Word: micheaux
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...independence, blacks needed to raise the capital that would allow them to pursue their own visions. And in the 30-plus years of race cinema, there was only one black man with the drive and doggedness to write, produce, direct, finance and distribute his own films. That was Oscar Micheaux, the first black to direct a silent feature, and the first to direct a talkie feature. In so many ways, Micheaux was the D.W. Griffith of race cinema. And also its Edward D. Wood...
...MICHEAUX THE SHOWMAN...
...Surrealists loved bad movies, seeing them as subversive attacks on the tyranny of narrative form. What would they have made of Edward D. Wood's horrifyingly inept cine-poems - or of Oscar Micheaux's melodramas, with black actors in whiteface? - J. Hoberman in "Bad Movies," Film Comment, July-August...
...Hollywood Blvd. At no. 6721, in front of Joe's Diner, across from the Ripley's Believe It Or Not emporium, stop to glance down at the pavement. There you will see three consecutive stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: for Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte and Oscar Micheaux. You recognize two of the names. The tan tantalizer Dandridge was the first black to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar ("Carmen Jones," 1955); Belafonte was and is the cool, sexy actor-singer with a half-century's radiance. But Micheaux? Considering his instructively bizarre, virtually anonymous career...
...self-made success - or colossal failure, depending on your indulgence for strange movies - Oscar Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Ill., in 1884. After various menial jobs he followed Horace Greeley's advice, went West and became a South Dakota homesteader. He lived among whites and, it is said, took a white woman as his lover. In his late 20s he began writing novels; to finance their printing, he went door-to-door, raising funds from his white neighbors. His first self-published, semi-autobiographical novel, "The Homesteader," appeared in 1913. When black film outfits sprang up after "The Birth...