"How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)" to Get Re-release on DVD

Melvin Van Peebles' extraordinary life story reveals an artist and a man whose groundbreaking impact on film, politics and pop culture remains as relevant as ever. On the 45thAnniversary of his landmark 1971 film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song—the most successful independent film of its time and a watershed in African-American cinema—Melvin Van Peebles’ life and career are celebrated in a DVD re-issue of filmmaker Joe Angio’s 2005 documentary How To Eat Your Watermelon In White Company (and Enjoy It).

Taking its title after a never-published essay Mr. Van Peebles once wrote, How To Eat Your Watermelon In White Company (and Enjoy It) presents a multi-talented and wildly prolific man whose personal and professional résumé defies categorization. Boasting a life and career as diverse and unexpected as the art he’s best known for creating, Melvin Van Peebles is a trailblazer of the tallest order who has at turns made his living as a filmmaker, a Tony-nominated playwright, an Air Force navigator, a novelist in two languages, a pioneer of the rap genre, a floor trader at the American Stock Exchange and more.

Van Peebles was never deterred by opportunity that failed to knock; he’d simply build his own door and get on with it. After Hollywood rejected his early filmmaking efforts, his self-produced Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (which he wrote, produced, financed, directed, scored and starred in) earned more than $10 million at the box office and indelibly changed independent cinema forever.