Moss found Micheaux easily drawn into conversation, or argumentation, on the subject of their shared race, and during the making of The Phantom of Kenwood and Ten Minutes to Live they held long talks.
“He saw the black population as two groups,” Moss recalled years later. “He would say, ‘The better class makes a strenuous effort, a strenuous effort to take advantage of the opportunity in America for those who are willing to work. Businessmen like C. C. Spaulding of the North Carolina Insurance Company, [Alonzo] Herndon of Atlanta Mutual Insurance Company, Jesse Binga’s Bank in Chicago—doctors and lawyers all over the country, real estate people—they all own nice homes and acres of good farm land.
“‘Now the other group, the rougher set. They ain’t got sense enough to come in out of the rain. They have no conception—hear what I say—no conception, of what it takes to succeed, to acquire, to have or to hold. They want ease, privilege and luxury without any great effort on their part. All they can do is hold on to the timeworn cry of ‘no opportunity.’”
Some discussions, however, Micheaux would not countenance. According to Moss, by the early 1930s the race-picture pioneer was a different man from the fearless, smiling entrepreneur of the years after World War I, who had leapt over so many hurdles and edged sideways around others. Now Micheaux seemed coiled tight, burdened by pressures from without and within. He seemed paranoid about ceding any power to outsiders. “The actors pleaded with him to let them rerecord words they felt they had mispronounced, or lines they thought were hurried,” Moss recollected. “The technicians complained they weren’t given the time to focus properly; that rushed scenes would reflect in faulty composition on the screen, and the lighting equipment was inadequate for scene changes. I constantly pointed out that he was making character changes that weren’t consistent with what had already been filmed.
“It all fell on deaf ears,” Moss continued. “Micheaux allotted a certain amount of film footage for each scene. There was no extra—there were to be no ‘retakes.’ If he decided a scene couldn’t be used, which was seldom, he would fill in with a musical sequence from a former film.”
One day Moss demanded to know why all the camera, sound, and lighting people behind the scenes were white (the “most obvious incongruity” of Micheaux’s operation, in Moss’s words). “He said that if a black man came to him with a skill,” recalled Moss, “he would hire him. But he didn’t have time to go running all over Harlem, trying to find somebody who wanted to learn how to operate the camera. He said, ‘That’s the trouble with colored people, they always want someone giving them something—I’m running a business, not a school.’”
By mutual consent, Ten Minutes to Live was Carlton Moss’s last film with Micheaux.
In the summer of 1932, Mr. and Mrs. Micheaux headed south for a wide-ranging trip, leading a skeleton cast and crew in a small caravan of cars. One person who wasn’t along for the ride was Frank Schiffman: The boss was left behind in the dark in Harlem, fuming and preparing legal action against his partner gone wild.
Micheaux planned to use the traveling time to sketch out his next picture—his fifth since The Exile—while arranging bookings and collecting fees for his quickie productions from theater owners south of the Mason-Dixon line. These days, however, bookings were sought with an urgency bordering on mania, so much so that Micheaux placed a rare advertisement in the 1932 Film Daily Yearbook, Hollywood’s annual directory of motion picture personnel, something he had never done before. Along with a stern, glaring photograph of himself, Micheaux issued a shrill challenge to black theater owners and managers: “GET A LOAD OF THIS, MR. EXHIBITOR: Poor attendance is due, in some measure, to the fact that your patrons are ‘fed up’ on the average diet you are feeding them daily and are crying for ‘something different.’ Why not give them one of our Negro features as a change? Many theatres are doing so—and with gratifying success. They are especially good for midnight shows. Modern in theme, which pleases your flapper patrons—each picture has a bevy of Creole beauties—with bits of the floor shows from the great nightclubs of New York, with singing and dancing as only Broadway Negro entertainers know how to deliver—try one!”
His survival instincts told him that his nightclub spectacles sold better in the South, where they were like a cheap ticket to Harlem. Northeastern audiences were blasé and needed more in the way of meaty drama. Films about the South also pleased Southern audiences, though they didn’t do as well in the North. Often Micheaux cheated with the title, changing the name of the film as it traveled around, deleting or emphasizing the “Harlem.”
Micheaux saw value in all kinds of stories—Northern urban dramas, Southern melodrama, realistic preachments, and musical cavalcades alike—but he felt obliged to defend the commercially weaker strain. “Personally,” he told one Chicago Defender columnist during a car ride back from a booking foray to Detroit, “I think Veiled Aristocrats by far the greater production, but it doesn’t begin to draw as my latest one [Ten Minutes to Live].”
The trick, he always thought, was in the mix. The best solution was to mingle Northern and Southern locales and preferences in the same picture. That was the goal of his next remake, this time of his 1926 film, The Spider’s Web. And so Micheaux steered his caravan toward Batesville, a sleepy cotton town in northeast Mississippi.
Like the original Spider’s Web, this new sound version would be an attack on the evils of crooked gambling. Micheaux’s updated script followed “a dashing young Secret Service agent” named Alonzo White (Carl Mahon), who arrives in “Batesburg” to investigate a shady plantation owner named Jeff Ballinger (John Everett). Ballinger exploits his workers and abuses his paramour Liza Hatfield (Grace Smith). The agent lodges with Mary Austin (Eunice Brooks) and befriends her pretty young niece Norma Shepard (Starr Calloway), “a recent graduate of high school” who has just been hired as a schoolteacher. After the agent arrests Ballinger, Liza flees from her unhappy past, becoming a nightclub singer in Harlem. Norma and Mary also head to Harlem, with Alonzo trailing behind. Mary is soon corrupted by the “numbers” game; she wins big, but when she tries to collect her money she ends up falsely arrested for the murder of the chief racketeer (Juano Hernandez). Alonzo sets a trap for the real culprit aboard an ocean liner and corners Liza into confessing. Mary is saved from execution, and the film ends in Micheaux-fashion with Alonzo and Norma’s embrace.
Pleasant weather accommodated the sweetly romantic scenes between Mahon and Calloway, which were filmed in Batesville’s town square and city parks. The nightclub and other interiors were shot later, some at the Homestead in Montclair, with the furniture and paintings switched around for different scenes. The outdoor photography (by newsreel cameraman Sam Orleans) was as lyrical as the indoors scenes were dim and poorly lit.
Micheaux was working frantically, aware of the disaster awaiting him back in New York. Mahon struggled with pages of cumbersome dialogue handed to him at the last minute. At one point in the finished film, the director can be heard off-camera, urging Mahon to hurry as the actor waves him off. At the end of another scene, Micheaux shouts “All right, cut!” But he couldn’t lose the take without forfeiting the dialogue, so into the picture it went. Such crudeness in technique—along with awkward plot contrivances—had become all too common in recent Micheaux films.
Got to keep going!
He finished up back in New York, packing a remarkable half dozen musical acts into the Harlem half of the film, which takes place at “The Radium Club.” Micheaux’s fast-fading budget limited him to tight shots of a quintet and a mere handful of extras. The entertainers included the top-hatted Tyler Twins, who execute a sly shadow dance. But the performers were sprinting, the chorus girls trying to synchronize their kicks with fur-and-fabric costumes pasted all over their bodies, a hedge against the censors. It was a far cry from the full-throttle Harlem of The Exile.
“Harlem and the good times!” reads the intertitle, when the story shifted to the capital of black America. Yet for the pi
cture’s main title, Micheaux looked in a different direction: since the no-good Liza turns out to hail from his old stomping ground, Micheaux decided to retitle his remake The Girl from Chicago. The last production under the Brecher-Schiffman regime, it was barely released to the public; the few reviews were harsh, and what critics there were belittled the “misleading” title.
Nineteen thirty-two was the year Micheaux touched bottom. His litany of misfortune began with the death in Great Bend, Kansas, of his 85-year-old father. Calvin Swan Micheaux passed away in late January, from the lingering effects of a paralytic stroke. “A hardworking, industrious man, and a good citizen,” read his obituary in the Great Bend Tribune. “He was the father of a large family, and he had the joy in his late years of knowing that each son and daughter had received a good education, and were successful, prudent, and saving.”
Juggling so many problems in New York, Micheaux couldn’t even afford the trip to his father’s funeral. Ever since his bankruptcy in 1928, he had been racing—lurching, some might say—from picture to picture. His business dealings were a rickety house of cards. In 1932, the whole house caved in beneath a series of lawsuits, some more crushing than others.
Among the first to sue was a married vaudeville team known as Hooten and Hooten, who filed papers against Micheaux in Baltimore in late 1931. The duo charged that Micheaux had stolen their well-established comedy shtick, “The Alphabet Sermon,” recycling it as preacher Amon Davis’s hilarious sermon in Darktown Revue.*
In May 1932, he was sued by a real “girl from Chicago.” Lucille Lewis, the virgin star Micheaux had “discovered” for Veiled Aristocrats, had never been paid for her emoting in the film. Lewis filed in court to halt the screening of future Micheaux movies in Chicago, and the Chicago Defender reported that “other creditors” were lining up behind Lewis.
Micheaux had long since learned how to evade attorneys, and even in New York it took a while for his chief financier, Frank Schiffman, to catch up to the race-picture pioneer with a lawsuit of his own. Charging angrily that his partner had “collected money which he failed to turn into the company offices,” and continually “issued checks without permission,” Schiffman first filed suit early in the fall of 1932. Micheaux simply ignored the claim, skipping the court hearing.
But on November 26, 1932, around the time he was finishing The Girl from Chicago, Micheaux was arrested and arraigned in a Washington Heights courtroom on charges of “petty larceny.” The complaint alleged that Micheaux had stolen $83.91 from Schiffman, who added that “this is but one of a series of larcenies totaling several thousand dollars.” Micheaux borrowed five hundred dollars for bail, jumped the bond, and then promptly ignored a series of court dates.
Almost a full year went by before the system finally caught up with him. In October 1933 Schiffman instigated another arrest, and this time his complaint was joined by the bondsman whose security Micheaux had forfeited. His bail was set at $2,500: Now Schiffman had Micheaux in a vise.
Micheaux became a fixture of the tiny-print proceedings and judgments itemized in the New York Times. (Ironically, this was the first time he was ever mentioned in the Times, which had never reviewed any Micheaux book or film. As far as the “paper of record” was concerned, race pictures didn’t exist.) The levies against Mr. and Mrs. Micheaux, who was named as a co-defendant, ranged above $3,000.
More humiliating was the headline coverage given to Micheaux’s lawsuits, arrests, and downward spiral of legal entanglements in the black press. Even some usually friendly critics piled on with their grievances. Ralph Matthews of The Afro-American had been a Micheaux enthusiast, but he was repulsed by The Phantom of Kenwood when it was screened for him in May 1933, and over time his misgivings had mounted. “I admire your determination to pioneer in your chosen field,” Matthews addressed Micheaux in the Baltimore-based newspaper, which circulated widely in black belts throughout the East, “but, sir, I confess I abhor your technique.”
The Phantom of Kenwood “seemed to lack direction,” Matthews wrote. “It seemed jumpy and undecided as to whether it wanted to move forward or backward, and your actors seemed to be held in check. Their actions were too studied, the natural spontaneity seemed suppressed.”
Matthews made it clear that he had followed Micheaux’s career from the start, and with appreciation; his astute analysis of the filmmaker’s auteurist body of work led him to a stern critique of its repetitive nature.
“Forget for awhile that colored gentlemen go West, or North, or to South America, and become millionaires,” Matthews urged Micheaux. Forget the “social justice” crusades, too, and the obsession with “passing” and miscegenation. “Not every black man wants to cross the [color] line to get a wife,” Matthews wrote. He pleaded for Micheaux to consider scripts by other writers once in a while, to find urgent material in real-life news events, for instance. He asked for stars who could really act, role models audiences could “imitate and emulate.”
“You have plugged away where others have tried and failed,” Matthews ended his column. “You have striven to succeed where others have retreated in despair. Your future, sir, lies with the youth, both in the studio and in the box-office. They are pulling for you. Give them themes they can take to their hearts.”
Yet Micheaux was in no position to reply. It would be at least a year before he made another picture—the first in fifteen without a Micheaux production. Instead he spent this ghost year drifting in and out of courtrooms, seemingly defeated.
Micheaux eventually paid his court fees and fines, as well as the money he owed Frank Schiffman. But his pictures were henceforth banned from the Brecher-Schiffman empire—the five largest theaters in Harlem, the city within a city where Micheaux lived, the nation’s single most concentrated market for race pictures.
This was the blow that should have destroyed him. But what had Booker T. Washington said? That it was good to start from the bottom of life? Belief was willpower, and Micheaux swore by the words of the Great Educator. He had scraped through before. It was good to start from the bottom.
He was an expert at many things, and among them were destitution, deprivation, and ignominy. He had been fired for thievery as a Pullman porter, and then learned to be a frontiersman the hard way, dragging a plow through acres and acres of tough ground in South Dakota. His baby had died in childbirth; his wife had left him; his personal humiliation had made headlines in Chicago; even his land had been stolen out from under him. The banks had reclaimed his beloved homestead. Censors had mutilated and repossessed his films. Critics of his own race had savaged some of his best creations. His own brother had betrayed him. Some of the pictures he had worked hardest to produce had been frozen in labs, sold at auction. Everywhere he went, he was trailed by lawsuits.
Through it all, he had had to contend with racism and segregation and Jim Crow.
Through it all, America’s mainstream film industry remained oblivious to his work.
Yet Micheaux’s motivations as a filmmaker went beyond those of his Hollywood counterparts, and this extra dimension compelled him to persevere. Film was a storytelling medium, but for Micheaux it was also a pulpit. He wanted to show life the way he alone saw it. He was determined to bear witness, to testify. “He was zealous, full of zeal,” recalled Shingzie Howard. “He wanted to get across a message.”
And so, slowly, Micheaux began to reinvent his future. He reached out to new investors and collaborators, talking up his ideas the way he always had. He found friends at the Empire Laboratories in Closter, New Jersey, one of the key plants serving the Fort Lee constellation of studios. The Empire Lab owners were willing to let Micheaux’s processing bills slide in exchange for a percentage of anticipated returns on his next films. Then he wangled a substantial production investment from Sack Amusement Enterprises, a San Antonio, Texas, company that wanted a steady flow of race pictures for its small theater chain in the Southwest.
The South and Southwest were increasingly important to Micheaux now t
hat he was blackballed in the major Harlem theaters. The West also held promise, and Sack Amusement Enterprises was exploring the market in California. In early 1934, Micheaux himself traveled to the West Coast. From his earliest correspondence with the Johnson brothers and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, Micheaux had aspired to make a race picture in or around Hollywood. Over the years he had continued to float this dream in publicity releases. But Micheaux never found the means or opportunity, and this was probably his first and last visit to America’s screen capital.
Micheaux had maintained a correspondence with the capable actor Clarence Brooks, one of Lincoln’s founders. Brooks had developed a solid Hollywood career, recently playing a high-profile role in John Ford’s adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith. Fifth-billed, Brooks portrayed a Howard University–educated doctor who aids the hero, Ronald Colman, in fighting disease on a West Indies island. Brooks’s part made the picture a resounding success in black theaters, and his breakthrough was widely heralded in the black press as “the most dignified part given a Negro in the films to date,” in the words of the Atlanta Daily World.
Brooks met with Micheaux in California, and made a handshake agreement to star in the director’s next two productions, the first to be shot back East. Micheaux also met with theater owners in central Los Angeles, which had a booming black population, taking pledges for the planned projects starring Brooks.
Micheaux’s visit wasn’t mentioned in the Hollywood gossip columns; nor did he apply for work at the major studios, where, he knew all too well, a man of his race was barred from any employment behind the camera. Film historian Donald Bogle cited these statistics from 1930: Of 4,451 actors in Hollywood, 128 were black. Of 2,909 actresses, 85. Of 1,106 “directors, managers, officials,” just three were black, none of course writers, directors, or producers. Micheaux couldn’t have gotten a job operating the clapboard on a Hollywood set.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 33