Ottley, Roi, 319
Ovington, Mary White, 221
Page, O. J., 4
Parks, Gordon, 349
Pathé Exchange, 195
Peele, Walley, 198
Pekin Stock Company, 124
Peterson, Bernard L., 190
Peterson, Bernard L., Jr., 226n
Peyton, Dave, 129
Phagan, Mary, 100–101, 275
Phantom of Kenwood, The (film), 262, 271
“pink slip” pictures, 133
Poitier, Sidney, 349
Preer, Evelyn, 126, 138n, 178, 186, 194, 205, 212, 227–28, 229–30, 259, 297
in Birthright, 198
in The Brute, 147–48
death of, 277
in Deceit, 172–73
in The Gunsaulus Mystery, 167–68
in Within Our Gates, 141–42
premonitions, Micheaux and, 142
Pullman, George, 21
Pullman Palace Car Company, 20–21
race pictures, 113, 120, 218–20
banner year for, 302
costs of doing business for, 183–84
during Depression, 284
World War II and, 328
racial intermarriage, 54
Reagan, Ronald, 349
Regester, Charlene, 206, 348, 349
Reid, Tim, 349
religion, in Micheaux films, 134
relinquishment system, 63–64
Reol Productions, 159, 247
Rhinelander, Leonard K., 206–7, 234
Roanoke, Virginia, 174–76
filming in, 179
OM establishes branch in, 171
Robeson, Paul, 181, 190, 203–4, 205, 206, 222, 347
Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 284
Rosebud Reservation, 29–30
Rosenwald, Julius, 101
Royal Gardens Film Company, 159, 247
Russell, Alice B. See Micheaux, Alice
B. Russell (second wife)
Russell, Julia Theresa, 205, 222, 223
Russell, Mary Malloy, 223
Russell, Sylvester, 149, 219–20, 235
Sack, Alfred N., 285–86, 311
Sack, Lester, 285, 311
Sack Amusement Enterprises, 273, 284, 286–90, 290, 302, 347
Sanborn, Gertrude, 259
Santino, Jack, 22
Savini, R. M., 340
Schiffman, Frank, 219, 249, 257–58, 260, 267, 270
Selig Polyscope studios, 123, 123n
Sewell, Alma, 180
Sharp, Saundra, 350
Shuffle Along (musical), 190–91
Sioux City, Iowa, 104–5
Sissle, Noble, 190, 262
Slaughter, E. Bismarck, 127
Slide, Anthony, 109
Smith, Grace, 226, 268
Smith, Inez, 126
Smith, Lillian (Eugenia), 319
Snelson, Floyd G., Jr., 247
Son of Satan, A (film), 191, 202–3
Spaulding, C. C., 266
Spence, Louise, 138n, 143–44
Spider’s Web, The (film), 213–15
remake of, 268–69
Spoor, George K., 329
Spoor, Marvin, 329
Stanton, Myra, 330, 334
Stewart, Thomas W., 122
Story of Dorothy Stanfield, The (Micheaux) (novel), 291, 320–22
Strausbaugh, John, 63
Strenge, Walter, 254
Stribling, T. S., 191–93, 297
Sutton, Susie, 252
Swing!, 292–93, 298
Symbol of the Unconquered, The (film), 215
censors and, 155–56
discovery of copy of, 348
filming of, 154–55
plot of, 152–54
talkies, 227
for black audiences, 229
black-audience theaters and, 246–47
Tatum, E. G., 147, 226
Taylor, Clyde, 247, 284
Temptation (film), 286–88
Ten Minutes to Live (film), 263–65, 267, 268
Thirty Years Later (film), 231, 233–34
Thomas, D. Ireland, 117, 181, 182, 184, 196
Thompson, Edward, 228, 229
Thompson, Sister Francesca, 125n, 126, 229
Thompson, Walker, 154
Thompson, William H., 109
Thurman, Wallace, 151
Tolliver, C. Tiffany, 174, 199, 212
Townsend, Babe, 262
Tribble, Andrew, 254
Tucker, Lorenzo, 235–37, 239, 240–42, 249, 252, 259, 260–61, 263, 264, 265, 287, 291, 319–20, 328, 343
OM and, 260
Tutt, J. Homer, 198, 234, 252, 297
Tyler, George, 255
Ulrich, Lenore, 228
Underworld (film), 288–90
Universal Negro Improvement
Association, 158
Van Engle, Dorothy, 263, 278, 279
VanEpps-Taylor, Beti Carol, 12, 15, 96–97, 167
Vann, Robert L., 117, 145
Veiled Aristocrats (film), 260–62, 268
Veiled Aristocrats (Sanborn) (novel), 259
Verwayen, Percy, 212
Virgin of Seminole, The (film), 178, 182–83
Wade, John, 158
Wages of Sin, The (film), 237–38, 264
Walton, Lester A., 149
Washington, Booker T., 7–8, 66, 99, 298
Waters, Ethel, 226
Webb, Frank J., 111
West, Cornel, 349
West Coast Lafayette Players, 228, 229
Wexler, Haskell, 308
When Men Betray (film), 239, 264
Whipper, Leigh, 154, 229
White, Dana F., 100, 158
White, James W., 96
White, Walter, 344
Whitney, Salem Tutt, 194, 198, 234, 245, 252, 297
“Wilderness Trail, The.” See Symbol of the Unconquered, The (film) Wilkes, Mattie, 154
Wilkes, Mattie V., 213
Williams, Clarence, 279
Williams, Ethel, 262
Williams, Frances, 303, 304
Williams, Gladys, 308, 332
Williams, Spencer, 284–85
Wilson, Frank, 262
Wind from Nowhere, The (Micheaux) (novel), 313–15, 319
Wister, Owen, 25
Within Our Gates (film), 137–39, 141–44, 156
censors and, 140–41
discovery of copy of, 347
filming of, 139–40
overview of, 141–44
Wright, Richard, 248, 299, 321
Wyeth, Sidney (alter ego of OM), 8, 99, 103, 150, 167, 190, 280, 308, 316, 321
About the Author
PATRICK MCGILLIGAN’S biographies include the Edgar-nominated Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light and the New York Times Notable Books Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast and George Cukor: A Double Life. He has also penned biographies of Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert Altman, and James Cagney, along with the oral history Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist (with Paul Buhle). McGilligan lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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PRAISE FOR
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only
“It’s rare that any life can make such a fascinating story, and Patrick McGilligan’s Oscar Micheaux packs as much narrative thrust and foolhardy behavior as a biographer (or even novelist) could hope for.”
—Time Out (New York)
“[An] exceptional new biography…. [McGilligan] leaves no source untapped in his comprehensive account.”
—BookPage
“Amazing…. Opens a door into a secret past, the world of black Hollywood.”
—Allen Barra, American Heritage
“As Micheaux’s films have been unearthed in such far-flung places as Brussels and Tyler, Texas, it is hoped that more may be discovered. For now we have this book, with its compelling perspective on
his life and career.”
—David Ehrenstein, Los Angeles Times
“In Patrick McGilligan’s riveting biography…Micheaux’s story is told in voluminous and intricate detail. McGilligan…uses public and private records to get into the mind of the legendary black filmmaker.”
—Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A culminating work.”
—Carl Rollyson, New York Sun
“Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“McGilligan does a fine job of reaffirming Micheaux’s significance beyond the appreciation of cineastes.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Micheaux, as this thorough text makes clear, was far ahead of his time.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A well-researched, passionately felt, and endlessly fascinating look at a singular American life.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“McGilligan has made this incredible, half-forgotten life newly available to us all.”
—Guardian (London)
“In the skilled hands of Patrick McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux’s life story bristles and takes flight.”
—Pearl Bowser, coauthor of Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences
“An enormously moving and compelling account of a quixotic life defined by arduous toil and perpetual optimism.”
—DGA Quarterly
“Patrick McGilligan’s absorbing and compulsively readable biography…is an impressive feat of period reconstruction that dares to disentangle the myths of this vital and woefully neglected filmmaker…. The Great and Only is a valuable addition to Micheaux scholarship.”
—Stop Smiling magazine
ALSO BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN
Cagney: The Actor as Auteur
Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff
Jack’s Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
Clint, the Life and Legend:
A Biography of Clint Eastwood
Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light
EDITED BY PATRICK MCGILLIGAN
Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Blacklist (with Paul Buhle)
Six Scripts by Robert Riskin
Film Crazy: Interviews with Hollywood Legends
Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age
Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s
Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s
Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s
Copyright
OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE GREAT AND ONLY. Copyright © 2007 by Patrick McGilligan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition AUGUST 2008 ISBN: 9780061982156
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*According to the Bureau of Land Management, a township is a major subdivision of land under the survey system and is approximately six miles square containing more than 20,000 acres. “A township is identified by its relationship to a base line and a principal meridian,” according to the BLM website. “The Section Number identifies a tract of land, usually one mile square, within a township. Most townships contain thirty-six sections. Standard sections contain 640 acres. A section number identifies each section within a township.”
*Like many writers and filmmakers, Micheaux liked to play games with names. “Binga” was an in-joke allusion to a prominent black entrepreneur who established the first black-owned bank in Chicago, Jesse C. Binga. Binga probably took early shares in Micheaux’s publishing and film company.
*It’s unclear if Micheaux ever held such a job, which was how he was identified in the article. “Rosebud County” does not exist, and, though it may have been a typo, Micheaux was not adverse to inventing a county, or a title for himself.
*Upon its republication in 1921, the author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was revealed to be one of the forefathers of the Harlem Renaissance, the poet, composer, and musician James Weldon Johnson, who had written anonymously in 1912 partly as a literary device, and partly because he was then serving as the U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Though the novel was regarded, at the time that Micheaux read it, as veiled autobiography, it turned out to be entirely a fiction of Johnson’s concoction.
*Actually, that was much more than Martin Eden’s output; in the novel London says repeatedly that Eden wrote “three thousand words a day.”
*Not to be confused with Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party. Harrop tried to enlist Henry Ford as his party’s presidential candidate in 1924, but Ford demurred and Robert R. Pointer was the presidential aspirant of the People’s Progressive Party. Later, Harrop withdrew and endorsed La Follette.
*There is no mention of Jews in The Conquest, but in Micheaux’s second version of his life story, The Homesteader—written after his stay in Atlanta and The Forged Note—the Rosebud homesteader gained a conspicuously Jewish neighbor, Isaac Syfe, whose unsavory portrait contained a whiff of anti-Semitism. Syfe was part of a small group of like-minded friends, including an ex-preacher, engaged in nefarious activities on the prairie.
*Micheaux’s wording was probably inspired by W. E. B. DuBois’s inscription for The Quest for the Silver Fleece (1911), which reads, “To One Whose Name May Not Be Written.”
*The racial subtext to this motif is that blue or green eye colors are seldom seen in African-Americans unless there is an interracial lineage.
*According to film historian Scott Eyman, whose book The Speed of Sound chronicles the end of the silent era, “A reel of film was 1,000 feet. Running at the silent speed of 16 to 18 frames a second was the norm, around 10–12 minutes per reel.” But the norms varied.
*Bull’s Eye was a 1917 Universal serial starring Eddie Polo, with Noble Johnson in a supporting role.
*Founded by the Chicago-born pioneering motion picture producer and entrepreneur William N. Selig, the Selig Polyscope complex of buildings and acreage, bounded by Irving Park Boulevard, Claremont and Western Avenues, and Byron Street, had been in operation since 1896, though actual production had started to languish in 1917.
*Black theater and film scholar Sister Francesca Thompson also bears the distinction of being the daughter of actress Evelyn Preer and actor Edward Thompson, both of whom played leads for the Lafayette Players and in Micheaux
films. In articles and books she is one of the best published sources on her mother and father as well as the Players.
*The one- to three-day bookings and humble ticket prices were geared to the lower economics of poor black communities and helps to explain why, throughout his film career, it was so difficult for Micheaux to turn a profit. In the white, first-run theaters in the downtowns of major U.S. cities at this time, the going rate for tickets to Hollywood pictures was $1 or $1.50. Audiences were paying up to three dollars for best seats to some D. W. Griffith films in New York, in 1919.
*Indeed, the low number of prints is one key reason why the majority of Hollywood’s silent films are also “lost.”
*Incidentally, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations later determined that discriminatory practices of moviegoing contributed to the anger that fueled the riot. Black people in Chicago were routinely “turned away from big downtown theaters, guided to second rate seats, or forced to move at the request of white patrons,” according to Mary Carbine in “The Finest Outside the Loop: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago’s Black Metropolis, 1905–1928.”
**Piney Woods was—is—an actual all-black boarding school in rural Mississippi. Such real-life references were a constant pleasure of Micheaux’s films. White Hollywood, by comparison, maintained busy legal departments that attempted to avoid expensive consent agreements and infringement lawsuits by disguising the actual names of people and places.
*Actress Evelyn Preer recalled the ending to that near-rape scene (missing from the incomplete print as it exists today) as being “my lover broke down the door and leaped on the villain’s back.” But nothing in the only extant version of Within Our Gates explains whether the white assailant in the scene is the schoolteacher’s father by previous rape, or concubinage. “This suggests that these scenes may have offended some censor boards, theater owners, or archivists,” wrote Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence in their book Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences.