Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture

Road Trip to Nowhere

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Kenneth Turan and Patricia Williams Endowment Fund in American Film.

Road Trip to Nowhere

HOLLYWOOD ENCOUNTERS THE COUNTERCULTURE

Jon Lewis

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2022 by Jon Lewis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lewis, Jon, 1955– author.

Title: Road trip to nowhere : Hollywood encounters the counterculture / Jon Lewis.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021042867 (print) | LCCN 2021042868 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520343733 (hardback) | ISBN 9780520343740 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520975132 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture studios—California—Los Angeles—History—20th century. | Counterculture—California—Los Angeles. | Motion picture actors and actresses—California—Los Angeles.

Classification: LCC PN1993.5.U65 L49 2022 (print) | LCC PN1993.5.U65 (ebook) | DDC 384/.80979494—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042867

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042868

Manufactured in the United States of America

28  27  26  25  24  23  22

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For MARTHA, of course

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Road Trips to a New Hollywood: Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point

2 Christopher Jones Does Not Want to Be a Movie Star

3 Four Women in Hollywood: Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, Dolores Hart, and Barbara Loden

4 Charles Manson’s Hollywood

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Illustrations

1. (Left to right) Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Arthur Penn in Texas in 1967 filming Bonnie and Clyde.

2. Elaine (Katharine Ross) and Ben (Dustin Hoffman) worry about the future at the end of The Graduate.

3. (Left to right) Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night.

4. Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton (right) with his bodyguard in 1971.

5. John Wayne presents the Best Picture Oscar to the production team behind The Deer Hunter.

6. Quite by accident a fashion photographer (played by David Hemmings) captures on a roll of film what looks like a murder in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

7. Michelangelo Antonioni beside a poster for the film that launched his career, L’Avventura.

8. In Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper (right) and Peter Fonda comfortably embodied their characters.

9. Antonioni’s young lovers in love: Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette.

10. The Zabriskie Point love-in.

11. Mel Lyman, the east coast Charles Manson, on the cover of Rolling Stone.

12. Dennis Hopper gets his picture taken in Taos, New Mexico, in July 1975.

13. Mark (Mark Frechette) points a gun at a policeman in Zabriskie Point.

14. James Dean on the set filming East of Eden.

15. Christopher Jones, looking the part as the next James Dean, 1966.

16. The B-movie impresario, Samuel Z. Arkoff.

17. The movie star Christopher Jones in Wild in the Streets.

18. Christopher Jones and costar Yvette Mimieux filming 3 in the Attic.

19. Pia Degermark, Christopher Jones’s love interest in The Looking Glass War.

20. Christopher Jones as Major Doryan in Ryan’s Daughter.

21. Marlon Brando with Black Panther Captain Kenny Demmon.

22. Jean Seberg in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.

23. The camera loved Jean Seberg.

24. The offending photograph: Jane Fonda posed astride a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun in July 1972.

25. Jane Fonda with her husband, the director Roger Vadim.

26. Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels in Klute.

27. Left to right: Dolores Hart, Elvis Presley, and Lizabeth Scott on the set of Loving You.

28. Dolores Hart (right) as Merritt trying to console her friend Melanie (Yvette Mimieux) after Melanie’s rape in Where the Boys Are.

29. All that’s left of Barbara Loden’s performance in The Swimmer are some still photographs, including this one with the film’s star, Burt Lancaster.

30. Barbara Loden in Wanda.

31. The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson in 1977.

32. The Family posed in the gully where Charles Manson auditioned for Terry Melcher and Gregg Jakobson.

33. Music producer Terry Melcher with actress Candice Bergen at the Whiskey a Go Go in 1967.

34. The Spahn Movie Ranch, where Charles Manson and the Family resided in the summer of 1969.

35. Charles Manson in police custody (again).

36. Damon Herriman as Charles Manson in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

37. Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

38. Sharon Tate (foreground) with costars Patty Duke (left) and Barbara Parkins in a publicity photo for Valley of the Dolls.

39. Jim Morrison of the Doors.

Acknowledgments

The final draft of this book was written in lockdown. For most of the past twelve months it’s been just me, Tyrone (my cat), and Martha (my best and prettiest friend since July 1985—my, just as Elia Kazan once described Barbara Loden, roulette wheel that never stops turning). Silly as any sentence beginning with, If I had to be locked down . . . surely is, if I had to be locked down, I was lucky to have been locked down with the two of you.

I generally keep to a small circle of friends and they get, like it or not, routinely recruited into my book projects. The overlaps between the personal and the professional for me are persistent; such are the benefits of making a life out of watching and talking and writing about movies. Many of these friends are e-mail pen pals; people I see live and in-person all too seldom.

In no particular order: big thanks to Noel King (who sends me things to read, to think about, often anticipating what I need—like the DeLillo piece on Wanda for chapter 3), Mark Betz (who offered some, to him, obvious suggestions at an invited lecture at UCL that I would have missed without him), Lee Grieveson (with whom I email most every day; we mostly talk about football and politics, but sometimes also about work—about the work—I hope I am nearly as useful to his, work that is, as he is to mine), Murray Pomerance (who weighed in on Antonioni—I so enjoyed the excuse to make contact), and Jonathan Kirshner (with whom I coedited When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited for Cornell University Press in 2019, in which I rehearsed many of the ideas played out here).

An even smaller circle of friends assembled more officially and involved actually reading versions of the book: Tom Doherty, Dana Polan, and Eric Smoodin. They can expect to be recruited next time out as well, on or off the books. I am lucky to have such good friends, such brilliant friends. They know me well enough to say what I need to hear even if it isn’t always what I want to hear.

I have for over thirty years now enjoyed the support of my friends and colleagues at Oregon State University. I teach what I want to teach, write about what I want to write about. I get paid on time and I feel well respected; not sure what else I’d want or need. For this project, I received from the School of Writing, Literature, and Film some research funding, including a generous grant from the Smith Fund.

Here in Corvallis, another contingent: first, my old friend Tracy Daugherty. Joan Didion’s The White Album turns up often and meaningfully in this book, and Tracy’s to blame for that. Over lunch and drinks, David Turkel and I talked a lot about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. No doubt some of his ideas made their way into this book. And, finally, Kate Dawson, a smart and enterprising grad student, set loose in the archives early on in this project’s development; what she found for me offered fuel to the fire, so to speak.

I pitched this book (accompanied by a PowerPoint on my I-Pad) to the University of California Press editor Raina Polivka in a restaurant over a glass of wine and a civilized lunch. I felt like I was onto something that afternoon because I could tell she thought so too. This is the second book we’ve done together. She gets how I work and how I write—and she tells me what’s working and what isn’t. Big thanks as well to the rest of the crew at the University of California Press and at BookComp—Madison Wetzell, Teresa Iafolla, Katryce Lassle, Jon Dertien, and Gary Hamel—and to Nancy Valenti at the Everett Collection for her help with the production stills.

Introduction

Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture

It is the morning of August 9, 1969. A story begins to circulate about some murders at a house in Benedict Canyon—some people everyone knows. The news spreads quickly, but not always helpfully or accurately. There are conflicting accounts, most of them pinned on the notion that the more sinister aspects of counterculture Hollywood have come home to roost. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, the essayist Joan Didion wrote in 1979. "And I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised."¹

The so-called Manson murders would become counterculture Hollywood’s simultaneous nadir and climax. There was one life in the Hollywood movie colony before August 1969 and another afterward. It would be impossible in the following months and years to shake the crime’s impact, to act as if it were not somehow part of a larger story—a larger story told here, in this book.

Hollywood history is anecdotal and improvisational. (I am not apologizing; only explaining.) It is composed in large part of backstories—a malleable term encompassing production histories, star and celebrity biographies, backroom shenanigans (what industry players call the action, what the trades call deals). These stories take us behind the scenes into a world not so easy to fathom, a world unlike the world most of the rest of us live in. The players in play are larger than life. We need to keep that in mind.

In the rhetoric of Hollywood history, movie people are said to be caught up in events, as if drifting in the wind, as if waking from a dream. Lots of people venture to Hollywood to reinvent themselves—to get or be discovered, to become players. It happens for them or (more often) it doesn’t. And if it does (happen, that is), then they run the risk that somewhere, sometime along the way they too will get caught up in something—in another story they most likely didn’t see coming. How they react or behave while they’re caught up will be news. It will be deemed newsworthy. That is the price they pay for being larger than life, for occupying so much space in the focal point of American pop culture.

The movies—the ostensible product of Hollywood industry—are, in fact, only ever just part of the story. As objects or products they too can get caught up in things, especially when they seem to distill a given moment, when they seem to elaborate a cultural history. From the mid-sixties through the mid-seventies, the counterculture was happening all around Hollywood (and in it too), and plenty of Hollywood’s varied players dabbled or dove right in. But for the Hollywood establishment, the manifestations and crosscurrents of the counterculture proved tricky to develop or exploit. So many of its aspects were divisive and controversial, and thus problematic to promote and market.

The studios had a long-term commitment to their mass audience and by definition something counter to the dominant culture ran counter to their business plan. Today, the movies from the counterculture era that continue to matter were in their day aberrations, movies that got made despite industry policy, movies made elsewhere (overseas, in the B-industry, by independent contractors working on some half-baked deal with a studio)—movies nobody with money and clout at the time gave half a chance at success.

Between 1967 and 1976 (or thereabouts), Hollywood encountered the counterculture. A lucky few made it; they became counterculture celebrities and hung on long enough to make a name for themselves, long enough to exploit the perks of their celebrity. Others got left out, left behind, or more interestingly (for this book, anyway), walked away—as if the Hollywood they had dreamed of and somehow gained admittance into was not all it had been cracked up to be.

Oscar Night 1968: Encountering Hollywood’s First Encounters with the Counterculture

The story of the studio industry’s first significant encounter with the counterculture begins in 1964 with the screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman shopping around a script for a film about the Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.² Figuring no one in Hollywood would understand their French New Wave–inspired script; they try to interest the director François Truffaut. The three men meet, and then retire to a screening of the Joseph Lewis noir picture, Gun Crazy. The writers figure they’ve got a deal. But they don’t, as Truffaut reconsiders and decides instead to make Fahrenheit 451.

Elinor and Norton Wright, the producers of the kiddie TV show Captain Kangaroo, option the script. With the Wrights’ blessing, Benton and Newman contact Jean-Luc Godard, who loves the script and wants to start production immediately. The Wrights tell Godard they don’t have the money yet. They can’t start production without a distribution deal. Benton adds that they will need to wait for spring anyway, that the weather in Texas in winter is not suitable for production. Godard replies, Who cares about Texas. He tells Benton he can make the film anywhere, even Tokyo. Benton cringes. Someone calls for a weather report in Texas, which exasperates Godard: I’m talking about cinema and you’re talking about meteorology.

FIGURE 1. (Left to right) Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, and Arthur Penn on location in Texas in 1967 filming Bonnie and Clyde (Everett Collection).

When the Wrights decide not to renew the option, Warren Beatty steps in. He meets with Godard. It does not go well. He then meets with Jack Warner, who, because Beatty is Beatty—that is, a movie star—offers modest financing: $1.7 million. Beatty ponies up the rest. The production decamps to West Texas, far from the prying eyes of the studio.

Several months later Beatty returns to Los Angeles to screen the rough cut. Warner hates it and shouts at Beatty: What the fuck is this? Beatty replies, "It is an homage—to the classic 1930s Warner Bros. gangster films. Warner again: What the fuck is an homage?"

In August 1967, Bonnie and Clyde opens in a limited release—Warner sees to that. And the film receives poor reviews from the old guard critics. Bosley Crowther at the New York Times dismisses the callous and callow film as an embarrassing addition to an excess of violence on the screen.³ At Newsweek, Joseph Morgenstern describes the film as a squalid shoot-em-up for the moron trade.⁴ Then, at his wife (the actress) Piper Laurie’s insistence, Morgenstern gives Bonnie and Clyde a second chance, this time in a theater with a mostly young audience that absolutely loves the film. Morgenstern pens a retraction.⁵ The film’s fortunes begin to shift.

For the cover of their December 8, 1967, New Hollywood issue, Time magazine commissions a Robert Rauschenberg collage, which the artist assembles from production stills from Bonnie and Clyde. A few months later, on Oscar night 1968, the film is up for ten Academy Awards. (It wins two.)

In its initial run, Bonnie and Clyde grossed nearly twenty-five times its production budget. It is for Hollywood quite clearly a watershed. But no one at Warner Bros. or at any of the other studios seems to have the slightest idea how or why.

Jack Warner was well into his fifth decade in charge of the family business when Penn and Beatty’s film so took him by surprise. He had been running things ever since the studio first experimented with sound, way back when one of the lies executives liked to tell the press, studio talent, and themselves, was that they had the whole equation in their heads.⁶ That is: a feel for trends, fads, the zeitgeist—a firm grasp of the math (money out and money in). Wishful thinking.

Mike Nichols’s The Graduate received seven Oscar nominations in 1968. The film was for Hollywood a preliminary narrative exploration of the emerging youth counterculture disguised as a satire of postwar suburbia—an outpost populated in the film by an array of upper-middle-class pseudo-liberals and their offspring: the latter, depicted as a generation adrift, paralyzed by counterculture ennui. The romantic triangle at the heart of the narrative (Ben, Mrs. Robinson, and her daughter Elaine) anticipated the advent of a new regime of film industry censorship (itself an anticipation of social change, a response to the dawning Age of Aquarius). Ben’s transition into adulthood runs counter to his upper-middle-class suburban parents’ dreamy life and ambitious plans for him—plans epitomized and satirized by the notion that the secret to America’s future might be contained in a single, whispered word: plastics. Asked early on what’s troubling him, Ben tells his father: I’m worried about the future—I want it to be different. By the time we get to the church at the end of the film, we understand why.

Nichols was thirty-six when he made The Graduate—for the record, the same age as Anne Bancroft, the actress who played the icon of the affluent and amoral establishment in the film, Mrs. Robinson. (Bancroft was just six years older than Dustin Hoffman, who plays Ben—hardly old enough to be his mother. Just saying.) Nichols was not a baby boomer, and he was not and did not aspire to be a counterculture filmmaker. He was a former sketch comedian, for years partnering with Elaine May. He had recently enjoyed some success as a Broadway stage director with two (what were even then) old-fashioned comedies written by Neil Simon: Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965).

Nichols’s first big Hollywood break came as a result of canny networking; the movie industry was then and still is a relationship business. While working and living in New York, Nichols became friends with the movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. When Taylor and Burton got tied to a film adaptation of Edward Albee’s stage play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for Warners, the actors listed Nichols as a director they’d be willing to work with. The studio hired Nichols to keep the star couple happy. And Nichols made the most of the opportunity.

The Graduate was Nichols’s second film. And, like Bonnie and Clyde, it was a box-office sensation: off a modest budget of $3 million, the film grossed in excess of $80 million domestically and over $100 million globally, astonishing numbers at a time when a $20 million gross qualified a film as a blockbuster. Nichols’s film was timely and though essentially a comedy, politically complex. The May-December romance between Ben (Dustin Hoffman) and Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) that seemed so shocking at the time was for Nichols at once a modern take on the age-old bedroom farce and a commentary on the current generation gap. Mrs. Robinson is one of Ben’s parents’ friends. She seduces Ben because she despises growing old—because she hates her cushy suburban life with her bourbon-swilling, golf-playing, white-collar husband. She’s mostly missed out on the sexual revolution, and she figures Ben is her one last chance to dip in.

The relationship offers for Ben a jolting rite of passage, especially after they split up and Mrs. Robinson becomes a formidable adversary. By then, Mrs. Robinson is something of a caricature—a rather monstrous symbol of an unhappy and lost older generation. Our last images of her at the wedding are meant to exaggerate her failure, her futility, and her hypocrisy. She has treated her own marriage with disrespect, yet she has pushed her daughter into the same unsatisfying institution, into marrying a man she doesn’t love. Mrs. Robinson wants to be young again, she wants to be part of a counterculture she’s only just read about in magazines, a subculture of casual hook-ups and free sex. She doesn’t find what she’s looking for. And sadly, Nichols gets us to hate her for trying.

FIGURE 2. Elaine (Katharine Ross) and Ben (Dustin Hoffman) worry about the future at the end of Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967, Embassy Pictures). Plenty of young Americans at the time shared their apprehension and confusion.

The Graduate ends with a darkly comic set piece: after Ben breaks up the wedding, he and Elaine sit together in the back of a bus, in and of itself (after Rosa Parks) hardly an inadvertent set piece. Seated side by side and captured in a long-take two-shot, they acknowledge through gesture their confusion. This final sequence takes us back to Ben’s earlier ruminations in his bedroom at home. He is, he tells his father, worried about the future. He—and here we begin to understand, he is not just speaking for himself—wants things to be different. But he has no idea how to make that happen.

The closest he comes to having a postgraduation plan involves moving to a rented room in a Berkeley boarding house—the better to stalk Elaine into falling back in love with him. (To state the obvious, the scenes of stalking played differently in 1967 than they do today.) The landlord, performed with bug-eyed comic exaggeration by Norman Fell, is anxious about Ben, not because he knows what Ben is up to, but because he’s afraid Ben is an outside agitator come to stir things up in America’s most notorious counterculture college town. Fell makes the most of his brief screen time, and he becomes the fall guy in a series of comic skits. But plenty of older filmgoers shared his anxiety at what was happening in Berkeley and on other college campuses at the time. All to say, in 1967 the Berkeley setting is hardly incidental.

Along with The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, two other films scored big on Oscar night 1968: the topical comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer) and the trenchant crime-melodrama In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison), which won Best Picture. All four films were in different ways counterculture: timely, hip, and political. It was hard for the studio suits to ignore that fact. The fifth and final nominee for Best Picture was the old-fashioned, old-Hollywood Dr. Doolittle, directed by Richard Fleischer, a costly and clunky mess that seemed only to emphasize the industry’s counterculture rift.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967), the year’s second-highest-grossing film behind The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night both starred the Black movie star Sidney Poitier. Kramer’s film cast Poitier alongside Old-Hollywood stalwarts Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The film asked a series of topical questions necessarily (per the studio’s collective caution) tempered by light comedy. What would a white liberal couple say if their daughter brought home her fiancé and he was Black? And what if he looked like (what if he was someone like) Poitier—handsome, urbane, intelligent? And what if, as the film further poses, he was an MD with a practice in Switzerland? Didn’t every married couple in 1967 dream of their daughters marrying doctors?

In the Heat of the Night cast Poitier as a police detective who ventures into the racially segregated South and gets recruited to solve a murder. His task is complicated by a bigoted southern lawman (played by Rod Steiger, who won the Oscar for Best Actor) and by the many racists who occupy the town. The film ends with an unlikely détente possible only in Hollywood’s dream version of race relations in late-sixties America.

The box office and Oscar night success of In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, and Bonnie and Clyde spoke to the counterculture predicament in Hollywood at the time. There was, it became quite clear, money to be made and awards to be won making movies that engaged a counterculture audience. But how then to proceed without alienating the so-called silent majority, the establishment folks who in 1968 put Nixon in the White House? It was a question the studio establishment could not answer.

Black Hollywood: Melvin van Peebles’s Road to Nowhere

It is (or at least it should be) a source of shame that the movie industry labor force, especially at the top end, was as late as 1968 not yet integrated. And even as white celebrities like Marlon Brando and Paul Newman spoke out on behalf of Black Americans (more on that later), the studios remained cautious about dealing with race on-screen. And they had their reasons. Case in point: the 1965 MGM release, A Patch of Blue (Guy Green), which featured an interracial romance between an illiterate, blind, white woman (Elizabeth Hartman) and an educated Black man (Poitier, again). A budding romance was confirmed by an on-screen kiss between the two characters (and stars)—well: they kissed in some versions that some filmgoers saw at some venues. Under pressure from theater owners in the South, MGM distributed an alternate version of the film with the kiss cut out. Two years later: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night were for the moment—arguably, despite the moment—still as far as the studios were willing to go.

FIGURE 3. (Left to right) Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger in In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, United Artists). The groundbreaking (for white Hollywood at least) civil rights–era film won the Best Picture Oscar in 1968.

In 1969, Black Americans accounted for about 15 percent of the US population. Yet they comprised more than 30 percent of the first-run film audience. Black Americans went to the movies proportionally more than white Americans did. Encouraged by the data and the Best Picture win for In the Heat of the Night, studio executives moved cautiously into making movies targeting the Black American audience. They had gotten their feet wet with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night and in 1969 they were ready to get in a bit deeper—to their ankles, let’s say. To do so, they invested in a small and select group of Black moviemakers.⁷

Among this first group, Melvin van Peebles seems today the most interesting and most important—if only because, to extend the metaphor, with him Hollywood was never just wading in. His story—sudden success followed by a self-inflicted career implosion—was an all-too typical counterculture venture on the road to nowhere. As such, it surely and sadly fits the scheme of this book.

In 1967, after failing to interest a single A- or B-studio in a script based on his novel La Permission, van Peebles signed a production deal with the small French company O.P.E.R.A. The retitled adaptation, The Story of a Three-Day Pass, told the story of a mild-mannered African American GI stationed in France, who, to celebrate a promotion, takes a rare weekend off the base. On the first day of his three-day pass, he meets a white French shop girl. When she offers to go with him to a resort hotel, he assumes she is a prostitute. She’s not, but as they discover together, they both would have been better off had she been one.

Anticipating the release of the film, Variety ran a feature on van Peebles under the now well-dated headline: Saga of a Negro Filmmaker. Rick Setlowe, writing for the trade paper, opened the feature with a fair (thus, cynical) assessment: The irony is that the novelist-filmmaker [van Peebles] had to exile himself to France to work at all, and the story of his struggle is a commentary on how tough it can be for a talented Negro to break into the film biz. Setlowe highlighted van Peebles’s CV: a BA with Honors in literature from Ohio Wesleyan; a stint in the Air Force; a job as a cable-car operator in San Francisco; and, on money earned from selling his car, the producer of three short self-financed films.⁸ Van Peebles, Setlowe reported, took his reel to a number of Hollywood executives and agents, but failed to drum up interest. One agent told him, memorably: If you can tap dance, I might be able to find you some work.⁹

The Story of a Three-Day Pass somehow got van Peebles noticed. And his timing seemed right; he (to indulge the industry use of the term) had arrived just as executives were trying build upon Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, and he was given a shot at a studio feature: The Watermelon Man (1970). The film offered a neat variation on a theme from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, as it tells the story of a bigoted white insurance agent who wakes up one morning to discover that he has been transformed into a Black man. The hook proved timely, and The Watermelon Man was a modest hit.

The production went smoothly, with only one significant hitch. Studio executives and van Peebles locked horns over the film’s denouement. The executive team at Columbia wanted to soften the film’s anti-racist message and commissioned an ending in which the insurance agent wakes to discover that it was all a dream. Van Peebles rejected such an ending as a cop-out. The film was released with van Peebles’s ending: the former-white-now-Black-executive enlists in the Black middle class: he buys a house, starts his own company, and most tellingly joins a group of politically aware Black Americans practicing martial arts, preparing for a future in which they might just need such skills.

When the film hit, executives at Columbia quietly put the argument over the ending behind them and offered van Peebles a three-picture deal. But van Peebles had seen enough of the studio process to know it wasn’t for him, and moved on. With some of his own and some of his friend Bill Cosby’s money he produced, directed, scripted, scored, and starred in the alliteratively titled Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).¹⁰ Had he endeavored to scuttle his career, he could not have produced a more efficient exit strategy.

The film’s main character, Sweetback (played by van Peebles) makes his living performing in live sex shows—quite literally performing a white-nightmare version of Black masculinity. When Sweetback witnesses a scene of police brutality, he goes on a rampage. From there, the film takes off—significantly, and if you get on board with van Peebles, and if you consider the identity politics in play—comically into caricature.

The promotional campaign employed by the B-movie distribution outfit Cinemation and then three years later by Roger Corman for the New World rerelease, played off taglines like: "Dedicated to all the Brothers and Sisters who have had enough of the