Every industry needs a trailblazer - a shining light to show others a career they might otherwise have discounted is possible.
That is what Melvin van Peebles was to future generations of African American filmmakers and actors.
Born in Chicago in 1932, the actor, director, playwright, novelist and composer was an inspiration to directors like Spike Lee, Ava Du Vernay and Barry Jenkins.
He also understood the potency of the moving image.
Born Melvin Peebles, his father was a tailor.
A literature graduate from Ohio Wesleyan University, he joined the US Air Force where he served for over three years.
After living for a period in Holland, he added "Van" to his surname.
Initially employed as a cable car gripman in San Francisco, he drifted towards filmmaking on the recommendation of a customer.
Van Peebles made his first short film in 1957 called 'Pickup Men for Herrick' and honed his skills on other short films.
He would later laugh off his naivete, claiming he thought the 11 minute films were features.
However as he dabbled more in directing, Van Peebles realised he could actually make low budget features.
Determined to make his mark, he brought his short films to Hollywood but struggled to find anyone who would bankroll a feature.
He almost gave up on his dream, thinking of uprooting his family instead to the Netherlands while he studied astronomy.
Van Peebles, however, met the avant garde cineaste Amos Vogel in New York, who founded Cinema 16 and agreed to screen his short films in the spring of 1960.
Vogel also championed Van Peebles while visiting Paris, screening them for the Cinematheque Francaise.
Now living in Holland, Van Peebles' marriage to Maria Marx dissolved.
The couple had wed in the 1950s and he had fathered a son Mario, who would become an actor and director too.
Their other children included a son, Max and a daughter Marguerite.
Melvin had lived with her in Mexico while painting and it was there where Mario was born.
Despite suffering the setback of watching his family return to the United States, Van Peebles had a lucky break with an invite to Paris on the back of his films.
With the encouragement of the Cinematheque Francaise, he directed a short film 'Les Cinq Cents Balles (500 Francs)' and also worked as a writer, doing some investigative reporting for the France Observateur between 1963-64.
After he wrote a profile piece on Chester Himes, the American crime novelist hired him on the anti-authoritarian satirical magazine 'Hari-Kiri' where he published a regular column and served on the editorial board.
Still living in Paris, Van Peebles was approached by Mad Magazine to work on their French edition but was their editor in chief for only five issues.
Now fluent in French, he nevertheless began to write plays in the language as well as dabbling in an early precursor of rap - speaking lyrics over music on a debut album called 'Brer Soul'.
While living in France, Van Peebles also wrote four novels, a collection of short stories and a play 'La Fete a Harlem' which he also published as a novel.
Even after 'La Fete a Harlem' was performed in Liege in Belgium, Van Peebles did not give up his dream of being a filmmaker.
in 1968, he made his first feature film, 'The Story of a Three-Day Pass (La Permission)' with Harry Baird and Miriam Berger, which was based on a novel and told the story of an African American soldier demoted for getting involved with a white girl in France.
After it captured a prize at the San Francisco Film Festival, the feature came to the attention of Hollywood producers who assumed it was the work of a French auteur.
Van Peebles was subsequently hired to make the groundbreaking racial satire 'Watermelon Man' - a Kafkaesque comedy with Godfrey Williams, Estelle Parsons and Howard Caine about a white insurance man who wakes up one morning to discover he has turned into an African American.
The film was a commercial success in 1970 and Columbia Pictures offered Van Peebles a three picture deal.
Van Peebles was due to direct a concert film of the Powder Ridge Rock Festival in Connecticut whose line-up included Eric Burdon, Sly and the Family Stone, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Joe Cocker, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Jethro Till, Janis Joplin and Chuck Berry.
However a lawsuit scuppered plans for the festival and Van Peebles' 'Woodstock' style documentary - even though 30,000 people did flock to the area and were entertained by some acts.
Van Peebles, however, turned his attention to his next movie 'Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song' which he funded partly himself and with the help of the comedian Bill Cosby who he had worked a year before on a TV show.
No studio would finance the film and by raising his own funds, he asserted complete creative control over what was a blaxploitation movie about an African American man escaping corrupt white cops.
Van Peebles cast himself in the lead role of Sweet Badasssss, a man raised in a brothel with a legendary reputation for his sexual prowess who police try to frame for a murder.
Critics were stirred by its overtly political tone, its vitality and humour, while the Black Panther movement saw it as the first truly revolutionary African American film.
Only two cinemas in Detroit and Atlanta would initially show the film but its success in both cities led to it generating box office of $15 million.
Considering its impact on future generations of African American filmmakers, Spike Lee would later declare: " 'Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song' gave us all the answers we needed.
"This was an example of how to make a film (a real movie), distribute it yourself and, most important, get paid.
"Without 'Sweetback,' who knows if there could have been a 'She's Gotta Have It,' 'Hollywood Shuffle' or a 'House Party'?"
His son Mario would later play Melvin in the well received 2003 indie movie 'BADASSSS!' about the making of the film.
Melvin would also reprise the role in a cameo in Jonathan Kesselman's 2003 comedy 'The Hebrew Hammer' with Adam Goldberg, Judy Greer, Peter Coyote and Mario but the film flopped with audiences and critics.
'Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song' would also be turned into a musical in 2008.
Van Peebles would follow it up in 1972 with 'Don't Play Us Cheap' - an adaptation of his Broadway musical about bats taking human form and crashing a party in Harlem.
It would be 17 years, however, before he directed another film.
In 1975, his novel 'Just An Old Sweet Song' was turned into a TV movie with Cicely Tyson and Robert Hooks.
He also contributed to the screenplay for Michael Schultz's NASCAR movie 'Greased Lightning' with Richard Pryor, Beau Bridges and Pam Grier.
For most of the 1980s, Van Peebles worked as an options trader on the American Stock Exchange while continuing to work mostly in theatre.
In 1987, another maverick filmmaker Robert Altman directed him in a cameo role as Wino Bob in the underwhelming teen comedy 'O.C. and Stiggs' with Daniel H Jenkins, Jane Curtin and Dennis Hopper.
He popped up in Joseph Sargent's dreadful sequel 'Jaws: The Revenge' as well, which Mario had a substantial role in and also starred Lorraine Gary and Michael Caine.
He joined his son on the shortlived NBC crime drama 'Sonny Spoon,' playing the bar owning father of Mario's private eye.
While the show ran for two seasons, it struggled to make much of an impression.
Working from a script by his son, Van Peebles cast Mario in the lead of the 1989 comedy 'Identity Crisis' about a rapper possessed by the soul of a dead French fashion designer.
Also starring Richard Fancy and Ilan Mitchell-Smith, the movie was screened at the Cannes Film Festival but ended up going straight to video after Van Peebles was unable to secure a theatrical release.
Reginald Hudlin gave him a cameo as an editor in the 1992 hit comedy 'Boomerang' with Eddie Murphy, Halle Berry, Robin Givens, Martin Lawrence, Eartha Kitt, Grace Jones and Chris Rock.
Mario directed and starred alongside him in the 1993 Western 'Posse' with Stephen Baldwin, Blair Underwood, Tone Loc and Billy Zane which was a minor box office hit despite unenthusiastic reviews.
In 1995, Melvin Van Peebles provided the screen adaptation of his own novel 'Panther' for Mario who was back in the director's chair.
Starring Kadeem Hardison, Courtney B Vance and Joe Don Baker, the film about the Black Panther Movement took a critical hammering and failed to match the success of Spike Lee's epic 'Malcolm X'.
There was a role too in Deran Saragian's Charlie Sheen action movie 'Terminal Velocity' with Nastassja Kinski and James Gandolfini which almost made its $50 million budget back despite poor reviews.
Tony Randel cast him in a poor American live-action version of a Japanese manga tale 'Fist of the North Star' alongside Gary Daniels, Costas Mandylor, Chris Penn, Isako Washio and Malcolm McDowell, which went straight to DVD.
The following year, Melvin directed a short film 'Vroom Vroom Vroom' - an erotic fantasy about a boy who saves an elderly woman with voodoo powers from being knocked down by a bus and is rewarded by being given a motorcycle which turns into a beautiful woman while riding it at night.
He co-directed with his son 'Gang in Blue' - a thriller with Mario, Josh Brolin, Stephen Lang and Cynda Williams about an African American police officer who discovers his colleagues are actually members of a white supremacist group.
The film again struggled to find an audience, languishing in the direct to video shelves.
In 1997, he directed an episode of the ABC science fiction anthology series 'The Outer Limits'.
He played Dick Hallorann in a 1997 ABC miniseries remake of Stephen King's 'The Shining' with Rebecca De Mornay, Steven Weber, Elliott Gould and Pat Hingle which attracted 19 million viewers and some decent reviews, despite suffering in comparison to Stanley Kubrick's iconic big screen version.
Van Peebles returned to France in 2000 to make 'Le Conte du Ventre Plein (Bellyful)' with Andrea Ferreol and Jacques Boudet about a conservative couple masquerading as liberals, who take in a poor black orphan but secretly work to undermine her among their townsfolk.
Set in 1960s France, it received mixed reviews.
There was a substantial role in Jerry Lamothe's little seen 2007 indie drama 'Blackout' about the Northeast Blackout that impacted New York four years earlier with Jeffrey Wright, Zoe Saldana and Michael B Jordan.
A year later, Van Peebles starred in and directed 'Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFootedMutha' which was an adaptation of a graphic novel and a. Broadway musical he created in 1982.
Playing a character from childhood to the age of 47, the film received mostly decent reviews after its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Mario directed him again in the 2010 blues guitarist drama 'Redemption Road' with Michael Clarke Duncan and Luke Perry which attracted mixed reviews and also in the 2012 high school comedy 'We the Party' with his grandson Mandela and Snoop Dogg.
In 2012, there was one more outing as a director for the short film 'Lilly Done The Zampoughi Every Time I Pulled Her Coattail'.
Essentially a video for a spoken word song about a death row inmate that he originally recorded on the 'Brer Soul' album, he released it via Facebook.
There was one more outing as an actor in 'Armed,' a 2018 action film directed by and starring Mario with a cast that also included William Fichtner and Dionne Warwick.
Dubbed the Godfather of African American Cinema, it came as little surprise to see Spike Lee, Ava Du Vernay and Barry Jenkins leading tributes to him on his passing in Manhattan in recent days.
Mario, however, knew and appreciated him best, summing up his place in US film history.
"Dad knew that black images matter," he remarked.
"If a picture is worth a thousand words, what was a movie worth?
"We want to be the success we see. Thus, we need to see ourselves being free.
"True liberation did not mean imitating the coloniser's mentality.
"It meant appreciating the power, beauty and interconnectivity of all people."
(Melvin Van Peebles passed away at the age of 89 on September 22, 2021)
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