Call it two legends united for one exciting night Friday in historic Bronzeville.
Melvin Van Peebles, the filmmaker who himself made history heralding a new era of African American-focused films in the 1970s, returned to his hometown to inaugurate a monthly movie series at the Parkway Ballroom where Count Basie and Nat “King” Cole once held sway.
South Side native Van Peebles was present at the Chicago premiere of the latest of his 36 movies, the 2008 “Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last year.
Clifford Rome, Parkway Ballroom president and owner of Rome’s Joy Catering, and entertainment attorney Randy Crumpton initiated the idea of “presenting quality entertainment and a cultural experience to the South Side, which is our Harlem,” said Rome.
Crumpton, who curates the five-film series, produces the annual Black Perspectives component of the Chicago International Film Festival. Sidney Poitier was Black Perspectives’ special guest last October.
The consummate filmmaker Van Peebles is to black cinema what Martin Scorcese is to New York stories. He began making short films in the late ?50s, thinking they were features and saying later of that period, “I knew nothing.” But he quickly learned.
He spent time in Paris where he wrote novels and made his first feature in 1968, which caught the attention of Hollywood producers who mistook him for a french auteur.
After his disappointing experience directing “The Watermelon Man,” Van Peebles was determined to have control over his next production, the groundbreaking “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song.”
Van Peebles privately funded it, helped along with a $50,000 loan from Bill Cosby. It grossed $10 million and was acclaimed for its political resonance with the black struggle.
Over his lifetime, Van Peebles has either written, acted, directed, produced ? or all together ? 36 features and has either directed or acted in 20 TV series and TV movies.
The renovated Parkway Ballroom, the swing and sway palace of Bronzeville from the 1920s to the 1940s, is located at 4455 S. King Drive.
