Melvin Van Peebles Net Worth At The Time Of His Death

Melvin Van Peebles Net Worth

This is one of the questions that people ask the most about Melvin Van Peebles, and although they always end up answering it on other pages with an “I don’t know, you know” or “it depends” if there are some estimates that various web portals mention.

Melvin Van Peebles’s net worth: Melvin Van Peebles was an American actor, filmmaker, playwright, novelist, and composer who had a net worth of $3 million at the time of his death. However, it is not possible to make an exact calculation about the fortune of this great actor. We have estimated Melvin Van Peebles’s net worth, salary, money, income, and assets.

Full Name	Melvin Van Peebles
Occupation	Actor, Film director
Age	89 years
Date of Birth	August 21, 1932
Place of Birth	Chicago, IL
Star Sign	Leo
Country	American
Net Worth	$3 million

Melvin Van Peebles Died

The director of the legendary film ‘Sweet, Sweetback’s baadasssss song’ and Spike Lee’s top reference, dies at 89

Spike Lee is doing very well, and possibly without him, the ‘black cinema’ would have less resonance. Among other African-American directors, Charles Burnett (“Never Go to Bed Angry”) is excellent, if less well known. Jordan Peele is also very good. And in the 70s, the ‘blaxploitation’ gave illustrious titles, created a ‘star system’ of its own -Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree-, left us unmatched funk, blues and jazz soundtracks, courtesy of Curtis Mayfield, Roy Ayers and Isaac Hayes, and it demonstrated that action films could be made with African-American directors, interpreters, and technicians that would be enjoyed by all audiences and that would be, at the same time, combative and vindictive. But all this being very well, nothing would have been the same without Melvin Van Peebles and his mythical’Sweet, sweetback’s baadasssss song’, made in 1971 .

Van Peebles passed away last Tuesday at the age of 89. That unpronounceable title film was directed, written, produced, edited, and starred by him. He also composed part of the music with Earth Wind and Fire, and that is another posh soundtrack -edited, of course, by the Stax Records label-, a cross between funk, free jazz, and other styles of black music that give it a Rhythmic lubricity and a tension to the film that no ‘blaxploitation’ achieved. The film is usually included in this movement, but the reality is that Van Peebles ate separately. He was always free and his cinema, truly independent and very ‘underground’, did not marry anyone.

One of his sons, Mario Van Peebles, actor, and director of several films – among them ‘Baadasssss!’ (2004) , in which he recreates the filming of the film in addition to playing his father, has expressed in a statement that “my father knew that the images of blacks mattered, and we need to see ourselves being free.” Unlike some modes of ‘blaxploitation’, which was losing its grip on being taken over by ‘white Hollywood’, Melvin Van Peebles always remained outside the institutionalized system.

His film was shot in just three weeks on a budget of just under half a million euros; the money was provided by Van Peebles out of his own pocket, plus a contribution from Bill Cosby. It tells of the escape of an African American man, Sweetback, who kills two white policemen to defend a young member of the Black Panthers.

13 million collection

On his journey to nowhere, he bumps into people from the ghetto and even Hell’s Angels. Everything is convulsive and urgent, and imaginative, in this cheap film that ended up grossing approximately 13 million euros. Legend has it that, while filming one of the sex scenes, Van Peebles, in the role of Sweetback, contracted gonorrhea. He asked the directors’ union for compensation and, with the money obtained, he bought more material to shoot. Rogues cinema. It is also said that he paid Earth Wind and Fire with a bad check and that they never charged for his work.

Although he seems the author of a single film, Van Peebles directed a dozen more titles, including ‘Watermelon man’ (1970), a comedy about racism that takes its title from the famous Herbie Hancock theme, and ‘Identity crisis’ (1989 ) , in which his son Mario plays a rapper possessed by the soul of a fashion designer. As an actor, he intervened in films far from his ideology as a director, such as ‘Jaws, revenge’, ‘Boomerang, the prince of women’, the western of his son ‘Renegades’, or the television series ‘El resplandor’ .