Oscar Micheaux

Micheaux, Oscar (1884–1951), director, producer, novelist, and leading director in early independent African American film. Oscar Micheaux was the first major African American director to produce feature films with black characters for black audiences. Over a thirty-year period from 1919 to 1948 he wrote, directed, and produced thirty-four pictures. Among these are Body and Soul (1924), a silent film starring Paul Robeson in his first American movie, and The Exile (1931), the first African American talkie made by a black film company. Micheaux was a legendary figure in early African American film, a field that began in earnest after the appearance of D. W. Griffith's controversial Birth of a Nation (1915). The great public outcry over the racism in Griffith's film created an underground movement of black filmmakers intent on presenting a more realistic appraisal of African American life.

Micheaux was born in Illinois and after a short period as a farmer and Pullman car porter turned his efforts to writing novels for black audiences. Over a ten-year period Micheaux wrote and self-published ten novels. In 1918 he founded the Oscar Micheaux Corporation in Harlem, New York, and turned to producing and directing films. After a series of short films he made The Homesteader (1919), based on his own novel. In rapid succession during the 1920s and 1930s Micheaux made many films, among them: Sons of Satan (1922), Birthright (1924), Wages of Sin (1929), Underworld (1936), and God's Stepchildren (1937). Micheaux was also an indefatigable promoter of his creations, touring the country to publicize and finance his films. He convinced white theater owners to have special showings for black audiences; he also distributed his films to approximately one hundred black theaters. Filming on a shoestring budget, Micheaux used black actors and actresses anxious for work in films, among them Lorenzo Tucker, Ethel Moses, and Bee Freeman. Reputedly over six feet tall, Micheaux dressed in large black coats and wide-brimmed hats. As a maverick director he often chose his players on a whim and had them work without repeated takes. The films were shot in convenient locations such as friends' homes and hastily constructed sets. Although most films were shot in less than six weeks, Micheaux created films showing black life on realistic terms while also providing entertainment for the black masses. His films contained a range of types and attempted to show that blacks were often just as rich, educated, and cultured as whites.

Recently Micheaux has been criticized for presenting a class system based on color in his movies. Often the most affluent or successful blacks in his films are the lightest-skinned with the straightest hair. Although the nightclub and cabaret scenes in Micheaux's films provide valuable insight into black music and dance, some critics suggest they may have been added to entice white audiences to his films. Nevertheless Micheaux's strongest films confront the race problem head on while presenting the lifestyle and attitudes of the black middle class. His heroes and heroines suffer through conventional romantic and financial crises complicated by the issues of passing and racial prejudice. In their own way Micheaux's films make a plea for black unity and black independence through education and economic competition while presenting a positive image for black audiences.

Micheaux successfully fashioned almost singlehandedly a popular black cinema and a black star system that provided a prototype for African American independent cinema in general. He created dynamic roles for aggressive black female actresses and many of his films featured females in the stronger roles. He gave black actors and actresses roles far different from the usual Hollywood stereotype of servants, Uncle Toms, and buffoons. Micheaux's extravagant personality, great creative flair, and independent vision made him a visionary filmmaker who could connect with the black audiences of the period. He examined and explored the shared, collective attitudes and outlooks of African Americans between the wars in a large body of films, many of which are now lost. Micheaux worked in both silent and sound film, one of the few black directors to bridge this important transitional era in American cinema. His final dream of widespread black and white audiences for his films was not to be. Micheaux'slast film, Betrayal (1948), opened in New York at a white theater and received major attention from the press, but the public took little notice and the movie failed. Soon after, Micheaux died in relative obscurity, and his films remained neglected for over thirty years.

Bibliography

• Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 1973.
• James P. Murray, To Find an Image: Black Films from Uncle Tom to Super Fly, 1973.
• Bernard L. Peterson, “Films of Oscar Micheaux: America's First Fabulous Black Filmmaker,” Crisis 86.4 (Apr. 1979): 136–141.
• Kenneth Wiggins Portor, “Oscar Micheaux,” in DANB, eds. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, 1982, pp. 433–434. “Oscar Micheaux” in World Film Directors 1890–1945, vol. 1, ed. John Wakeman, 1987, pp. 765–770.
• Donald Bogle, Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia, 1988.
• Marc A. Reid, “Pioneer Black Filmmaker: The Achievement of Oscar Micheaux,” Black Film Review 4.2 (Spring 1988): 6–7.
• Jane Gaines, “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama, and Oscar Micheaux” in Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema, 1993, pp. 49–70.—Stephen F. Soitos

film producer; film director; writer

Personal Information

Born Oscar Devereaux Michaux (surname later spelled Micheaux), January 2, 1884, near Metropolis, IL; died March 26, 1951, in Charlotte, NC; son of Calvin (a farmer) and Belle (Willingham) Michaux; married second wife, Alice Russell (an actress), 1929.
Education: High school graduate.

Career

Worked at various jobs in Chicago and South Dakota, early 1900s; writer, 1913-51; filmmaker, 1918-48. Produced, wrote, and directed more than 40 movies, including The Homesteader, 1919; Within Our Gates, 1920; The Gunsaulus Mystery, 1921; The Ghost of Tolston's Manor, 1923; Body and Soul, 1925; A Son of Satan, 1925; The Exile, 1932; The Girl from Chicago, 1932; Ten Minutes to Live, 1932; Ten Minutes to Kill, 1933; Lem Hawkins' Confession, 1935; Swing!, 1938; God's Stepchildren, 1938; Birthright, 1939; The Notorious Elinor Lee, 1940; Lying Lips, 1940; and The Betrayal, 1948.

Life's Work

No history of American cinema is complete without the inclusion of Oscar Micheaux, an enterprising writer/director/ producer whose filmmaking career spanned three decades prior to the dawn of the civil rights movement. Micheaux was a pioneering creator of "race films"--motion pictures for black audiences whose entertainment options were limited by segregation and whose tastes were insulted by racist Hollywood fare. He was not the first African American filmmaker, but he was the most successful of his time.

He is the only artist who produced both silent and talking films--and the only black director who was able to sustain a career through the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. As Donald Bogle explained in Film Comment, Micheaux aimed to create a kind of "alternative cinema" in which blacks were not exploited as either docile servants or ignorant bumpkins, but were rather imbued with the classic American aspirations of upward mobility, romantic fulfillment, and inherent dignity.

Bogle wrote of Micheaux's work: "In these films, black Americans saw themselves incorporated into the national pop mythology, and a new set of archetypes emerged: heroic black men of action. Whether cowboys, detectives, or weary army vets, many of the early characters were walking embodiments of black assertion and aggression, and, of course, they gave the lie to America's notions of a Negro's place." The critic added: "To appreciate Micheaux's films one must understand that he was moving as far as possible from Hollywood's jesters and servants. He wanted to give his audience something 'to further the race, not hinder it...' [His works] remain a fascinating comment on black social and political aspirations of the past. And the Micheaux ideal Negro worldview popped up in countless other race movies. His films likely set the pattern for race movies in general."

The facts of Oscar Micheaux's life are shrouded in mystery today. Most of what is known about his youth comes from his own writings, which have been liberally fictionalized. One fact emerges repeatedly, however: Micheaux was a determined and tireless promoter who left no stone unturned in his quest for money to finance his books and films. In an American Film essay, Richard Gehr called Micheaux "a bona fide artistic pioneer as well as an extraordinarily energetic and resourceful individualist."

Micheaux was born January 2, 1884, on a farm near Metropolis, Illinois. He was the fifth of thirteen children born to Calvin and Belle Michaux. As might be expected with a large family, the Michaux clan struggled financially. Oscar's parents stressed education, however, and the youngster grew up determined to seek his fortune elsewhere. Even as a child, Gehr reported, Micheaux was nicknamed "Oddball" because he was constantly engaged in private projects. He also read widely and was particularly drawn to the self-help social doctrines of Booker T. Washington.

At 17 Micheaux left Metropolis and moved to Chicago. There he held a succession of low-wage jobs, eventually becoming a porter on a Pullman train car. After three years in that position, he became restless again. In 1904 he settled on a tract of land in South Dakota, where he grew quite prosperous through hard work. By his own account, as recorded in his first book, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, by the Pioneer, he was worth the considerable sum of $20,000 by the time he turned 24.

Two events moved Micheaux in a new direction in 1909. He saw his first minstrel show that year and was inspired by it to become a writer. Then he fell in love with the daughter of a white homesteader in his region. The difference in races thwarted this love affair, but the charged subject of interracial romance would become Micheaux's principal theme as both author and filmmaker. In real life, Micheaux married a black Chicago woman but was unable to sustain the union when his father-in-law interfered.

In 1913 Micheaux wrote his thinly veiled memoir, The Conquest, in which the hero, named Oscar Devereaux, settles on a homestead in South Dakota, falls in love with a white woman he is unable to marry, and is cheated out of his property by a devious father-in-law. A small Midwestern press published The Conquest for Micheaux, and the would-be author peddled his book door-to-door in order to sell it. He was particularly successful finding readers when he took a selling trip to the South and found a black readership. Micheaux was so encouraged by his southern trip, in fact, that he followed the same door- to-door selling plan with his second book, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races, published in 1915.

In general, Micheaux filled the plots of his books and screenplays with adventure and romance, returning again and again to the theme of interracial love and the stress of living in a mostly-white community. In his 1917 effort, The Homesteader, for instance, the hero is once again a homesteader in South Dakota who is married to a black woman but in love with a white neighbor. This time love triumphs when the wife commits suicide after discovering that her father has swindled her, and the white neighbor learns that she is, in part, of African heritage. Micheaux peddled The Homesteader the same way he had his other books. This title proved particularly popular and found a readership far in excess of the author's expectations.

The success of The Homesteader as a novel brought Micheaux an offer from the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, an outfit that produced movies--starring black actors--mainly for viewing by black audiences. Audacious and self-assured as always, Micheaux refused to sell the rights to the story unless the Lincoln Company agreed that he could direct the film himself. When the company refused, Micheaux took the idea on the road, selling stock at $75 per share to his book customers until he had amassed enough capital to shoot the film on his own.

"Thus began a pattern Micheaux followed for the next 30 years," wrote Gehr. "He'd shoot a film in the spring and summer, edit it in the fall, then travel with a driver throughout the Northeast, South and East, where he would show stills of his stars to ghetto theater owners." The theater owners would then buy the film for display--and they would often toss in an advance toward Micheaux's next project. It was this dynamic face-to-face salesmanship that provided the continuity in Micheaux's career. Many other black filmmakers went bankrupt, but Micheaux, despite numerous financial setbacks, was able to produce and sell films with regularity.

Some scholars estimate that Micheaux created 48 feature-length motion pictures. Fewer than fifteen survive today due to the deterioration and flammable nature of the old film stock. The first Micheaux feature was The Homesteader, based on his book. Soon thereafter he began to produce movies in the standard American genres--Western, detective, romance, melodrama-- featuring all-black casts. To say that Micheaux worked on shoestring budgets is putting it mildly. His films were crudely and quickly shot, many with natural lighting. Actors forgot lines in mid-sentence, and stage hands sometimes found themselves intruding upon the action-in-progress. The few outtakes remaining after the final cut might find their way into the next feature, and stories and footage were used over and over again.

In his films Micheaux did not care to offer realistic portrayals of the lives of people of color in the inner city of his time. He preferred to entertain his audience with stories of affluent, or at least upwardly-mobile African Americans, and he adhered to the same philosophy of self- improvement that had formed the backbone of his novels. Still, it was impossible to avoid racial issues entirely.

As Gehr explained it: "Micheaux's novels and films constitute intriguing representations of key events in his life and times. The themes of interracial love, wrongful accusation and racial prejudice--both white versus black and light-skinned versus dark-skinned blacks--repeat themselves with an obsessiveness verging on compulsion.... Micheaux worked during a time when blackness was still mysterious and threatening to most whites.... [He] was profoundly ambivalent about his race ... and this love-hate relationship expressed itself in all his work. For every film seeming to focus on alcohol, gambling and drugs, there was another celebrating black achievement, and his analysis of racial politics still overwhelms all subsequent efforts."

Especially in the 1920s and 1930s, Micheaux's films were extremely popular in the so-called "ghetto movie houses" and other venues catering to black audiences. The stars of his films--Lorenzo Tucker, the "colored Valentino," Bee Freeman, the "sepia Mae West," and Slick Chester, the "colored Cagney"- -became favorites in the black community. Famed actor/singer/activist Paul Robeson made his motion picture debut in the 1925 Micheaux vehicle Body and Soul, and Robert Earl Jones (father of actor James Earl Jones) appeared in two Micheaux films, The Notorious Elinor Lee and Lying Lips. Other than serving as an actor, Micheaux filled just about every niche in the movie-making process himself. He wrote the scripts, directed, edited, and marketed his features himself from his own production company in New York City. He was thus one of the first successful independent filmmakers of any race, and a pioneer for Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, Mario Van Peebles, and other African Americans who would enter the field a half-century later.

Very little of Micheaux's work survives today--only two of an estimated 27 silent films and a dozen or so talking pictures-- and what does remain has drawn its share of criticism. Some critics from the black community reportedly contended that Micheaux's films actually compounded the problem of racial stereotyping that was so prevalent among the major studio releases of the era.

In Film Comment, J. Hoberman likewise maintained that Micheaux, "in his success as a self-made entrepreneur, ... was as American as anyone--if not more so. Trapped in a ghetto, but unwilling or unable to directly confront America's racism, Micheaux displaced his rage on his own people. In other words, part of the price that he paid for his Americanness was the internalization of American racial attitudes."

Micheaux made his last feature film, The Betrayal, in 1948. It was one of the few movies he made that was shown in mainstream theaters, and it was not terribly successful. By that time Micheaux was struggling with arthritis that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair. He had spent the years of World War II writing novels and visiting the South for speaking engagements. He was on just such a promotional tour in 1951 when he died in a hotel room in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For quite a few years after his death, Oscar Micheaux was nearly a forgotten man. Then the honors began to accrue. He was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, even though he never made a motion picture in that town. In 1988, his grave in Great Bend, Kansas, was covered with a monument that reads: "A man ahead of his time." Most importantly, the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame immortalized the director with its Oscar Micheaux Awards Ceremony, an annual occasion celebrating black contributions to the American cinema.

Perhaps the most important single figure in the history of race movies, Micheaux is remembered today not so much for the content of his films as for the fact that he made them--so many of them--for an audience overlooked or insulted by Hollywood in the days when discrimination ruled American society even down to its forms of entertainment. Richard Gehr called Micheaux "cinema's most mysterious and prolific African-American auteur," adding: "This ultimate hyphenate increasingly demands attention as the driven spiritual predecessor of the relatively few black directors to make an impact since."

Awards

Granted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; annual award, sponsored by the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, was named for Micheaux in celebration of black contributions to American film.

Works

Writings

• The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, by the Pioneer, Woodruff, 1913.
• The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races, Western Book Supply, 1915.
• The Homesteader, Western Book Supply, 1917.
• The Wind from Nowhere, New York Book Supply, 1944.
• The Case of Mrs. Wingate, New York Book Supply, 1945.
• The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, Based on a Great Insurance Swindle, and a Woman, New York Book Supply, 1946.
• The Masquerade: An Historical Novel, New York Book Supply, 1947.
• Also author of screenplays, including The Homesteader, Body and Soul, The Notorious Elinor Lee, Lying Lips, and The Betrayal, among others.

Further Reading

Books

• Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, Viking, 1973, pp. 109-16.
• Cripps, Thomas, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 183-93, 342-46.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 50: Afro-American Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance, Gale, 1986, pp. 218-25.
• Leab, Daniel J., From Sambo to Superspade: The Black Experience in Motion Pictures, Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
• Salley, Columbus, The Black 100, Citadel Press, 1993.
• Sampson, Henry T., Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films, Scarecrow Press, 1977, pp. 42-55.

Periodicals

• American Film, May 1991, pp. 34-39.
• Ebony, February 1993, pp. 156-60.
• Emerge, November 1993, p. 86.
• Film Comment, July-August 1980, pp. 7-12; October 1985, pp. 31-46.
• New York Times, October 22, 1990, p. C-13.
• South Dakota Review, winter 1973, pp. 62-69.

— Anne Janette Johnson

• Born: Jan 02, 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois
• Died: Apr 01, 1951 in Charlotte, North Carolina
• Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
• Active: '20s-'30s
• Major Genres: Drama
• Career Highlights: Temptation, Within Our Gates, Darktown Revue
• First Major Screen Credit: The Homesteader (1918)

Biography

Though independent filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was an important and prolific contributor to early black American cinema, his work has been largely ignored by film historians. Part of this is due to the fact that few of the forty films he made between 1919 and 1948 have survived, but it is also due to his controversial racial messages and the technical inferiority of his films that have made him hard to integrate into standard histories. Prior to becoming a filmmaker Micheaux worked as a shoeshine boy, a farm worker, and a Pullman porter. By 1913, Micheaux was running a 500 acre South Dakota homestead and had written, published and promoted The Conquest, a semi-autobiographical novel -- he would go on to write ten more. In 1918, the Lincoln Film Company, one of the first all-black studios, offered to film one of his novels, The Homesteader (1917). But negotiations broke down and Micheaux decided to make it himself. He then went to Chicago and took over the abandoned Selig Studio; the film was released one year later. Micheaux became quite successful. By the '30s, black independent cinema was in decline due to the rise of Hollywood all-black musicals and the Depression, but Micheaux was still able to survive. Much of the poor technical qualities of his films can be attributed to lack of funding which resulted in his use of non-pro actors. Most of his films were poorly lit; scenes were shot in one take and the resulting flubs were not edited out. In 1931, he released the sound film The Exile. The film generated controversy amongst black critics and audiences for it's ambivalent, bourgeois ideologies. His 1938 film God's Step Children was especially controversial. Micheaux endeavored to imitate popular Hollywood genres and create African-American versions of major stars, but his films were not terribly successful. He attempted a comeback in 1948 with The Betrayal but it failed miserably. Three years later he died while on a promotional tour. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

Lying Lips Buy this Movie

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