Conception
At the time Melvin Van Peebles came up with the story for Don't Play Us Cheap, he was living in Paris, but had gotten a summer job in New York making a documentary. Along with the job, Van Peebles was given an apartment in a posh neighborhood on the lower east side of Manhattan.
On a very hot day, Van Peebles was lounging out in front of the apartment, and an old black lady came down the street and told Van Peebles that she wanted some water and to use the bathroom. The woman thanked Van Peebles, and a few days later, Van Peebles received a telephone call from her inviting him to a party she was throwing for her niece.
When he returned to France, he thought of what would happen if these wonderful, kind, open people were invaded by imps bent on destroying their party. The story became the basis for a novel, Harlem Party, and later a French-language musical play, which Van Peebles later translated into English, and made as a film in 1973.
Read more about this topic: Don't Play Us Cheap
Famous quotes containing the word conception:
“Consider what effects which might conceivably have practical bearings we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“It is possible—indeed possible even according to the old conception of logic—to give in advance a description of all ‘true’ logical propositions. Hence there can never be surprises in logic.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)