1884-1951
It is almost impossible to over-state the importance of the career of Oscar Micheaux. It's hard to even know where to start. He, along with Noble Johnson, stand alone in the silent era as black men making and enabling films to be made. Micheaux and Johnson were nearly the same age and both mid-westerners, that is pretty much where any similarity between them in film industry ends. For a short time, Michaeux had dealings with Johnson's Lincoln Motion Picture Company and his brother George, though the association did not come to anything. Micheaux was born Oscar Devereaux Micheaux on this day in Metropolis, Illinois, which is located in the extreme southern part of the state and closer in it's state associations with Kentucky, than Illinois. And, in fact, Micheaux's father had been a slave in Kentucky (it is presumed that the family surname came from enslavement by French Huguenots in Virginia--a large settlement of which was located in Kentucky). Micheaux had 12 siblings, and he eventually went to live with an older brother in Chicago working various manual labor jobs, finally starting his own shoe-shine business. He later went to work for the railroad; this enabled him to save money and travel--the two most important elements to him going into the motion picture industry. He moved to South Dakota, married and had a son--intending to become a homesteader. Not long after the birth of his son, his wife left him and her father sold Michaeux's property out from under him and stole the profits. The occasioned him abounding becoming a range homesteader, but it did provide him with material to draw upon for writing. Micheaux had already begun to write by this time and in 1913, he managed to get one of his novels published for the first time. George Johnson, brother of Noble and co-founder of Lincoln Motion Picture Company, showed interest in Micheaux's next novel The Homesteader, published in 1918. The company would eventually not make the novel into a film over creative differences, but it was the catalyst that put Michaeux into the film business. Returning to Chicago, and ever the independent business man that he was, he founded his own motion picture production AND publishing company: Micheaux Film & Book Company. His first film was an adaptation of his own novel: The Homesteader. He co-directed the film with Jerry Mills, and starring Charles D. Lucas and Evelyn Preer; the film was released on the 20th of February in 1919. It was also important first, in that it was the first feature film made by a black director; becoming the first of 42 titles under his direction. It is also lamentably lost. His follow up was Within Our Gates in 1920, also starring Preer, it was Micheaux's first original screenplay and is fortunately a surviving film that is widely available for screening. It remains the earliest surviving film directed by an African American. Often thought of as a response to D. W. Griffith's infamous A Birth of a Nation, Micheaux when asked about that said that the screenplay was developed as depiction and response to the extreme racist events that took place after World War I. More than half of Micheaux's films were released in the silent era; and large portion of them all into the category we recognize as "melodrama" today; they also tackle racial injustices as well. Take The Symbol of the Unconquered as an example; the film takes on a number of racist behaviors from the most visible (the KKK) to much more subtle themes (racism perpetrated by light skinned African Americans against their darker skinned neighbors). The film even has the protagonist--Eve Mason (Iris Hall)--coming from Selma, Alabama. Filmed in entirely Fort Lee, New Jersey, it was released in November of 1920 (a surviving print was restored by the Museum of Modern Art, in corporation with The Oscar Micheaux Society and Turner Classic Movies and aired on TCM). Michaeux also flirted with horror themes and gothic flourishes. For example, in The Dungeon (1922), he puts an African American twist of the Bluebeard story; he does the same for the haunted house genre in A Son of Satan (1924), while The Spider's Web (1927) is an actual horror film with crime elements. Of the twenty four silents made by Micheaux, only three are known to have survived. Without a doubt Body and Soul (1925) is not just his most high profile silent film, owed to the presence of Paul Robeson in the film; it is also his most well known surviving film of the 1920's; and shot entirely in The Bronx. His last film of the decade was his first sound film; Wages of Sin, released in 1929, it was also his first full talkie. While his first film of the new decade was actually a partial silent; A Daughter of the Congo--starring Kathleen Noisette--also met with extreme criticism in the African American press, especially in the Amsterdam News. It is extremely rare for a filmmaker, even a minority filmmaker, in the United States to make a sound film and return to a the silent film format in the 1930's, but that is exactly what Micheaux did with Easy Street; though affter making The Exile in 1931, complete with a poster announcing "All Talking," Micheaux was never forced to retreat to the silent format in the all sound era again. A further connection to the silent era does exist in Micheaux's later films however. In 1939 he released Lying Lips, which was filmed the old Biograph Studios in Manhattan (and the fact that Biograph created the career of D.W. Griffith is more than a little ironic). Micheaux continued to write and direct regularly through 1940, but after the release of The Notorious Elinor Lee, featuring the acting of Robert Earl Jones (in only his second film and father of James Earl Jones), he left off film making for eight years. His last film, The Betrayal, was a whopping 3 hour long melodrama, released on the 24th of June in 1948 (it is also a lost film). Micheaux had been suffering from a heart condition for sometime. While living in Charlotte, North Carolina, the condition claimed his life just three years later on the 25th of March at the age of 67. He was transported to Great Bend, Kansas--one of the western locals that he had lived much earlier in his life--for burial at the Great Bend Cemetery with family members also buried there. He is buried next to his brother Swan who was the manager of Oscar's company.
[Source: Marty Keenan (Find A Grave)]
Oscar Micheaux Committee (Official Site)
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