Word: micheaux
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...raised to an aesthetic, almost a theology, certainly an industry; and these long-neglected movies are cult artifacts, promoted in revival houses, "special edition" videos and learned books (like Michael J. Weldon's cogent, peerless The Psychotronic Video Guide). Russ Meyer's bosomacious melodramas are taught in colleges. Oscar Micheaux's primeval black parables play in museums. And Ed Wood, who couldn't get arrested when he was alive--all right, as an alcoholic transvestite, he could get arrested, but nobody in Hollywood paid attention to his goofily inept sci-fi and sex films--was in 1994 the honored subject...
Good, bad or worse, exploitation directors were the independent filmmakers in an era dominated by Hollywood. No one made black films for black audiences, so Micheaux did, beginning in 1918; and if his films often showed an actor waiting for him to bark out a stage direction, they satisfied their constituency. Edgar G. Ulmer, the vagabond king of grade-Z films, directed the black musical Moon over Harlem--as well as pictures in Yiddish and Ukrainian--all in the same year (1939). These guys were tireless: from 1935 to 1945, hack-of-hacks Sam Newfield directed an impossible 150 quickie...
...Quakers (7-0 Ivy, 15-3 overall) are led by lottery candidate Jerome Allen. Their only weakness is in the middle, but Harvard does not exactly posses a Phi Slamma Jamma Olajuwon-Micheaux-Young frontcourt...
Race movies in this original conception were an answer to the racist and exclusionary movies coming out of "classic" Hollywood in the 1920s. Independent race movie producers, like Oscar Micheaux, set up their own production system that tried to represent the interests of African-Americans ignored or stereotyped by the Hollywood mainstream. These race, or "colored cast," producers struggled with only mediocre financial success until they were almost completely driven out of business. This eventual failure occured for a number of reasons, but mainly because the political dynamics of World War II Hollywood led to more complex portrayals of African...