Hello, my name's Justin the Clue, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And this week, we're talking about Melvin Van Peebles.

And for people who don't know who he is, who is he will?

He is one of the trailblazing African-American filmmakers.

The man who is sometimes credited with

having launched the black exploitation genre with his film Sweet Sweet Back's badass song.

Two A's five S's. And just a general renaissance man who's done all sorts of things besides

making movies. So here we are, two white guys. The whitest middle class guys you could get. Talking about

Melvin Van Peebles. What could go wrong? Listen, very closely with the pencil in hand

and right down the time codes when we appear extra offensive. Listen, just be patient with us.

Please. We're well-meaning. We're trying. All right. So... Why are we doing Melvin Van Peebles?

Well, Melvin Van Peebles is someone that's incredibly important for a number of reasons.

We'll get into his biography a little bit later.

But he has an fascinating way that he got into movies.

The fact that he worked for the studio and then he broke off from the studio and made a film completely independently.

And it was a movie for a black audience.

He was somebody who, for the last 10 years, really the one big black star that white people would have known in the movies was Sydney Poitier.

And Melvin Van Peebles created sort of a counter narrative to the Sydney Poitier films where

if in a movie like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Sydney Poitier could only appear presentable

to the white public by being super overqualified. He was going to marry a white woman, but he was a

Harvard doctor. So he was the best possible person he could be to counteract the fact that he was black.

...