film making? first of all, i grew up on that film. it meant i was, you know, learning about editing. we were learning about acting. you grow up in the melvin van peebles by any means necessary film making family, you learn it all. that s actually good because dad said, i don t play ball well. i m going to try to teach you how to own the team. when he did sweet back and i was there as a kid, i saw hollywood look at this and say, this is a movie about a black sex worker who becomes a revolutionary, who gets a consciousness. they didn t want that, but they wanted that revolutionary money. so they had a film about a white detective, and they just did it in black and called it shaft. after that came soup uperfly, bt did sort of make drug dealing look hip, and that was hurtful to us as a community, but it was too late. we were now seeing ourselves on-screen with afros and black
financing, on and on. what did he do for black cinema and independent film sng. as a kid, i grew up on that film. i was learning about editing, we were learning about acting. when you grow up with melvin van peeples filmmaking family, you learned it all. dad would say, i don t know much about baseball, but i want to see you on a team. so he did a movie and it was about a black sex worker who wanted consciousness. they didn t want that, but they wanted a revolutionary movie. they did it black and called it shaft and after that came super fly. it was a great film in many ways but it did sort of make drug dealing look hip, and that hurt