VAN PEEBLES EXERCISES STOCK OPTION : VAN PEEBLES

By MARTIN ZIMMERMAN

May 22, 1986 12 AM PT

Melvin Van Peebles has resurfaced--albeit in a different arena than the one he usually works in.

This time the screenwriter/film maker/novelist/theatrical producer has exchanged the glamour of Hollywood and Broadway for the trading pits of Wall Street and the world of nonfiction publishing.

“I’m just doing it like I did the other things,” said Van Peebles, 54, who shocked the Hollywood establishment in 1971 with the success of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” A landmark black chase film, “Sweetback” helped launch a wave of so-called blaxploitation films that included “Shaft,” “Superfly” and “Cleopatra Jones.”

“It (Wall Street) is quite refreshing, the black-and-white of it,” said Van Peebles, who became the first black trader at the American Stock Exchange three years ago and who has just authored “Bold Money,” a guide to the ins and outs of options trading. “It’s a simplistic world; there are no grays in it, no ‘Should I make it D-minor or D-major?’ The artistic world is one of high nuance. . . . By the time I’m bonkers with the simplicity of trading, then I’m back in the world of emotions and nuance.

“And by the time I can’t take nuance anymore and I’m ready to blow my brains out, then it’s time to go back and trade, where it’s all simple, cut and dried. I find it very, very complementary, the two worlds.”

The wiry, salt-and-pepper-haired Van Peebles is reputed to be a millionaire from the success of “Sweetback.” That he would tackle Wall Street--and write a book about it--wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with his convoluted careers.

A native of Chicago, he joined the Air Force after his graduation from Ohio Wesleyan University and served as a navigator on a Strategic Air Command bomber. Returning to civilian life, he made several short films while working as a cable car operator and a postman in San Francisco. After attending graduate school in Amsterdam, he went to Paris and worked as a reporter and began writing in English, then in French. He had five novels published and one of them, “La Permission,” became his first feature film, “The Story of a Three-Day Pass.”

It was selected as the French entry in the San Francisco Film Festival in 1969, and Van Peebles found himself back here with a deal with Columbia Pictures to direct “Watermelon Man,” starring Godfrey Cambridge. He followed that with the X-rated “Sweetback”--a raunchy, violent film that he financed, produced, directed, wrote, scored and starred in.

“Sweetback” was a ripping success, grossing more than $10 million on a $500,000 investment, astonishing for an independently made film that Van Peebles had to distribute himself and that played almost exclusively in black movie theaters and drive-ins.

Notwithstanding his career on the trading floor and hoped-for success with “Bold Money,” Van Peebles has not turned his back on show business. Even while working on the final revisions for “Bold Money,” he found time to finish a screenplay for the producers of “Tender Mercies” and to write an “Afterschool Special” for ABC-TV. He’s working on a script with Jules Fisher (of “Beatlemania”), has directed a music video for the rap group Whodini’s single, “Funky Beat,” and is in “the final stages of financing a low-budget movie.”

And he still has hopes of bringing his long-stalled musical version of Thackery’s Vanity Fair to the stage: “I would love to have Pia Zadora or Cyndi Lauper play Becky Sharp.”

Van Peebles is a witty story-teller whose easygoing demeanor stands in direct contrast to his portrayal of the hot-tempered, close-mouthed, super-stud pimp in “Sweetback.” Van Peebles’ raw style of acting cemented his image as a black revolutionary--he never directed another film and is somewhat bitter that his only work in Hollywood since “Sweetback” has been as a hired hand, doing screenplays.

“Even after the commercial success of the film, I’ve never been approached. I’ve always had to go it alone,” he said, his voice taking on a slight edge as he reflected on his aborted career as a film director. “I get jobs often to write a this or a that, or offers usually from the sort of people who decry racism at great length, but are usually not above profiting by the deal you’re offered.

“A lot of times, people will say ‘Gee, isn’t it terrible?’ but when they come to offer (something to) an actor or writer of color, many times they will then offer him a lesser amount of money . . . because he’s so desperate.

“Sweetback II” has been ready for some time, but “I just can’t swing it alone, just by the very nature of it; it’s hard for a maverick artist to get the financing and being a colored maverick compounds the problem.”

“Sweetback” ended with the character played by Van Peebles successfully eluding the law and escaping over the border into Mexico. “Sweetback II”--the second in a trilogy, Van Peebles said--finds our hero, now working in a small traveling circus in South America, being approached by a group of American businessmen who want him to return to the States to rid their neighborhood of drugs and drug dealers. Van Peebles said “Sweetback II” “doesn’t differ in the real essence of what it (“Sweetback I”) was about--the struggle that America imposes on people. It’s just an action movie that will probably be much more readily understood now than the original movie.”

Hollywood’s reluctance to hire him as a director forced Van Peebles to move his act to Broadway, where he produced, directed, wrote and starred in several shows on the Great White Way as well as on Off-Broadway. His two biggest hits--”Aint Supposed to Die a Natural Death” and “Don’t Play Us Cheap”--garnered 11 Tony nominations between them, even though both opened to mixed reviews from the critics.

It was a Broadway-related transaction that led him, inadvertently, to Wall Street: A few months after promising a financier friend that he would go to Wall Street as a trader if a “deal didn’t come out as fast I’d promised,” Van Peebles found himself at a seminar on how to be a Wall Street trader. He went to the seminar--and then flunked the trader’s exam.

Not passing the test got his dander up, so he hired himself out as a clerk to a boss who was 30 years younger. One month later, he passed the test; two weeks later he was trading on the Street. He was going to do it only for a six-month stretch but now sees no end in sight.

When Warner Books asked him to write a book about his experiences, he refused because “I thought they wanted me to write some book like ‘These Black Hands Copping the Cash’ or something like that.”

Warners persisted. When he realized that they wanted “a real book,” he got interested. “I told Warners that I would be willing to try and write a book that explains how to trade, to give a tapestry or superstructure to the rookie so you can at least understand what your broker is saying or should be saying.”

Traders buy and sell for their own accounts as well as making deals for their firms. Van Peebles claims to have done all right for himself, even coming in as a neophyte: “I made very few mistakes. There’s something on Wall Street called PIG--panic, ignorance and greed. Those are the big sins. I’m not greedy, I knew I was ignorant and I didn’t panic.”

Van Peebles seems at ease with his life and frequently peppers his conversation with obscene humor, usually directed at himself. His live-and-let-live style is far different from the revolutionary image that has clung to him since the early ‘70s. Divorced since 1960, he has three children: Melvin, who is “just being 22”; Megan, 27, a former model now working in real estate; and Mario, 29, an actor who has worked with his father on Off-Broadway and is finding some success in Hollywood.

Describing his life, Van Peebles smiled and shrugged: “I’m doing well, in the global sense. I’m very fortunate.

“Somebody once asked me, ‘Melvin, how’d you get to the top?’

“It was simple. Nobody would let me in at the bottom.”