Beg Borrow Steal: The Visionary Art of Melvin Van Peebles and the Rise of Independent Black Cinema
About this audiobook
"An urgent, captivating examination that rightfully places Van Peebles’s hustle and bravado as the pulsating blueprint of all independent storytelling." - Maya S. Cade, creator and curator of Black Film Archive
An essential history of modern Black cinema, as led by avant-garde filmmaker, novelist, composer, and playwright Melvin Van Peebles.
Beg Borrow Steal, a title inspired by Black artists’ make-a-way-out-of-no-way ethos, is a stirring and remarkable deep dive into Black independent film and culture, as modeled by raconteur and iconoclast Melvin Van Peebles. Award-winning writer Santi Elijah Holley enriches the extraordinary history with interviews from today’s most innovative Black independent filmmakers and actors, such as Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as Van Peebles’s published and unpublished manuscripts, critical reviews, analyses, and reflections.
Independent Black artists across all disciplines—from music and theater to literature and poetry—continue to push boundaries, challenge stereotypes, and pursue their own vision, away from traditional gatekeepers. The success of artists like Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Jordan Peele, and Ryan Coogler can be traced directly to the pioneering work of Van Peebles, whose ambitious and innovative multidisciplinary artistry never yielded to anybody else’s vision but his own.
As a Black American who’d overcome poverty, discrimination, and other obstacles, Van Peebles refused to let White America take advantage of him and his talent. It’s made him a beacon for every Black auteur and independent filmmaker of the past 50 years. Sinners, Black Panther, Sorry to Bother You, Get Out, She's Gotta Have It, Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, Shaft, Superfly, Daughters of the Dust, Selma, the list goes on. It is impossible to imagine any of these culturally defining films existing, if not for the groundwork laid by Melvin Van Peebles’s 1971 Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. It is canon in Black film.
Beg Borrow Steal is the story of the legendary man who provided the blueprint for independent Black cinema, and a tribute to the power of radical Black creativity in American art and culture.
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About the author
Santi Elijah Holley has reported for more than a decade on the intersection of culture, music, race, religion, and politics. His work has appeared in numerous national and international outlets, including The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Atlantic, National Geographic, NPR, The New Republic, The Economist, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Holley is the recipient of grants from PEN America and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and he was awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship for nonfiction. His previous book An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, an Amazon Editors' Pick for Best History, an NPR selection for the ""Books We Love,"" a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Ann M. Sperber Book Prize, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
