Production
Godfrey Cambridge plays the role of Jeff Gerber in whiteface for the first few minutes of the film, and then goes without the makeup when his character changes into a black man. Before director Melvin Van Peebles had come into the project, the studio had told him that they were planning to cast a white actor like Alan Arkin or Jack Lemmon to play the part, but that it didn't seem to work quite right. When Van Peebles read the screenplay, he had thought that the studio had sent him the wrong script. When he was told that they had planned to cast a white actor and have him play the part in black makeup for part of the film, Van Peebles suggested that they cast a black actor instead.
A popular rumor suggests that Van Peebles was contractually obliged to deliver an alternative ending to the film, but that Van Peebles incurred the studio's wrath by agreeing to film the original ending, and then not delivering the ending as he had promised. On the film's DVD release, Van Peebles explains that he had hated the ending, and convinced studio executives that it had to be changed, but they said he had to film both versions of the ending - he says he only filmed the one, "by accident". The alternative ending was to be that Gerber wakes up as a white man and learns his time as a black man was only a nightmare, but that he realizes he ought to be more sensitive towards others.
Columbia was happy with the finished product, and the film was a financial success, leading the studio to offer Van Peebles a three-picture contract. Instead of taking their offer, Van Peebles made the independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which later turned out to not only be the highest grossing independent film of 1971, but also the highest grossing independent film up to that point. Following that film's success, Columbia tore up Van Peebles' contract.
Read more about this topic: Watermelon Man (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)