Alice Tepper
September, 1970
When Melvin Van Peebles occupied an executive suite at Columbia Pictures, he had a sign on his wall that warned: Please, for your own safety, don't try to understand me too fucking quickly. It's an apt admonition, for Van Peebles, 38, the first black to have had complete creative control over a $1,000,000 feature film made in Hollywood--the satiric Watermelon Man, starring Godfrey Cambridge in whiteface--has more angles than a geometry book. A Chicago product, Van Peebles migrated to San Francis...
