Freakout City: Melvin Van Peebles, Still Slick, Visits BAM

Melvin Van Peebles roamed the BAM cafe, sharp in pinstripes and old-school spectator shoes, pointing here and there with his trademark unlit cigar. He asked a BAM staffer for a club soda, then sank onto a chair beneath the spectacular arched window.

"They might call me the godfather of modern black cinema," he said, "but the fact of the matter is I'm the godfather of The Blair Witch Project, too. Of independent film, period."

Van Peebles was busy checking sound for his band, Roadkill, which would later that evening?after the screening of his 1970 film Watermelon Man?back him up for his cabaret-style act. He peered at the stage through wire-rimmed glasses. "I think I'm imitating James Brown and Barry Manilow," he says of his performances, "but it's coming out Melvinesque."

Of course, Van Peebles?the "Van" is an affectation he's made stick?is best known for his 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, in which Van Peebles himself played the namesake stud who took on Whitey, in the process establishing for Hollywood the blueprint for blaxploitation. Made for around $500,000, Sweet Sweetback grossed more than $10 million. Van Peebles says he made it because he didn't think Hollywood films about black people reflected "where the lumpenproleteriat were at." Before Sweetback Van Peebles had made a foray into Hollywood, where he'd attracted attention for his earlier picture, The Story of a Three-Day Pass, made with grant money from the French government while living in that country.

"When I came back to the U.S. it was as the French delegate to the San Francisco Film Festival," Van Peebles explains. "No one knew I was an American, let alone black. So when I showed up it was freakout city."

After that first film won a prize at the festival, Van Peebles was "inundated with job offers." He accepted one from Columbia to make Watermelon Man, a mordant, absurdist comedy about a boorish white insurance salesman who one day wakes up black. It was not a sellout project by any means. Actor Godfrey Cambridge played the lead in whiteface, something Van Peebles had to fight for.

"They were telling me about this script and all these actors they had tried?Jack Lemmon, Arkin, people who were big at the time. None of them seemed right. After I read it, I said, I think you sent me the wrong script! This guy is only white for the first eight minutes. Why don't you get a black guy to play it in whiteface? They were like?" here Van Peebles widens his eyes and changes his voice "'?what, is that possible?'"

Still, he says, "It was important that I got someone who was cuddly, lovable, friendly, etc. That wasn't frightening to them. Godfrey was a very nice person, but he had one little quirk that I didn't know about. He wanted to be thin. Every time he lost weight he became an ogre. This chubby jovial guy was...changed." Histrionics would ensue if Cambridge's ginger ale wasn't served at exactly 55 degrees, something the actor would check with a little thermometer.

It was time for Van Peebles to take BAM's elevator downstairs and say a few words to the crowd gathered to watch Watermelon Man. Outside the theater, an attractive young woman approached.

"Have you met my new fiancee?" the gray-bearded director asked the assembled press, putting his arm around her.

"Yes, we're getting married," she said, laughing a little.

"Whoa?hold on. Who said anything about marriage?" Van Peebles clowned.

"Well, how about a long engagement," replied the woman.

"All right, now that I can live with."

Before the credits rolled, Van Peebles, hanging outside the door to the movie theater waiting for his cue, said he sees his own influence in the work of other contemporary black artists "100 percent."

"I made it possible for it to be whatever African-Americans or the whole black diaspora wanted to do," he says. At the same time, he's less than sanguine about the situation for black people in contemporary mainstream theater and film. "It's all shit. The same as it always is." His latest film is, once again, a French import. Set in the late 60s in France, Bellyful was shot entirely on digital video and premiered at Cannes last year. Van Peebles is his own man, which helps explain why he's made fewer movies than perhaps he might have. 1995's Panther, for example, which Van Peebles wrote and produced, took 15 years to make it onto the screen, at least partially because of Hollywood's skittishness about its subject matter. Despite what he says about making his art for himself, Van Peebles?who spent some time in the 80s as a successful options trader?is keenly aware of the demands of commerce.

"I'm your basic hooker," he says, laughing a little. "Wherever there's work is where I'll go."

After the screening of Watermelon Man, everybody went up to the cafe again and Van Peebles took the stage to perform with Roadkill. He turned in heartfelt, affecting versions of "The Wind Beneath My Wings" and Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is." Van Peebles' voice is hoarse and gravelly. In both his movements and his singing he suggests some sort of unholy cross between Tom Waits and a hipper Kermit the Frog. He claims that he doesn't have the faculty of "tailoring" what he does to different audiences.

"That just sort of eludes me," he says. "I do movies, I make music, I write books sort of like I cook. I put in what I like, because if no one else likes it I still have to eat it the rest of the week."