Oscar Micheaux: America's First Black Director

A book in my collection ---- 'The Great and Only Oscar Micheaux,' by Patrick McGilligan. A book I highly recommend.

The most prolific independent filmmaker in American cinema, Oscar Micheaux wrote, produced and directed forty-four feature length films between 1919 and 1948.

The fifth child in a family of thirteen, Micheaux worked as a shoeshine boy, farm laborer and Pullman porter. In his early twenties, he was self-confident to the point that he invested his savings in farmland in an all-white community in faraway South Dakota. Within nine years, he had expanded his holdings to 500 acres whilst writing, publishing and distributing his first semi-autobiographical novel, The Conquest (1913). He popularized it by selling it door to door to the farmers of South Dakota.

In 1918, the Lincoln Film Company in Nebraska offered to film Micheaux's 1917 novel, The Homesteader. But when Lincoln refused to produce the film on the scale that he desired, Micheaux responded by founding his own production company and shooting the work himself.

He started the Micheaux Book and Film Company, raising money by, again, selling shares door to door in South Dakota. Micheaux found the equipment and actors he needed in Chicago, bought a car, hired a white chauffeur and drove all the people and equipment from Chicago to Winner, South Dakota. (There was a sod house near Winner, which he needed as a location.)

"The Homesteader" was the first full-length feature film directed, written and produced by an African-American. It secured Micheaux's name in history books, and was declared a success when it grossed over $5,000.

Catching the bug, Micheaux devoted all his energy to moviemaking, writing, producing, directing and distributing every film himself. Within a year he made three more films, earning over $40,000.

Micheaux worked successfully and prolifically throughout the next decade, largely thanks to the promotional techniques he had developed in selling his own novels. With script in hand he would tour ghetto theatres across the nation, soliciting advances from owners and thus circumventing the cash-flow and distribution problems that limited other all-black companies to producing only one or two pictures.

Micheaux offered audiences a black version of Hollywood fare, complete with actors typecast as the "black Valentino" or the "sepia Mae West." Above all, Micheaux saw his films as "propaganda" designed to "uplift the race." In the 1930's, his films represented a radical departure from Hollywood's portrayal of blacks as servants and brought diverse images of ghetto life and related social issues to the screen for the first time.

From the start, Micheaux sparked controversy. After "The Homesteader," he continued tackling interracial romance and skin color hypocrisy. Despite vehement protests, he never backed down from portraying another taboo subject, corrupt clergymen.

With his fifth movie, "Within Our Gates," Micheaux attacked the racism portrayed in the most highly acclaimed silent movie of all time, D.W. Griffith's masterpiece, "The Birth of a Nation." In his movie, Griffith depicted blacks as lazy alcoholics who raped white women. Micheaux turned the table on Griffith, filming a scene where a white man tries to rape a black woman, using exactly the same lighting, blocking, and setting as the black on white rape scene in "The Birth of a Nation." Unfortunately for Micheaux, "Within Our Gates" came out right after the race riots, which plagued America throughout the summer of 1919. Black and white officials feared further violence if "Within Our Gates" was shown and they forced Micheaux to edit out controversial scenes. Micheaux, however, turned around and booked other theatres to show the "uncut version" to even bigger audiences.

With the advent of sound (with its attendant high costs), Hollywood's move into the production of all-black musicals and the Depression combined to bring about the demise of independent black cinema in the early 1930s. Micheaux, alone, survived. He released his first "talkie, " The Exile in 1931.

During his later years, black audiences abandoned Micheaux, having grown tired of his replaying certain themes over and over. Nobody could have guessed how visionary these themes would one day appear.

Micheaux's attacks on hypocritical clergymen ring especially true in this day of money-grabbing television evangelists. Critics applaud modern filmmakers for breaking "new" ground in dealing with interracial romance and light-skinned versus dark-skinned blacks. Micheaux covered those subjects 80 years ago.

Even Micheaux's craft, lambasted for years, demands new respect. He experimented with nonlinear storytelling and perspective shifts with which current filmmakers are now supposedly revolutionizing filmmaking in the 1990's.

Micheaux's work has experienced a renaissance of sorts in recent years. His movies draw large audiences when shown at retrospectives, and his South Dakota books have returned to print. In 1986 the DGA honored Oscar Micheaux, Fellini and Akira Kurosawa with its Golden Jubilee Special Award. The Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame honors artists every year at the Oscar Micheaux Award Ceremony. In Gregory, South Dakota, the Oscar Micheaux Festival is an eagerly anticipated annual event. In Hollywood, the Oscar Micheaux Award is presented each year by the Producers Guild of America. And the most independent moviemaker there ever was even has his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Oscar Micheaux Filmography

1919
The Homesteader
Within Our Gates

1920
The Brute
Symbol of the Unconquered

1922
Gunaslaus Mystery
Deceit
The Dungeon
The Virctin of the Seminole
Son of Satan

1923
Jasper Landry's Will

1924
Body and Soul (This movie marked the screen debut of Paul Robeson.)

1926
The Spiders Web

1927
Millionaire

1928
When Men Betray
Easy Street

1929
Wages of Sin 1930
The Exile
Darktown Revue

1932
Veiled Aristocrat
Black Magic
Ten Minutes to Live

1933
The Girl From Chicago
Ten Minutes to Kill

1934
Harlem After Midnight

1935
Lem Hawkin's Confession

1936
Temptation
Underworld

1937
God's Step Children

1938
Swing

1939
Birthright
Lying Lips

1940
The Notorious Elinor Lee

1948
Betrayal

Source: Producers Guild of America