Trouble & Attitude 1/Trouble and Attitude - Issue 01.iso/pc/pctext/bizpe.txt

Text File | 1995-06-02 | 8.0 KB | 191 lines

Melvin Van Peebles
with Jonathan Braun

I guess the obvious place to start would be with the
genesis of the "Panther" movie.
MVP: Well, the genesis of the movie was my novel. As a
matter of fact, I just got a review in the biggest
review of all, Publisher's Weekly, which calls the
novel "engrossing".

I'd like to read that. I didn't realize when I went to
the film that it was adapted from the novel.
MVP: Yes, well, what happened was about nine years
ago, I was coming from Philadelphia to New York with
my partner on the train. I turned to my partner, who's
also my son, and I said, "What do you think of the
manuscript I showed you of the novel I'm working on?"
And he said he thought it was engrossing, it was
powerful, and he learned so many things about this
group that he really didn't know a lot about. He
thought it was all good stuff. Then he went on to say
that it would make a great movie.
Actually , I was a little bit annoyed at the time,
because I wasn't even sure that I could find a
publisher who would print something that explosive as
a novel, let alone make it into a movie!
I'd been working on the novel for about fifteen years.
And when I started off, people considered it science
fiction, not even fiction. It was considered so
far-out. Here's this guy talking about the FBI, and
people hadn't gotten around to saying that the FBI
ever did anything illegal. This was before the 1976
Senate committee that said, on the floor of Congress,
that the FBI had committed lawless and illegal acts
against the Panther party. So then people backed up a
little and said, okay, maybe you've got a slight
point. Then, you had the Freedom of Information Act,
and it came out about this Cointelpro and other
activities. You could even get the memos.

The way you used the Cointelpro memos in the film was
very effective. Were those the actual memos?
MVP: They paraphrased the contents, but they were
pretty close to it.
It really is shocking.
Well, I used to be a crime reporter in Paris, for one
of the French newspapers. So I have a nose for
bullshit. It seemed to me one of the most obvious
things when I started the book - well, it really
started in two strands. One was, if the Panthers were
this stumblebum group of thugs, as they were portrayed
in the media at that time, how were they able to
survive for all those years and flourish, to go from a
small core group to over a hundred chapters around the
country, if that were true? If from day one, they were
at odds with the authorities, how were they able to
flourish and grow under that? So that was one thing.
The answer to that, quite obviously, was that they
weren't what they were portrayed to be.
Number two was, there was a serendipity for the
authorities. There was a direct correlation between
the rise in the availability of drugs in the ghetto,
and the rise of militancy. Was that just pure luck for
the authorities, or was there a more sinister
explanation? I believe, and as things came out my
conscience told me, that there was a more sinister
explanation. Now, how to take these two strands and
try to breed them together to tell a coherent story?
That's how I then came up with the fictitious
character of Judge. And it was the weaving of that
(the two strands of intrigue) that ended up as the
novel, Panther.

Do you think if you'd left out the drug angle that the
criticism you're getting would have been less severe?
The critics who dislike the film seem to zero in on
that.
MVP: No, I think they would've just zeroed in
somewhere else. That also happens to be true in
shooting the shoot-out. But what happens there is we
have what they call corroborated evidence, which
usually means, here, white-sanctioned evidence. If it
hasn't been in The Wall Street Journal or TIME
Magazine, then it didn't happen.

In that shoot-out at the end, in the warehouse, did
anything like that ever really happen?
MVP: Yes, it did. On a number of occasions. It
happened once right here on 86th and Columbus!

What did the shoot-out take place over?
MVP: It involved a heroin factory at the time.

So the Panthers really actively fought against drugs?
MVP: Yes.

And they really tried to police the ghetto
communities?
MVP: They also raised awareness of
Sickle Cell Anemia, school programs, all those things
that aren't considered so radical now, which have been
co-opted by the larger culture without giving the
credit where it started. Also, when they were carrying
guns originally they were legal in California.

Right. As I recall, the Panthers were the first ones
to apply the colonial model to the urban ghettos.
MVP: They weren't the first ones. Many others talked
and wrote about that. The Panthers were just well
read, well versed people. But they were some of the
first to bring it to those times. You have to
understand the times: you had the SDS, the Panthers,
the Peace and Freedom Party, all those things....
[Eldridge] Cleaver ran an article recently, May 9th,
in an interview in the Globe, in which he said, "Look,
detail by detail they jumbled the order, but the
essence of what was going on was true."

The movie reminded me of the way some Panthers, like
Fred Hampton, died in bloody shootouts with the
police.
MVP: The murder which happened afterwards,
and is only alluded to in the movie. In Fred Hampton's
case, there were ninety-nine bullet holes in the
house, and only one of them pointed outward. You can
go on and on and on, but I don't want to go on about
that. There was a lot of that that happened. You've
got to read the book, because I have what I call
witnesses; people who were there, giving their take on
what happened at the time.

Is Eldridge Cleaver still alive?
MVP: Yes, Eldridge is alive. Bobby Seal is alive.

Have they said anything about the film?
MVP: They say it's not the way it happened. Bobby says
it's not the way it happened. But then, speaking of
the minutiae. Sometimes people who were there get
frozen in the details, but I wanted to deal with the
forest rather than the trees. "No, he had on a green
suit!" "No, it was a pink suit!" I wanted to avoid all
that stuff, you understand. And speaking of the
forest, I didn't want to be shoved aside with people
saying, "Well, this is an individual case." That's why
I did it broadly like this. Starting from those two
strands I wanted to discuss them and still have an
engrossing movie. These were larger-than-life
characters, this was a major turning point in America.
And that's why I did it that way....
From there, my son had said "Dad, I'll do it with
you." But that was nine years ago, and he couldn't
even get arrested. He was just starting out in the
business. But as time went along, and his star went
up, he and I and another producer named Preston
Holmes, the three of us got together and pooled our
muscle. The first Hollywood group that we went to
wanted us to tell it from a mainstream perspective -
that's how they put it, a la Biko or Mississippi
Burning. You know what I mean?

They wanted a white central character.
MVP: They wanted a white Panther. And when I didn't
like that suggestion, they wanted a Guru, some
Berkeley student who teaches these poor illiterate
kids to read and write and then they turn into
Panthers. So ,finally, we ended up getting the money
from overseas, and that's how we raised it.

How difficult was it to finance this picture?
MVP: It took five years.

And you had to raise the money overseas. Did it come
from people in the movie business?
MVP: Yes. From a movie company called Working Title,
who've done most recently, Four Weddings and a
Funeral.

What was the budget for "Panther", approximately?
Under ten million, which is less than a third of what
you normally do. A normal movie's average cost is $27
million at the least.

And you're happy with the way it turned out?
MVP: It's exactly the way I wanted it.

Thank you.