SOURCE: "The Rediscovery of Oscar Micheaux, Black Film Pioneer," in Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 40-8.

[In the following essay, Grupenhoff provides a historical overview of Micheaux's life and career.]

The stars on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard are dedicated to those who have achieved a measure of fame in the entertainment industry. But one of the most recent stars honors a film director few people have ever heard of, and even fewer have seen any of his films. Unveiled in February 1987, that new star belongs to Oscar Micheaux, a rather obscure and engimatic individual who was, nevertheless, the most prolific and consistent independent black filmmaker in the United States between 1918 and 1948. During that time he produced, directed, edited, and distributed approximately 40 feature-length black cast films for all-black audiences. Yet, for the past 40 years Micheaux's achievements (as well as the achievements of black independent film production as a whole) have gone virtually unrecognized.

A renewed interest in Micheaux's life and work has recently surfaced, however, and the Directors Guild of America has taken a leading role in reviving Micheaux's name. The Directors Guild was instrumental in getting Micheaux's star placed on Hollywood Boulevard, and in May 1986, the Directors Guild celebrated its Fiftieth Anniversary by bestowing its "Golden Jubilee Special Directorial Award" on Micheaux for his pioneering efforts during the early days of black filmmaking.

Even though he was the most important black filmmaker in the first half of this century, Micheaux left few traces behind when he died in 1951. A rather flamboyant and gregarious public person, Micheaux was guarded and secretive about his personal life. No full-length biography of Micheaux has yet been published, and until recently little was known about his family background, the disposition of his records and estate, or his filmmaking methods and techniques. What little we know about him has had to be pieced together from the revelations he made about himself in his autobiographical films and novels, and from new information gathered in recent interviews with his last living relatives and with friends who knew him.

I first became familiar with Micheaux while conducting research for a biography on Lorenzo Tucker, once known to black moviegoers as "The Colored Valentino," and one of Oscar Micheaux's leading men from 1927 to 1937. (It was Micheaux who first dubbed Tucker "The Colored Valentino.") Some basic detective work led me to find Micheaux's last living blood relative, Verna Louise Crowe, of Pasadena, California, who provided me with memories about Micheaux's background and family, and with photographs and letters that help to fill in parts of the puzzle of Micheaux's life.

Born on January 2, 1884 in Illinois, some 40 miles above Cairo on the Ohio River (The Conquest), Oscar Micheaux was the fourth son of the marriage between Calvin Swan Micheaux and Belle Goff, who had 11 children in all (Crowe). In the late 1880s the family moved to nearby Metropolis, Illinois, and it was there that Oscar was raised. A bright, independent, and strong-willed child, Oscar Micheaux usually avoided most childhood games and was always off working on some project of his own, a behavior that earned him the nickname "Oddball" [From a personal interview with Lylas Keyes, 2 April 1985]. Years later Micheaux wrote about his early child-hood and his realization that for the rest of his life he would be his own man.

My father complained of my poor service in the field and in disgust I was sent off to do the marketing—which pleased me, for it was not only easy but gave me a chance to meet and talk with many people—and I always sold the goods and engaged more for the afternoon delivery. This was my first experience in real business and I found that from that time ever afterward I could always do better business for myself than for anybody else (The Conquest).

By the time he was a teenager Micheaux was a free-thinker prone to disagree with the prevailing conventional wisdom, and he would counter discussions about the miserable plight of blacks with arguments for self-improvement and success that were to become his standards for the rest of his life.

Another thing that added to my unpopularity, perhaps, was my persistent declarations that there were not enough competent colored people to grasp the many opportunities that presented themselves, and that if white people could possess such nice homes, wealth and luxuries, so, in time, could the colored people. "You're a fool," I would be told, and then would follow a lecture describing the time-worn long and cruel slavery, and after the emancipation, the prejudice and hatred of the white race, whose chief object was to prevent the progress and betterment of the negro … and I became so tired of it all that I declared that if I could ever leave M—pls [sic] I would never return. More, I would disprove such a theory (The Conquest).

Micheaux finally did leave home in 1901 at the age of 17, and went to live for a short time with his brother in Chicago, where he worked briefly as a stockyard hand and as a coal hauler. Then he got a job as a Pullman porter, and for the next three years he traveled by rail throughout the United States. By 1904 he had saved enough money to buy a relinquishment on a homestead located on the edge of Indian territory in South Dakota. By 1907 Micheaux, who was then 23, had parlayed his original investment into a considerable tract of land.

On a trip to Chicago in 1909 Micheaux witnessed a performance of a minstrel show, and was so taken by it that he decided to begin a career as a writer by turning out short observational pieces and reviews for local newspapers. The following year he fell in love with the white daughter of a nearby homesteader, but realizing that public opinion would be opposed to their marriage, he married instead a black woman from Chicago whose father was a preacher. According to Micheaux, the father-in-law cheated him out of his property and ruined the marriage (The Conquest). Micheaux quit farming and be-came a professional writer, publishing his first novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, by the Pioneer, in 1913.

A rambling and uneven work, The Conquest is a fictionalized version of Micheaux's early economic success and marital difficulties, events that would be retold again and again in his later films and novels. In effect, the novel is an autobiographical self-vindication of Micheaux's first 30 years, containing many of the early hopes and desires that were to guide him for the rest of his life. The Conquest is dedicated to the black champion of self-improvement and economic independence, Booker T. Washington, and it contains one of Micheaux's primary goals: "One of the greatest tasks of my life has been to convince a certain class of my racial acquaintances that a colored man can be anything."

Micheaux sold his first novel door-to-door to his white neighbors and in nearby towns. With the revenues from this book he formed his own publishing company, and soon wrote and published a second novel, The Forged Note (1915), and a third, The Homesteader (1917), which was a reworking of the events depicted in The Conquest. It was this one-man cottage-industry pattern of writing, publishing, and door-to-door marketing of his books that Micheaux was to copy with the films he produced in the years that followed.

When Micheaux began making films in 1918 there were very few all-black films being produced. For the most part the only black images to be seen on American movie screens were the stereotypes that white producers and directors had coopted from earlier entertainment forms and from the popular cliches of blacks current in the dominant white society.

The stock stereotypes of black characters that evolved in turn-of-the-century white-produced films included those all-too-familiar characterizations of the shiftless fool, the brute, the comic female pickaninny, the faithful servant, the unfortunate mulatto, and the wise old mammy. Indeed, the early images of blacks in film mirrored the attitudes of white society in general: blacks were "subhuman, simple-minded, superstitious and submissive" [Daniel Leab, From Sambo to "Superspade ": The Black Experience in Motion Pictures, 1975].

At the time, the most significant film containing negative depictions of the black race was D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. Released in 1915, The Birth of a Nation was a landmark production from the perspective of early cinema aesthetics, but it also depicted a bleak and racist view of the Reconstruction Era. The screening of the film touched off a storm of controversy that was to last for years. Rather than quiet its critics, however, the screening had an opposite effect, for it helped to solidify a growing black consciousness that had been pioneered by such leaders as W. E. B. Du Bois.

The power of the motion picture as a new medium for education had already been realized by 1915, and its potential as a polemical tool had been made blatantly apparent by The Birth of a Nation. Recognizing Griffith's genius as a filmmaker, Du Bois suggested that the answer to The Birth of a Nation was not for blacks to condemn its shortcomings, but rather to create a film aesthetic of their own. Consequently, after 20 years of being stereo-typed in negative roles by white producers, blacks decided that the only way they were going to achieve positive images of blacks in films was to form production companies of their own. The rise of all-black cast films made by black producers for segregated black audiences came as a response to the white producers' demonstrated unwillingness to represent blacks in other than pejorative stereotypes. White discrimination was, paradoxically, one of the causes for the rise of independent black filmmaking.

All-black cast films produced exclusively for segregated black audiences ("race movies," as they came to be known), actually began around 1913, two years before The Birth of a Nation. It was then that black showman William Foster outlined the economic and educational aspirations of black filmmakers: to make money and to redeem the black race by showing it in its true condition (Leab).

The first successful black production company to make feature films about blacks in positive roles was the Lincoln Motion Picture Company of Los Angeles. Formed in 1916, Lincoln was headed by a handsome, light-skinned black actor named Noble Johnson, and that same year the company produced its first two-reeler feature short, The Realization of a Negro's Ambition, with Johnson as its star. The film was "the first feature film produced in the United States which featured blacks in dramatic, non-stereotypical roles" [Henry T. Sampson, Black in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films, 1977].

By 1918 at least eight film production companies were engaged in producing race movies, and over the next 30 years more than 150 companies would be formed for the same purpose. Yet of this number only 75% would actually produce one or more films, and only 33% would be totally owned and operated by blacks. Limited by lack of capital, technical sophistication, and distribution networks, these companies simply could not compete with Hollywood. The most they might hope for were the marginal profits they could gain from screening their films to segregated black audiences in the urban areas of the north and midwest, and in the small southern towns where screening facilities existed for black audiences.

In early 1918 George Johnson, the brother of Noble Johnson and the Omaha-based distributor of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company's films, read The Homesteader and suggested to Noble that the novel might be worth developing into a film dramatization. The Johnsons contacted Micheaux and began negotiating with him for the rights to the novel. In a letter to the Johnsons dated May 18, 1918, Micheaux agreed to allow them to film the novel, under the condition that the three of them form a new production company for the purpose of making the film, with Micheaux as president, Noble Johnson as vice-president, and George Johnson as secretary. The Johnsons, however, were not about to relinquish the control of their production to this upstart prairie novelist, and the deal fell through.

Undaunted, Micheaux combined his book company with film production, and called it The Micheaux Book and Film Company. He financed his first production by selling stock in the company at $75 a share to the same farmers who had bought his books. Then he set about teaching himself how to make films, and within a year he surpassed all the black filmmakers who had preceded him by producing the first full-length feature film with an all-black cast, The Homesteader [Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., "The Films of Oscar Micheaux: America's First Fabulous Black Filmmaker," The Crisis, April 1979].

Following The Homesteader, Micheaux produced a controversial film entitled Within Our Gates (1920), that contained a realistic scene of a lynching in the south. Initially rejected by the Chicago Board of Movie Censors for fear it might cause a race riot, Within Our Gates was eventually allowed into general release.

Moving to New York City to take advantage of the talented black actors performing in Harlem, Micheaux be-came a production dynamo, turning out in quick succession over 20 silent films, shooting them in the spring, editing them in the summer, and distributing them in the fall and winter. Included among these films were: Symbol of the Unconquered (1920), a film with a strong anti-Ku Klux Klan stance; Deceit (1921), about rural blacks who come to the big city and pass as whites; The Gunsaulas Mystery (1921), about a black man unjustly accused of murdering a white woman; Birthright (1924), which concerned black achievement in the face of white prejudice; and Body and Soul (1924), about black religious leaders and gamblers who exploit the black community. This last film is the only one of Micheaux's silent films still available for screening, preserved perhaps because it starred Paul Robeson in his first film. This film, and about eight sound films, are all that remain of Micheaux's work.

It is true, as many critics claim, that by Hollywood standards Micheaux's films were often technically inept and poorly structured, although it must be remembered that Micheaux produced each film on a budget of about $15,000, whereas Hollywood's budgets were then approaching a million dollars. It is also apparent that Micheaux gave little consideration to the formal conventions of film art that had recently been developed by his contemporaries Porter and Griffith. Micheaux was not a film artist, nor was he a meticulous craftsman; at best, he was a novelist working as a filmmaker.

Micheaux approached the business of motion pictures from the perspective of a precorporate, turn-of-the-century farmer and frontiersman. His life as a home-steader trained him to learn and perform all the different yet essential tasks that needed to be done in order to insure survival and success. Micheaux brought this rugged individualism to his filmmaking. He taught himself the craft and performed most of the tasks himself. He was the producer, writer, director, lighting director, editor, and distributor of almost all of his silent films.

Constantly working under the limitations of low budgets and time constraints, Micheaux was apparently willing to sacrifice quality for quantity. The handful of films that remain for viewing indicate that Micheaux was not concerned with the elements of film art; rather, he was intent on moving the actors through the scene and getting the film made. Lorenzo Tucker recalled that while Micheaux was excellent in preparing and arranging a shot, the work of directing actors did not come easy to him. In fact, Micheaux's usual practice was to direct while lying on a couch and swallowing handfuls of Argo starch directly from the box. "It soothes my aching stomach," he would say (Tucker).

Micheaux rarely granted actors a chance to rehearse a scene once it had been blocked for the camera. Tucker, whose theatrical background had taught him the importance of rehearsals, would often ask Micheaux for time to rehearse, but Micheaux, well aware that time meant money, would refuse.

He would get frustrated and yell at me, "You young actor! I don't know what I'm going to do with you. What's the matter, Tucker, you can walk, can't you? And you can talk, can't you? Well, then, let's shoot the scene!" (Tucker).

Micheaux's attitude about second takes was even more tightfisted. If an actor forgot a line while the camera was rolling, Micheaux sometimes let it pass and printed the scene. Hardly ever would he shoot a scene over. As a concession to an actor he might begin the next shot from the point where the mistake was made—at times from the middle of a sentence. Later edited without benefit of a cutaway, the result was a jump cut. In one of Micheaux's early sound films, The Girl From Chicago (1932), one can hear Micheaux's off-camera voice cuing the actor as the actor, in turn, gestures for Micheaux to be quiet. Micheaux's films are filled with these strange, revealing moments in which we are able to see both the character and the actor behind the character in self-conscious behavior. Critic J. Hoberman called Micheaux's directing a kind of "ipso facto avant-gardism."

To call Micheaux's work problematic is to say the least. His films were made on a shoestring and are characterized by a surreal degree of corner-cutting. He seemed to be oblivious to the laws of cinematic continuity.… Micheaux's actors ran the gamut from B-movie competents to would-be matinee idols, to utter amateurs. Thus, most of his big dramatic moments are played to utter cross-purpose. Left stranded by their director—in scenes grossly overextended—Micheaux's performers strike fantastic poses or stare affectingly into the camera, revealing their individual personalities. Thirty years before Warhol, Micheaux approached a mise-en-scene "degree zero" [J. Hoberman, "A Forgotten Cinema Resurfaces," Village Voice, 17 November 1975].

Why didn't Micheaux spend more time and money on his films? According to Lorenzo Tucker, Micheaux was first and foremost a businessman who knew better than anyone through on-the-job research what the black film market would bear. The margin he was working under would not allow him to raise his standards and make a profit, too.

Tucker said that Micheaux would laugh when he saw other producers spending too much money to hike up production values, knowing that even though the film might be better crafted, the box office just wasn't there to make the film profitable. A strange approach to making a film, perhaps, but obviously the black film market did not operate in the typical Hollywood fashion. In any case the fact remains that Micheaux outlasted every one of his competitors, so he must have known something about marketing and distribution.

Oscar Micheaux was the quintessential self-taught grass roots filmmaker, and that fact is perhaps partly responsible for his naive approach to cinema technology and for his rather parochial sense of visualization and mise-en-scene. Yet his rural background infused Micheaux's films with a rugged individualism and a refreshing outspokenness. In the decades when Hollywood (and white society at large) insisted upon stereotyping blacks as Uncle Toms, Mammies, and Stepin Fetchits, Micheaux presented a positive image of blacks in films that dealt honestly and openly with the social and economic issues they were forced to face on a day-to-day basis.

Rarely, if ever, did Micheaux depict members of his race in a negative light. That is not to say that his films lacked negative behavior. Micheaux's films were often melodramatic, and as such presented a world of good versus evil, with its obvious heroes and villains. The Girl From Chicago (1932), for instance, is a tale of exploitation, greed, and murder. Swing! (1936) is a proto-feminist critique of middle-class black male behavior. Still, while there are negative characters in Micheaux's films, there are no negative stereotypes held up to ridicule.

In The Exile (1931) Micheaux addressed the issue of race and blood. In one of the film's central scenes Micheaux grapples with the dilemma of light-skinned blacks. A white neighbor boy visits the cabin of the light-skinned hero, Jean-Baptiste, and the boy tells Jean-Baptiste that a new farm family has moved in nearby, headed by a Scotsman named Jack Stewart, who has two sons and a pretty daughter.

Jean-Baptiste: They're white, I suppose.

Boy: Yes. Ain't that funny?

Jean-Baptiste: What's funny?

Boy: Your asking me if they're white people. What difference does that make? Anyway, you're not all colored, are you?

Jean-Baptiste: Yes, brother. All colored.

Boy: Aren't you sort of mixed—got some white blood in you?

Jean-Baptiste: If you're part white and part colored, it's all the same. You're considered all colored.

It is a simple scene, yet in a few lines of dialogue Micheaux was able to pinpoint an important distinction.

To be black in America did not simply mean that one had black skin. Anyone, even light-skinned enough to be recognized as white, was considered tainted and consequently inferior to whites as long as there was black blood flowing in their veins. No Hollywood films dared to deal so openly with such issues in 1931.

By 1940 Micheaux had made all but his final film. Realizing that his films were now neither popular nor profitable, Micheaux returned to novel writing. During World War II he wrote, published, and distributed novels that sold rather well. In 1947 he took some of his profits and struck a deal with Astor Pictures to make one more film, The Betrayal. By this time, however, he was suffering from painful arthritis, and walking and writing became very difficult. Still he managed to shoot the film on location in Chicago. On January 7, 1948, Alice B. Russell, Micheaux's wife and an actress in some of his films, wrote a letter to Oscar's sister, Ethel, who lived in Great Bend, Kansas. The letter was rather personal, especially in its description of Micheaux's debilitating illness. But it also provides us with an insight as to how he struggled to put together his final film.

My dear sister Ethel,

Just a note to let you know we are thinking of you and we hope and pray that you are getting along all right.

Things are just so-so with us right now. Dad [Micheaux] has arthritis all over his body, but he keeps going. I have to help him put on his clothes and take them off. And I have to help him take a bath. His hands are slightly swollen and he can't grip or hold anything tightly, but as I said, he keeps on working. It is better for him to keep busy as long as he can, because he is so restless he couldn't stand not being able to go when he wanted to go.

Last spring, Dad saw that the Book business was going down, so he decided that he would try to get back in Pictures as soon as possible. Therefore, he took all his little money and went to Chicago last summer and made a big Picture. He took me along to help him. We came back home in November with the Picture. He has been busy cutting it since and finished last week. He must get $500.00 which he is working on now and then he will start matching the negative so he can get a print for screening, then he will start booking the Picture and he hopes to be ready to play by April. He has already made up some of his advertising matter. I'm enclosing a Program. So you can see dear, he is doing a big job. And he is doing it alone. Isn't that wonderful?

I thought we were going to visit you last year, but we didn't get there. Maybe we will sometime soon, I hope. Take good care of yourself and try to keep well. Dad's books are still selling, but nothing like in the past. Write when you can.

With love, as ever

Alice

Unfortunately for Micheaux, The Betrayal was not a success, and he was finished as a filmmaker. By 1949 the arthritis had confined him to a wheelchair but, even though he must have been in a great deal of pain, he continued to travel from city to city selling his books. He was on the road when he died in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1951.

For some unknown reason Micheaux's body was not shipped back to New York to his wife, Alice B. Russell. Instead, it was sent to Micheaux's sister, Ethel, who buried him in the family plot in Great Bend, Kansas. To this day, 37 years later, Micheaux's grave remains without a tombstone.

Micheaux was always aware of the criticism leveled against his films, and more than once he replied with an appeal for understanding of what he was trying to do. In the January 24, 1925 edition of the Philadelphia Afro-American he summarized his work.

I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the race a cross section of its own life, to view the colored heart from close range. My results might have been narrow at times, due perhaps to certain limited situations, which I endeavored to portray, but in those limited situations, the truth was the predominant characteristic. It is only by presenting those portions of the race portrayed in my pictures, in the light and background of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights (Sampson).