How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company(and Enjoy It) (2005)

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 the 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.

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