No Identity Crisis: A Father and Son's Own Story of Working Together

by Melvin Van Peebles, Mario Van Peebles

A successful father-and-son team discuss their experiences collaborating on the film "Identity Crisis"

Paperback

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Melvin Van Peebles (born Melvin Peebles; August 21, 1932 – September 21, 2021) was an American actor, filmmaker, writer, and composer. He worked as an active filmmaker into the 2000s. His feature film debut, The Story of a Three-Day Pass (1967), was based on his own French-language novel La Permission and was shot in France, as it was difficult for a black American director to get work at the time. The film won an award at the San Francisco International Film Festival which gained him the interest of Hollywood studios, leading to his American feature debut Watermelon Man, in 1970. Eschewing further overtures from Hollywood, he used the successes he had so far to bankroll his work as an independent filmmaker.

In 1971, he released his best-known work, creating and starring in the film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, considered one of the earliest and best-regarded examples of the blaxploitation genre. He followed this up with the musical, Don't Play Us Cheap, based on his own stage play, and continued to make films, write novels and stage plays in English and in French through the next several decades; his final films include the French-language film Le Conte du ventre plein (2000) and the absurdist film Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha (2008). His son, filmmaker and actor Mario Van Peebles, appeared in several of his works and portrayed him in the 2003 biographical film Baadasssss!.

Reviews

[Brandon Will]

A fascinating oral history from much of the production team chronicling how hard it is to make even terrible art. I don't say this to diminish father and son Van Peebles, each admirable trailblazers--all great artists have a dud or two. The movie that's production's minutiae is shared here is just on every level, from writing to acting to post production, just not even okay.

And that's okay. Mario would go on to make great things, and Melvin had nothing to prove. Everything about their effort is admirable. In some ways, even more so--white dudes have been making thousands of shitty movies, easily, since film became a thing. Artists need room to fail. Because even making a thing is a success. They had to fight to make this terrible movie. Poured their hearts and own money and sweat into it.

This book tells so much about the time and the place (Indie filmmaking in the late eighties) . The Van Peebles were always finger on the pulse in some ways, and ahead of their time on others. Mario writes a lot of great forward-thinking stuff about the need for minorities on every level of film and TV production, that now, three decades later, is a big cultural discussion. Then on the other hand, there's a lot of that stuff you have to chalk up to "it was a different time"--like, a lot of gay jokes. In the book, and the movie itself. But then, one of the crew members featured in the oral history, one of Melvin's best buds, is visibly and wonderfully queer and it's like hell yeah. So it's that mix, like MVP himself. Kind of wildly offensive at times, and then in the next breath thinking far beyond the constraints of that time.