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Watermelon Man (film)
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Watermelon Man is a 1970 comedy-drama film directed by Melvin Van Peebles and based on the book The Night the Sun Came out on Happy Hollow Lane by Herman Raucher. Written by Herman Raucher and distributed by Columbia Pictures, it tells the story of a typical 1960s, somewhat bigoted white insurance salesman named Jeff Gerber who wakes up one morning to find that he has become black.
Plot summary
Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) lives in an average suburban neighborhood with his seemingly liberal housewife Althea (Estelle Parsons), who tolerates her husband's character flaws out of love, and two children, Burton (Scott Garrett) and Janice (Erin Moran).
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Encyclopedia
Watermelon Man is a 1970 comedy-drama film directed by Melvin Van Peebles and based on the book The Night the Sun Came out on Happy Hollow Lane by Herman Raucher. Written by Herman Raucher and distributed by Columbia Pictures, it tells the story of a typical 1960s, somewhat bigoted white insurance salesman named Jeff Gerber who wakes up one morning to find that he has become black.
Plot summary
Jeff Gerber (Godfrey Cambridge) lives in an average suburban neighborhood with his seemingly liberal housewife Althea (Estelle Parsons), who tolerates her husband's character flaws out of love, and two children, Burton (Scott Garrett) and Janice (Erin Moran). Every morning when Jeff wakes up, he spends some time under a tanning machine, bats around a boxing ball, drinks a health drink, and races the bus to work on foot.
Jeff presents himself as happy-go-lucky and quite a joker, but he's a bit obnoxious and boorish. Althea chastises Jeff for not having sympathy for the black people and she watches the race riots every night on TV with great interest.
One morning, Jeff wakes up to find that his pigment has changed. He tries to fall back asleep, thinking that it is a dream, but to no avail. He tries taking a shower to wash the "black" off him, but finds it doesn't work, when Althea walks into the bathroom, and screams. He explains to her that the "Negro in the bathroom" is him.
At first, Jeff believes this to be the result of spending too much time under the tanning machine. He spends almost the entire day at home, afraid to go out of the house, only going out once to venture into the "colored part of town" in order to try and find "the stuff they use in order to make themselves look white." His attempts to change his skin color fail.
The next day, he is persuaded to get up and go to work. Things start out well at first, until Jeff is accused of "stealing something" while racing the bus. The policemen assume that, since a black man is running, he must have stolen something. During his lunch break, he makes an appointment with his doctor who cannot explain Jeff's "condition" either. After several calls, the doctor suggests that Jeff might be more comfortable with a black doctor.
Returning home, he finds Althea afraid to answer the phone. He doesn't understand why until he receives a call from a man telling him to "move out, nigger." At work the next day, Jeff's secretary (who had previously ignored him) makes several advances toward him, finding him more attractive as a black man. Jeff's boss suggests that they could drum up extra business with a "Negro" salesman.
At home one evening, he finds the people who had made the threatening phone calls, who offer him $50,000 for his home. Jeff manages to raise the price to $100,000. Althea sends the children to a relative and later leaves her husband. Finally accepting the fact that he is black, Jeff quits his regular job, buys an apartment building, and starts his own insurance company.
Production
Godfrey Cambridge plays the role of Jeff Gerber in "whiteface" (white makeup, cf. blackface) 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, in which Gerber wakes up to find that it was all a nightmare, and he is white again, 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".
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.
Music
As with much of Melvin Van Peebles' filmography, the film's score was composed by the director himself. A soundtrack album was released in 1970. It has yet to appear on compact disc. The title itself is a reference to the song "Watermelon Man" by Herbie Hancock.
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