Word: micheaux
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...growing; a couple dozen of these films, previously believed lost, were discovered in the 80s in a Tyler, Texas, warehouse. The much smaller category of black-directed films are even more provocative, as we'll see in the next That Old Feeling, when we consider the careers of Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, Jr. But while you're waiting for the shipment of videos you've ordered from the Black Artists of the Silver Screen section of Hollywood's Attic, consider the careers of four outstanding African-American actors...
...school valedictorian, exhorting his classmates to "catch a new vision." Robeson did. Four years later he was starring for O'Neill, giving the first concert composed entirely of songs by African Americans and playing the two lead roles (as a philandering preacher and his sweet-souled brother) in Oscar Micheaux's silent film "Body and Soul...
...Robeson could seize the screen by pouring more of his roguish majesty into the part. Isaiah wows the church ladies with his orations, then sullies their virgin daughters and pockets his victims' life savings (hidden in a Bible!). The actor's playing here is as broad as Broadway, but Micheaux wasn't looking for subtlety. He wanted cinematic sex appeal from his famous young star...
...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...