June 10-16, 2004

movies

Like Father, Like Son

by Sam Adams

Melvin Van Peebles is trying to answer questions. It's a sunny April day in the middle of the Philadelphia Film Festival, and Melvin and his son Mario are doing interviews on a sunny block of Chestnut Street. Dressed in shirts promoting Baadasssss!, which Mario doubles with a logoed knit cap, they're here to promote a movie. But first things come first. Melvin breaks off midresponse to redirect his son's attention from the salad he's rapidly consuming: "Look at that," he urges, and their heads swivel to follow a shapely woman's progress down the block.

As Baadasssss! demonstrates, the two haven't always seen eye to eye. Though they co-directed 1996's Gang in Blue, it wasn't until Mario played Malcolm X in Ali — whom his father had once interviewed as a journalist — that Mario started to look back on his dad's legacy. "I had made a movie about the Panthers, I was spending time with Ali, and all these roads were leading to Rome," he says. By "Rome," he means Melvin.

Inspired by his dad's "by-any-means-necessary filmmaking," Mario shot Baadasssss! in 18 days, one less than it took for the film it focuses on, his father's Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song. But Melvin points out that, with digital video, shooting days aren't what they used to be. The short schedule was a result of Mario's insistence on shooting the script he'd written and rejecting studio notes to make Melvin "more likable," or to "Barbershop-ize" the story with hip-hop humor.

If Melvin might not have been the best role model, he at least demonstrated to his son that it was possible to be a black filmmaker — hardly a gimme in the mid-1960s. "I didn't know what a film director was," Melvin recalls. "I just know I was tired of looking at the shit. I said, "Boy, I'm gonna make films.'" Used to seeing triple bills, Melvin didn't even know how long features were supposed to be: His first, Three Pickup Men for Herrick, came out at 11 minutes. While Melvin, not without justification, takes credit for everything from the birth of independent cinema to the idea of using music to market a film before its release, he says his deviations from the status quo were never calculated. "I make movies like I cook," he says. "I put in what I like. In case no one else likes it, I'm gonna have to eat it for the rest of the week."

It's easy to make blithe generalizations about the way digital video has democratized filmmaking, but Mario says, "What's missing now is what was missing before — the power to say what you want to say." And the hunger for anti-authoritarian heroes is as great now as it was then. Filming Baadasssss!, Mario was running down the street in his father's side-brimmed hat and vest when a man on a nearby stoop yelled out, "Hey! Sweetback's back!"