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.