Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 15

  Johnson was taken aback, but he agreed to consider Micheaux’s demands. Micheaux left without signing any contract, telling Johnson he would return to Omaha to finalize plans as soon as the postal clerk and his brother had hashed out the details of the new arrangement. Meanwhile, he said, he would embark on the scenario. On June 3, he wrote George to solicit Noble’s professional insights: “You might write your brother and enquire whether he would not be so kind as to give me his idea[s] before I go into the details of picturising the story, that is, parts which he feels should be changed and improved upon.”

  The devil was in the details, however, and Micheaux seemed conflicted about making the Lincoln commitment. His book business was thriving. In his June 3 letter he urged the Johnson brothers to take The Homesteader off its timetable until January 1, 1918, giving him time to wrap up publishing affairs, complete the scenario (“to do this, of course, will require time and very careful study”), and then “offer same to your Company for examination, at which time I feel you can better appreciate how full well I understand” the requisites of motion pictures.

  Yet only a few days later, Micheaux wrote again from Sioux City, sounding more firm and committed. He said he might even move to Omaha to facilitate the filmmaking partnership, that he was looking forward to signing a Lincoln-Micheaux contract. “Expect to send my wife to her home on an extended visit” in order to get busy on the script, he informed George Johnson—the first and only time he is known to have mentioned “Sarah Micheaux” in correspondence.

  While Micheaux’s letters assured Johnson that “the same ideas and plans which were technically agreed to in Omaha are still my ideas for the sale of the book as well as the production of the picture,” he kept adding new stipulations. At the end of June he asked for exclusive exhibition rights to the “white territories” of Wisconsin, Minnesota, both Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. Again, this wasn’t a deal-breaker, as Lincoln normally skirted such “white territories.” Still, bit by bit, the student was taking over the curriculum.

  Although George Johnson said later he believed the proposed merger fell apart when his actor-brother rejected Micheaux’s assistance and supervision of the film—“because Micheaux not only had no [film] experience but also had no Hollywood connections”—other events proved at least equally decisive.

  Chief among them was the news, in July, that Noble Johnson had been called on the carpet by Universal, which insisted he cease and desist all appearances in Lincoln productions. This was one way the studios reined in their black contract players, exaggerating the extent to which race pictures competed with their own releases, for Noble was really making the Lincoln films “between times, or rather, on Sundays,” in Micheaux’s words.

  But Hollywood was the actor’s bread and butter, so Johnson quit the company he had founded. Clarence Brooks took over the leads of the Lincoln projects that were already in the pipeline, but Brooks was still in the formative stages of his career; he hardly boasted the box-office mystique of Noble Johnson. The prospect of having Noble play Jean Baptiste, the author’s shadow self, had been half the appeal of the Lincoln-Micheaux alliance. Micheaux had seen all the Lincoln productions, and he was a fan of Noble’s work in his Universal pictures, too. “Saw Johnson kill a dozen men, make a great fight in the Bull’s Eye, and in the end ‘die’ a horrible death himself,” Micheaux told George Johnson in one letter.*

  By July, it was clear that Noble would not be playing the homesteader. And with this, Micheaux’s thinking took a huge leap: He decided to produce the film himself.

  Although Noble’s brother George was left empty-handed in Omaha, he made a point of staying in contact with Micheaux. The George P. Johnson archives offer a wealth of material about the whole field of race pictures, including correspondence to and from Micheaux. One revelation of these files is that Johnson sometimes resorted to devious means to keep tabs on Micheaux. He always believed that he was the one who put “the film bug” in Micheaux’s ear, and that not just The Homesteader, but the film company that Micheaux went on to found, was his stolen baby.

  Micheaux wrote regularly to Johnson and the remaining Lincoln partners, diplomatically keeping them apprised of his plans to film his homesteading novel. At first there remained a faint possibility that Noble might sneak away from Universal between assignments to star in the first Oscar Micheaux production. “Have you had any word from Noble, as to when he will be through the last serial he is helping make?” Micheaux wrote Clarence Brooks. “I should be pleased to hire him, paying him in cash a goodly sum, providing he will be available.”

  By August, however, that illusion had evaporated. It was disappointing, Micheaux reflected in a letter to the actor’s brother, that Noble couldn’t make himself available to act “the hero in this production; but it is obvious that the Negro race contains other talent, and it is that I will shortly set out to seek, not only for the one part, but for the entire picture.”

  Micheaux knew how to make strength out of weakness. He decided he would in general bypass Hollywood players, saving money by casting stage actors, vaudeville performers, singers and musicians—lesser-knowns and unknowns. An inveterate theatergoer, he was familiar with actors in Chicago and New York, by name and reputation. “I feel I can collect more complete talent—in the cast—in the Negro race, than I could in Los Angeles, and it would be too expensive as well as unnecessary to freight them clear across the continent at present R.R. rates. So it seems that the picture will be made in either Chicago or New York.”

  The new Micheaux Book and Film Company was incorporated in Sioux City, mainly for purposes of convenience. “Although Sioux City is mentioned as the office city,” Micheaux told Johnson, “that is only because I expect to sell most of the stock to Sioux City people and in that vicinity, and do not feel that they would appreciate the main office being so far from where they live. But as soon as the subscribed stock has been paid up, incorporation completed etc., I expect to establish the main office in the business district of Chicago, get a Dodge Roadster, and make my home” there.

  The first step was finding investors for Micheaux’s race-picture enterprise. The legal papers authorized twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars in stock, to be divided into shares of one hundred dollars each.

  The brochure, penned by Micheaux himself, foresaw booking The Homesteader into “the largest theaters in the largest cities under the personal direction of Mr. Micheaux, whose long experience in publicity work and the sale of his books to individuals, bookstores, libraries, etc., has peculiarly fitted him for the work in hand. After this it will be booked consistently in the smaller places, but always under the personal direction of Mr. Micheaux, who knows and understands more fully, the nature and sentiments of more communities than any man we know of…”

  The brochure continued: “Aside from the general public, who themselves, having never seen a picture in which the Negro race and a Negro hero is so portrayed, and can therefore be expected to appreciate the photoplay as a diversion and a new interest, is the fact that twelve million Negro people will have their first opportunity to see their race in [a] stellar role. Their patronage, which can be expected in immense numbers, will mean in itself alone a fortune…”

  Micheaux had a ready-made list of possible investors: the buyers of his novels. Yet it was one thing to purchase a book for $1.50, quite another to spend $100 on film shares. He found that, except for writing to trusted relatives and friends—Ernest Jackson probably kicked in for a few shares—he was obliged to revert to the salesmanship techniques he’d learned as a boy in Metropolis and honed as a self-published author. He visited each prospect in person, hailed them by name, warmed them up with a smile and small talk, then dazzled them with his pitch.

  “I have been soliciting subscriptions to the capital stock about nine days,” Micheaux informed Clarence Brooks on August 11, “and have to date a trifle over $5,000 subscribed. Am succeeding as well as I had hoped, only I find it takes lon
ger than I had calculated, it being necessary to get the people’s attention and argue sometimes for quite a period. At this rate I contemplate that I will have the $10,000 subscribed and collected by September first.”

  At length he found his backers, some of them black, many white. Hugh E. McGuire, an auctioneer mainly of farm equipment in Holstein, Iowa, was willing to take a flyer on three shares, and later bought three more; his relatives say that McGuire’s Irish Catholicism, and the fact that he and his family were Democrats in a German Republican stronghold, made him sensitive to prejudice and sympathetic to Micheaux’s goals. “He’d try anything once,” recalled his great granddaughter Martha Boyle, an officer of the Iowa auction company that today is still run by members of the McGuire family. Hugh McGuire died “broke,” she added.

  Thomas W. Stewart bought seven shares; at one point, Micheaux listed him as the company’s vice-president. He was a Tuskegee graduate, a veterinary doctor working as a meat inspector in the Swift, Armour, and Cudahy packing houses for the Department of Agriculture and living in South Sioux City. Besides being a black man of Micheaux’s generation and a reader of his self-published novels, Stewart “was always confident of ‘get rich quick’ schemes, which of course never materialized,” according to his daughter Martha (Stewart) Hunter.

  It was axiomatic in Micheaux’s life that whenever he made a decision, and had mustered enough money to act accordingly, he acted with blinding speed. Earlier in the summer, still hedging about a Lincoln-produced version of The Homesteader, the novelist had said he would need roughly six months to effect a proper script. By August 11, completely won over, he was telling Brooks that the scenario would take about “two weeks, this I will perhaps write in Chicago while I am at the same time gathering the players for the act.”

  And he was already pressing ahead of the script and the actors: Micheaux himself was photographing background scenes. It was harvest season in Iowa, and he realized that he could save time and money by having a camera crew shoot some footage of fields that would stand in for South Dakota. “It is necessary to get these scenes,” Micheaux explained to Brooks in his August 11 letter, “since when I am ready to begin active work on the production, harvest will be over with.” He intended to film the harvest that very day unless it rained, in which case he would put it off for a few days “since Ringling Bro’s will be here tomorrow, and I contemplate attending the same.”

  Amazing but true: By mid-September 1918, five months after he was first approached by the Johnson brothers, Micheaux had opened film company offices at 538 S. Dearborn Avenue in the Chicago Loop and rented space at the well-known former Selig Polyscope studios, with production scheduled to start after October 1.*

  But the scriptwork could barely keep pace, and according to at least one published source, Micheaux asked for help from an elder statesman: William Foster, who sometimes went under the pseudonym “Juli Jones Jr.” “A clever hustler” and jack-of-all-trades, as Thomas Cripps described him in Slow Fade to Black, Foster worked at various points as a press agent, a sportswriter, and a salesman of sheet music and coffee. But he also was an actor, writer, and director for the Pekin Players, before turning out some of the very first race pictures before World War I, films Micheaux had seen during his stint in Chicago suing his father-in-law. Foster’s 1912 production The Railroad Porter, “an imitation of Keystone comic chases” in the words of Cripps, was probably “the first black movie.”

  With (or without) Foster’s help, The Homesteader script shaped up. “Writing it caused me considerable worry,” Micheaux reported to Clarence Brooks on September 13, “but I am mostly through and relieved.”

  He was still vacillating over whether to direct. He engaged Jerry Mills to play the Reverend McCracken character, but also as a kind of security blanket. Mills was regarded as one of the “Professors” of the old Pekin Players. Beyond playing the title character in The Railroad Porter, Mills had been involved in various capacities in Foster’s other pioneering race pictures, and had been a prolific writer and director of Black Belt shows. Micheaux was wary of handling actors, and press items of the time suggest that he had Mills in mind as the director. Micheaux praised Mills to Clarence Brooks as “well versed in the theatricals, and is highly respected as a dependable associate.”

  However, by the time October rolled around, it’s clear Micheaux had built up a momentum, and a zest for picturemaking, that he never lost. The book and film, after all, were his life story. Farsighted in so many ways, Micheaux was ahead of his time in viewing film as a medium to express his personal beliefs and feelings, and by paying others less and taking the reins himself, he saw that he could reap more profits while protecting his ideas. He would be the supreme boss of his films, directing and producing them himself. This was undoubtedly the subtext of his uneasiness with the Lincoln partnership. And as with so many decisions made on his first film, this policy of writing, directing, and producing, once established, became the unwavering pattern of his career.

  Micheaux’s stock offering had proposed a rock-bottom budget of $15,000 for The Homesteader, “which includes four sets of films and $1,500 worth of lithograph posters.” The Birth of a Nation cost an estimated $100,000, before prints and advertising, making its budget more than ten times that of The Homesteader.

  Micheaux was a cunning economizer, however, and one of the places where he usually saved was on actors’ fees. “Most any of the ‘big’ stars would get this much for their acting alone in such a picture,” Micheaux’s brochure informed possible investors. “Happily, owing to the peculiar nature of this story, an expensive ‘big star’ is not essential for its success.”

  The professional actors he hired were often amateurs where motion pictures were concerned. He introduced many black actors to the screen; most of them were grateful, and few were in a position to demand star treatment. Micheaux also used genuine amateurs from time to time: they came even cheaper, and demanded less.

  Especially during the silent era, he drew repeatedly from the pathfinders of Chicago’s Pekin Stock Company, from the similarly trailblazing Anita Bush Stock Company of New York, and from the Bush troupe’s immediate successor, the Lafayette Players, the most heralded of the all-black repertory companies, which first had started presenting shows at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre in 1916.

  All these ensembles, but especially the Lafayette Players, were renowned for the versatility of their talent and the range of their shows. The Lafayette Players performed everything from light opera to the heaviest Eugene O’Neill tragedy. They presented original plays about black life, and frequently mounted Broadway plays or evergreens as interpreted by all-black casts. They prided themselves on being able to deliver any type of entertainment. And as they began to tour widely, introducing legitimate theater to black audiences in provincial parts of the country, the Players became “in a special way educators as well as entertainers,” in the words of Sister Francesca Thompson, who has definitively researched the history of the group.*

  The Lafayette Players had come to Chicago for the first time in the spring of 1918, and even as Micheaux was finalizing his casting a second company of the celebrated all-black troupe was finishing a lengthy summer run at the Lafayette on the Stroll. They had taxed the theater’s capacity with constant overflow crowds, with the audience at some of the acclaimed plays “at least forty per cent Caucasian,” according to Tony Langston in his Chicago Defender column.

  The Lafayette Players were seasoned performers, whom a novice director didn’t have to worry about guiding through tricky emotional scenes; such veterans could virtually “direct” themselves. And the black press had already made the Lafayette Players into celebrities, another valuable asset to Micheaux: They were already marquee names.

  Casting the principal roles was the final hurdle, and Micheaux seesawed between candidates. What he looked for in a leading lady was another One True Woman, an actress whose beauty was matched by her intelligence. Of course she had to have ability, and she had to
appeal to audiences. For his leading man—not just in The Homesteader, which was expressly autobiographical, but for most of his films—Micheaux would look for another archetype: a tall, handsome variant of himself.

  To play the Scottish maiden Agnes (“The Tenderest Little Heroine Ever Created,” as he would later advertise her), Micheaux settled on Iris Hall, a petite, fair-skinned ingenue who had come to Chicago with the New York road company of the Lafayette Players. She played French maids and other supporting parts. But the young actress was “sweet, tender, vivacious and clever,” Micheaux explained to Clarence Brooks, plus she “can pass for white and is just the size.” Besides the Lafayette Players, Micheaux told Brooks, Hall “has worked in movies as a maid with [Famous Players–Lasky star] Pauline Frederick—can make up fine.”

  When Jerry Mills didn’t work out as the Reverend, Micheaux replaced him with Vernon S. Duncan, a Kentucky-born, Chicago-based actor who had the required size and power. For the “despicable” sister Ethel, the first of many “bad girl” or “vamp” characters in his films, Micheaux picked a Harlem actress, Inez Smith, “a striking, highly educated girl from New York that appears to me as having been made for the part.”

  At first he had a different actress in mind for the Orlean McCracken character, but when she failed to jell Micheaux switched to Evelyn Preer, born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but reared in Chicago. Just twenty-one, Preer was not yet widely known, though she had been performing in local shows since graduating from high school. Micheaux spotted the light-caramel-skinned, straight-haired beauty on a street corner, where she was using her histrionic talents to help her mother, a devoted Pentecostal, preach and raise money for building a church. “Preer, young, vivacious, and extremely attractive, was capable of drawing crowds to hear and watch her as she made a tearful plea, crying ‘Sinners, oh sinners, come home!’ with her arms outstretched wide in supplication,” wrote Sister Francesca Thompson.