The cinema is just one medium in which the multi-talented Melvin Van Peebles has distinguished himself. After serving a stint in the US Air Force, he lived in Mexico where he worked as a portrait painter in the mid-1950s. Van Peebles made his first short films ("Sunlight" and "Three Pickup Men for Herrick", 1958) while working in a San Francisco post office. He went on to live in Holland and France and earned his living as a crime reporter in Paris where he also began writing French language novels. Van Peebles made his feature debut adapting his novel, "La Permission/The Story of a Three-Day