Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 20

  This parade of imitators wasn’t lost on Micheaux. It rankled him that some of the Johnny-come-lately producers were white men—including “some Jews,” in his words, people like Levy and the owners of the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia. In 1926, the Colored Players produced a thoughtful drama called A Prince of His Race; the film was hailed by some as a masterpiece, but Micheaux sniffed at it. A Prince of His Race “appears to draw [audiences] very well, although mighty badly acted and poorly photographed,” he wrote to Richard E. Norman.*

  Micheaux did enjoy The Green-Eyed Monster, though, and saw Norman as a man not unlike himself. Even though he was a white man, Norman wasn’t a dilettante mining for gold. He was devoted to race pictures, a man who wrote, photographed, edited, and directed his own films when necessary. And he wasn’t Jewish.

  The Jewish producers, complained Micheaux, didn’t understand the nuances of black life. Worse yet, they booked their films into all the wrong theaters. “We could help them a great deal,” Micheaux wrote, “but since they seem to think they know it all, and regard all of us who have endured through the years gone by as dubbs, and know nothing[s], I am letting them find out for themselves the things we have learned from experience.”

  Jewish or not, most of the new race-picture producers were frankly commercial (so was Richard E. Norman, for that matter). Micheaux’s aesthetic motivations, on the other hand, were different: He made films in large part to hold a mirror up to his race, for better and for worse.

  Micheaux had to keep up his reputation in that regard, and to that end he was in the midst of negotiations with an elder statesman of race realism, Charles W. Chesnutt. Regarded today as a major figure of early African-American fiction, Chesnutt was an author Micheaux could admire, “a mature gentleman with a keen sense of literary art,” in Micheaux’s words. When the director first met with Chesnutt in Cleveland in late 1920, it was to discuss Chesnutt’s first book, a short story collection called The Conjure Woman from 1900. Having read The Conjure Woman, Micheaux thought it might make a good film.

  In the course of conversation, though, Chesnutt brought up his first and most famous novel, 1901’s The House Behind the Cedars. After hearing the author rhapsodize about Cedars—his most successful book—Micheaux read the novel himself, and soon decided it would make the better film. Not unlike The Homesteader, it was a story about the tragic impossibility of interracial romance, a theme that couldn’t help but resonate with Micheaux.

  Arguably the greatest of all “passing” novels, The House Behind the Cedars concerned Rena Walden, a beautiful “bright mulatto” in North Carolina, whose brother has changed his name and moved away from his family in order to “pass” as white among genteel society. Years after becoming prosperous and successful, the brother returns home to invite Rena into his life. She agrees to join him in his new home elsewhere in South Carolina, “passing” herself to take care of his young child. While there she meets a white aristocrat, who falls in love with her. When events reveal her secret, her life—and the lives of her friends and family—is wrecked.

  Chesnutt himself was a light-skinned black man, as much a “bright mulatto” as Rena, so the character was of “mine own people,” as he once put it. “Like myself, she was a white person with an attenuated streak of dark blood, from the disadvantages of which she tried in vain to escape, while I never did,” the author wrote. Meeting Chesnutt, Micheaux was reminded of the heroes of his own films: though categorized and stigmatized by racism, the author had rejected falseness and pity and lived an honest, honorable life.

  Like many of Chesnutt’s other works, The House Behind the Cedars was set in the fictional town of “Patesville,” a substitute for Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he had grown up. Rena’s mother in the story is the mistress of a white man, and her character was patterned after Chesnutt’s own paternal grandmother, who bore children from a similar interracial liaison. Thus The House Behind the Cedars was not only his most widely read book, but “my favorite child,” in his words, in some ways a quasi-autobiographical story (another echo of The Homesteader). Chesnutt longed to see the story filmed, but filmed properly.

  Micheaux was eager to oblige. He wrote to Chesnutt from Harlem, offering five hundred dollars—for him a stratospheric sum—for the screen rights. But he could only promise a mere twenty-five dollars as down payment. The offer was disappointing to Chesnutt, who knew that even five hundred dollars was a pittance compared to what Hollywood could afford to pay for well-known books. (Just a few years later, for example, producer Sam Goldwyn would pay $125,000 for the screen rights to Harold Bell Wright’s The Winning of Barbara Worth.) Still, Micheaux was persuasive, and Chesnutt was convinced, first in person and then in correspondence.

  From the outset of the lively correspondence that ensued between the two men, Micheaux warned Chesnutt that his film version would inevitably tinker with the novel. “Any story that deals with the relation between these two races in the manner as portrayed in this book is, to say the least, a very delicate subject,” Micheaux said in a January 18, 1921, letter. All changes would be “necessary changes that I consider practical.”

  There were obvious as well as subtle differences between literature and film, Micheaux explained, setting Chesnutt up for changes in much the same way the Johnson brothers had tried warning him just two years earlier. The word “nigger,” for example, was conspicuous in Chesnutt’s novel. It was also prevalent in Micheaux’s pictures, part and parcel of his populist approach. But the word had encountered censorship, and Micheaux had heard the critical caveats. Since “in the last few years, the Negro race has risen almost in a unit against the use of the word nigger, coon, darky, etc.,” Micheaux told Chesnutt, the dialogue or intertitles would minimize such language, which otherwise was natural in a story set in post-Civil War North Carolina.

  “Understand me, for being a writer myself,” he averred, “I find that being compelled to abstain from the use of these words, a very great deal of originality is lost in portraying the lives of the race to which we belong.

  “But public sentiment is stronger than even originality, and, regardless of how much I may object to having or using a word which everyone know[s] would likely be used in a conversation or a controversy, the Negroes of this country will not stand for any of these words flashed on the screen. Of course,” Micheaux added tactfully, “I am aware that twenty years have elapsed since the writing of this story and no way seek to criticize it.”

  From his earliest letters, Micheaux demonstrated how his thoughts raced ahead of his actual writing of the script. Micheaux suggested to Chesnutt that he might begin the screen version of The House Behind the Cedars with a chapter drawn from the middle of the novel, an extended flashback that reveals Rena’s mother as the mistress of a “rich and liberal” white protector, whose paternity accounts for her light-skinned brood. The film ought to open with that backstory, Micheaux said, and then proceed chronologically. “This is a very strong start,” Micheaux explained. “Fading out at this point, a title reading ‘Ten years later’ would bring us to where the story now starts. From there on I find parts that you have described in places only mildly that I would intensify very greatly, while other more carefully drawn out I would in many instances be compelled to omit or change altogether.”

  Many of Micheaux’s suggestions had less to do with what was realistic than with what was financially “practical,” he admitted. While Chesnutt’s novel had Rena meet her white beau at a gala racetrack occasion, such a scene “would require a great many people dressed in costumes of that period, which would entail an expense so large that the limited amount of returns which we can look forward to would not justify [the outlay],” he wrote.

  Even as it stood, the bulk of Chesnutt’s story took place “shortly after the Civil War,” Micheaux noted, and the production “will require such minute detailing to avoid the camera catching some modern incident.” In general, the filmmaker warned Chesnutt that he would try to avoid
elaborate crowd and street setups in bringing his story to the scene.

  But in these earliest letters to Chesnutt, Micheaux was also thinking about story elements that had nothing to do with reality or budget. In the 1950s, the French cinephiles of Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif would break critical ground by anointing a number of American directors who “wrote with the camera,” regardless of whether they wrote the actual scripts of their films, hailing these pantheon directors as the “auteurs,” or true authors of their bodies of work. In this way, too, Micheaux was a pioneer, an auteur before the term was coined. He always wrote as well as directed his films. He consistently drew on stories from his own life, of course, but he also “personalized” other people’s stories with his ideas.

  Though he insisted that he loved everything about Chesnutt’s story, Micheaux suggested that one of its characters could be enhanced in such a way that would enable Micheaux to turn a relentlessly grim drama, concluding with Rena’s death, into a story with a rosier ending. Rena didn’t have to die, he proposed; she could revive and marry a man of her own race. Micheaux zeroed in on one of Chesnutt’s secondary characters, a hardworking black man named Frank who grows up across the street from Rena and stays her loyal friend through life. In Chesnutt’s novel, the goodhearted Frank can only tell Rena that he loves her, on her deathbed. Micheaux wanted to “improve” the humble character, gradually transforming him into someone audiences would accept as Rena’s soulmate. “I would make the man Frank more intelligent at least towards the end of the story,” Micheaux suggested, “permitting him to study and improve himself, for using the language as he does in the story he would not in any way be obvious as a lover.”

  Despite the “wonderful version” of a tragic ending Chesnutt had devised for his novel, such an unhappy ending was wrong for a Micheaux film, he said. The race-picture pioneer was always mindful about possible viewers’ reactions; it was a cornerstone of his philosophy to be at one with his audience. Explaining how he wished to please the “colored people whom we must depend upon as a bulwark for our business,” Micheaux said he always tried to “visualize just how they would leave the theatre after the close of a performance.”

  The way to fix the story, Micheaux advised Chesnutt, would be to make Frank “stronger, and while good as he is portrayed, unselfish and devoted, but in the meantime for permit him to have become sufficiently intelligent, such a reasonably courageous fellow, that during Rena’s illness she would be able to see and appreciate in him the wonderful man he really was, and to have her heart go out to him in the end, as his reward.”

  Micheaux said he was “sure” this changed ending would send “our people” streaming “out of the theater with this story lingering in their minds, with a feeling that all good must triumph in the end,” which was preferable to the audiences’ “gloomy muttering and a possible knocking with their invisible hammers.” Besides, wrote Micheaux, it was his experience that an upbeat finale “would result much more profitably from a financial point of view.”

  Everything Micheaux proposed met with Chesnutt’s approval. And even if Micheaux’s five hundred dollars didn’t excite the author, he realized that it was “better than nothing”—that is, he had no other bids. Yet Chesnutt’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, urged him to ask for one hundred dollars upfront, not the paltry twenty-five.

  So Chesnutt wrote to inform Micheaux that he could have The House Behind the Cedars if he could afford to pay one hundred dollars as the first of five installment payments. He had been encouraged by his meetings with Micheaux and by his letters, but it was the quality of his films that really won him over. “I have no doubt that you will make it an interesting and credible picture,” Chesnutt wrote. “That you can do so I am well aware, from the specimen of your work that I saw in Cleveland several months ago.”*

  Corresponding with his publisher, Chesnutt showed himself to be the model of an accommodating author. He fully expected Micheaux to “chop” his favorite book up “more or less, and probably change the emphasis on certain characters,” he wrote, but “this is no more than the usual fate of a novel which is filmed,” in Chesnutt’s words. Besides, he added, “I have seen one of the films produced by this company, and it wasn’t at all bad.”

  A jubilant Micheaux wrote back to say he would strike the first check promptly after the contract was formally worded and mutually signed. In the first flush of their new partnership, he urged Chesnutt to consider writing original screen stories for other Micheaux productions. He said he’d eagerly pay him for “at least four.”

  “It is not, when writing directly for the screen, necessary to write a long book,” Micheaux explained, giving insight into his filmmaking regimen during the silent era, “synopsis being sufficient. I find that mine approximate 8,000 to 15,000 words, a detailed synopsis setting forth a concrete tho’t from which I can make an adaptation.”

  A concise descriptive synopsis with dialogue highlights was preferable to a novel-length manuscript that might “run to conversation,” Micheaux warned. “Bear this in mind if you decide to write more stories for us—description and not such much conversation, plenty of action, intensity, and strong counterplot…

  “Write of the things you have known more intimately. I like stories of the South—strange murder cases, mystery with dynamic climaxes—but avoid race conflict,” i.e., conflict between black and white people, “as much as possible, which does not mean that I want stories ‘all colored’—I do not. I desire them as the races live in relation to each other in every day life.”

  Micheaux said he expected to get right to work on The House Behind the Cedars. He hoped the script would come easily and the film version of Chesnutt’s novel might rush before the cameras by May or June 1921.

  But the hundred-dollar pledge to Charles W. Chesnutt was another figment of Micheaux’s imagination. He didn’t have the money to spare. Stalling Chesnutt, the filmmaker returned to his own voluminous story file, and pulled out a “strange murder story,” set in the South, on a theme that would come to preoccupy him as obsessively as the subject of “passing.”

  The Leo Frank case involved a sensational crime, a Negro versus a Jew in the courtroom, and a lynching. Micheaux had first delved into the case in his novel The Forged Note, making a study of the trial in Atlanta; and he was not the only person, especially in black America, who believed the Negro in the case might have told the truth, and the Jew was the actual killer.

  He tended to impugn Frank in his books, embracing the prosecution’s inference that Frank was a “sexual pervert” who disliked ordinary lovemaking and was therefore compelled to rape or sodomize his victim after killing her. But his films about the case were more searching and enlightened: Though the Negro was always innocent in his on-screen versions of the story, the Jew wasn’t necessarily guilty either. Instead, Micheaux suggested that a third, unsuspected party might be culpable.

  It appears from press accounts that Micheaux began working on a scenario about the Frank case on his first swing through the South in 1919, promoting The Homesteader. At that time, the working title was “Circumstantial Evidence.” Although the names and places would be changed when Micheaux switched the setting from Atlanta to New York, there was no question as to the antecedents. In early drafts the victim’s name was Little Mary, as in Phagan; later, it would be changed to Myrtle Gunsaulus, giving the film its final, unwieldy title, The Gunsaulus Mystery. (“I like odd and peculiar names,” the Sidney Wyeth character says in the sound remake of The Gunsaulus Mystery—Lem Hawkins’ Confession— as though alluding to its predecessor.)

  Micheaux boldly inserted himself into the story, writing his Forged Note alter ego Sidney Wyeth into the script as a West Indian selling his novel door to door, in order to finance his law degree. Wyeth is captivated by a woman who buys his book, but they are separated by a misunderstanding.

  Some time later, Wyeth, now a successful attorney, is drawn into a peculiar homicide and forced to investigate the crime himself to dig
out the true facts. Wyeth thus becomes the first “race detective” in film; indeed, most of literature lagged behind.* Like many of Micheaux’s innovations, this idea sprang from his own experience: Wyeth, the first of many black gumshoes and undercover agents in his films, was a melding of his Wyeth persona with the two mixed-race operatives he counted, in The Forged Note, as part of Leo Frank’s defense team.

  Wyeth agrees to defend the chief suspect in the sordid murder of a female factory worker. As in the actual Frank case, the initial suspect is a night watchman, in this instance, the brother of the woman from Wyeth’s past. Reunited, Wyeth and the woman team up as sleuths. Their detective work shifts suspicion to a Negro janitor, who, after being arrested, implicates the factory superintendent.

  Micheaux shot The Gunsaulus Mystery in the New York area in early 1921. E. G. Tatum played the night watchman; Louis DeBulger was Lem Hawkins, the Negro janitor (the James Conley figure); and Evelyn Preer played the sister quietly in love with the author, lawyer, and “race detective” played by Ed “Dick” Abrams, a well-regarded lead for the Lafayette Players. Lawrence Chenault, with his relatively light complexion, played the sleazy white factory boss.

  The seven-reel drama was ready for Micheaux’s first Harlem premiere at the Lafayette Theatre in April 1921, and by all indications the film was a crowd- and critic-pleaser. The New York Age reported that The Gunsaulus Mystery “holds the interest of the audience from start to finish…[and] is one of the best pictures the Micheaux Film Corporation has produced.” Other black newspapers agreed, praising the suspenseful handling of the plot while noting Micheaux had also managed to sneak in uproarious “bits of comedy.”

  Micheaux heavily promoted the film’s parallels to the Frank case. “The evidence shows that Leo Frank committed the crime and got a COLORED MAN to help him dispose of the body,” read a 1921 advertisement in the Chicago Whip, “And then tried to blame the crime on the COLORED MAN.” But the marketing avoided the word “Jew,” and the factory boss in the 1921 film (and its remake) bore the WASPish name of “Brisbane.”