career as diverse and unexpected as the art he’s best known for creating. A trailblazer of the tallest order who has at turns made his living as a filmmaker, a pilot, a novelist and a stockbroker, van Peebles was never deterred by opportunity that failed to knock he’d simply build his own door and get on with it. After Hollywood rejected his early filmmaking efforts, his self-produced 1971 feature film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, earned more than $10 million at the box office and indelibly changed independent cinema forever. A pioneer of rap music, a Tony-nominated playwright and a civil rights activist then and now, van Peebles’ remarkable life story is playfully and candidly chronicled, illuminating an artist and a man whose groundbreaking impact on art, politics and pop culture remains, forty-five years after the release of Sweet Sweetback, as relevant as ever.