Van Peebles acted, wrote, produced, directed, and
created the musical score for the film, which even-
tually had a box office return of $10 million.
When Van Peebles returned to writing, the re-
sponses to his work were still mixed. His musical
play Ain’t Suppose to Die a Natural Death (1971)
examined the interaction among black Harlem
dwellers caught within the oppressive limita-
tions of their lives. One critic concluded, “With a
combination of music, dialogue, dance, beautiful
acting.... Van Peebles’ characters come alive and
make us deal with them on their own terms” (Riley
and Harte, 447). In a more abrasive vein, another
critic stated, “the whole thing is rather like a splen-
did mansion built on sand.... The most important
elements of drama are totally absent.... [T]hese
characters are far from tragic. They are pathetic
clowns... [The] whole show was overloaded with
filth” (Riley and Harte, 447).
Undaunted by his hostile critics, Van Peebles
went on to write another musical play, Don’t Play
Us Cheap (1972), which fared no better in its re-
ception than its predecessor had. A musical com-
edy, the play was “a fantasy wherein two demons
(a cockroach and a rat) assume human form and
attempt to wreck the festivities” of a Harlem party
(Woll, 54). In 1973 he made a movie version of
the play bearing the same title, but the film never
found an audience or box office success. Three
years later, he moved to the small screen, writing
Just an Old Sweet Song (1976), a teleplay for the
CBS network.
Into the next decade, Van Peebles worked in
theater as a director, including the off-Broadway
productions, No Commercial Value (1981), Body
Bags (1981), Waltz of the Stork (1982), and Cham-
peeen! (1983). That same year, he also combined
his acting and writing for a television miniseries
for NBC, Sophisticated Gents—adapted from The
Junior Bachelor Society by JOHN A. WILLIAMS. In
1989 he directed the film Identity Crisis, based on
the script by his son Mario, who also portrayed
the film’s dual protagonists. The movie focuses
on a gay French fashion designer who, under a
spell, moves in and out of the body of a black rap
performer.
Van Peebles worked again with his son on two
projects that the latter directed. First, the elder
Van Peebles acted in a small role in the film Posse
(1993), a story about black soldiers of the Span-
ish-American War who made their way west into
the American frontier. Melvin Van Peebles served
as a screenwriter on the second project, Panther
(1995), based on his novel of the same title about
the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party.
Throughout his decades of work as a film-
maker, Van Peebles continued to write in various
genres. His novel A Bear for the FBI (1968) was a
study of middle-class black life; eight years later,
he completed the novel The True American: A Folk
Fable, which followed a black prisoner who died
and went to hell, where blacks were privileged
while whites, the majority, were not. In 1977 he
was a co-screenwriter on the film Greased Light-
ning, a vehicle for comedian Richard Pryor. Two
additional nonfiction books followed in the next
two decades: Bold Money: A New Way to Play the
Options Market (1987) and No Identity Crisis: A
Father and Son’s Own Story of Working Together
(1990), the latter written with Mario.
Melvin Van Peebles has proved himself a cre-
ative survivor, expressing himself on his own
terms as a fiction writer, playwright, music com-
poser, and film and stage director. For most, he
will forever be connected to his 1971 film that, de-
spite the stormy debates surrounding it, ushered
in a new wave of black urban action films that
provided more primary roles for blacks in Holly-
wood productions. Film critic Ed Guerrero wrote
that “Melvin Van Peebles... demonstrated... that
there is a critical mass of black people eager to see
heroic images of themselves rendered from a black
point of view and that through a series of hustles,
maneuvers, and creative financing, independent
money can be raised to make such films” (146).
Van Peebles was elected to the Black Filmmakers
Hall of Fame in 1976.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies,
and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films. New York: Continuum, 1990.520 Van Peebles, Melvin