Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  Sgt. Fatty was just coming into view down the street, carrying his big supper basket, ready to take over the night shift.

  Captain Teeheezal had been at a meeting with the new mayor about all the changes that were coming when Wilcox was incorporated as a city.

  Sgt. Hank came running out, waving a telegram. “This just came for you.”

  Teeheezal tore open the Western Union envelope.

  TO: ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS, ALL CITIES, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  FROM: OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

  1. VOLSTEAD ACT (PROHIBITION) IS NOW LAW STOP ALL POLICE DEPARTMENTS EXPECTED TO ENFORCE COMPLIANCE STOP

  2. ROUND UP ALL THE REDS STOP

  PALMER

  Teeheezal and the sergeant raced to punch the big red button on the sergeant’s desk near the three phones. Bells went off in the squad room in the tower atop the station. Sgt. Fatty’s lunch basket was on the sidewalk out front when they got back outside. He reappeared from around back, driving the black box of a truck marked Police Patrol, driving with one hand. And cranking the hand siren with the other, until Sgt. Hank jumped in beside him and began working the siren on the passenger side.

  Patrolmen came from everywhere, the squad room, the garage, running down the streets, their nightsticks in their hands—Al, Mack, Buster, Chester, Billy, and Rube—and jumped onto the back of the truck, some missing, grabbing the back fender and being dragged until they righted themselves and climbed up with their fellows.

  Teeheezal stood on the running board, nearly falling off as they hit the curb at the park across the street, where the benches had a No Petting sign above them.

  “Head for the dago part of town,” said Teeheezal, taking his belt and holster through the window from Sgt. Hank. “Here,” he said to the sergeant, knocking his hand away from the siren crank. “Lemme do that!”

  The world was a high screaming whine, and a blur of speed and nightsticks in motion when there was a job to be done.

  Introduction: Occam’s Ducks

  I’M GLAD OSCAR MICHEAUX and other filmmakers of the separate “race,” or black cinema of the teens through the fifties, are getting their due. They made films, sometimes on less than nothing, sometimes with a budget that would approach one for a regular-movie short subject; to be shown in theaters in black neighborhoods in the North, and at segregated showings throughout the South (where the black audience all sat in the balconies, even though they were the only ones there; it was the same place they sat when a regular Hollywood film was shown). Sometimes Micheaux would get some actors, shoot some photos for stills and lobby cards, and take them around the South, saying to theater owners, “This is knocking ’em dead in Harlem and Chicago, but I only have three prints. Give me twenty dollars and I’ll guarantee you’ll get it first when I get the new prints.” With the money he and his coworkers got that way, he’d go and make the movies, sometimes with different actors than had appeared in the stills . . . (Roberts Townsend and Rodriguez didn’t invent credit-card filmmaking—it was just that credit cards weren’t around back then; if they had been, Micheaux could have saved lots of shoe leather . . .).

  Starring in these race pictures (usually the entire cast was black, with a token Honky or two) were black entertainers from vaudeville, theater, the real movies (these were the only times they’d ever have leads in films and be top-billed); plus people who seem to only have acted in race movies (and who probably had day jobs). The films were comedies, dramas, horror movies, gangster films, backstage musicals, even Westerns (Harlem on the Prairie, The Bronze Buckaroo). In other words, the same stuff as Hollywood, only different—all the actors were black and they weren’t under the Production Code, the bête noire of regular filmmaking from 1934 through the late fifties.

  Black actors hopped back and forth from playing comedy relief, singing convicts, elevator operators, musicians, and back-lot natives in real movies to these films.

  This story is dedicated to two people; the one to Mr. Moreland is self-explanatory after you’ve read the story. I needed someone about five years older for my purposes, but I’m not making up much. Mantan Moreland’s filmography is about as eclectic a one as you’ll find, outside Andy Devine’s, Lionel Stander’s, and Kate Freeman’s. He was everywhere, he did everything; this was besides vaudeville and service-station openings too, I assume. And unlike them, he was in a couple of dozen race movies besides.

  The other dedicatee takes a little explaining. Icky Twerp was Bill Camfield, who worked for KTVT Channel 11 in Ft. Worth in the ’50s and ’60s. In the afternoons and on Saturday mornings he was Icky Twerp, with a pinhead cowboy hat, big glasses, and some truly Bad Hair; he showed the Stooges on Slam-Bang Theater, with the help of gorilla stagehands named Ajax and Delphinium, on a pedal-powered projector he mounted like a bicycle, from which sparks shot out. That’s six days a week of live TV: But wait! There’s more!—Saturday nights he was Gorgon, the host of Horror Chiller Shocker Theater (which ran the Shock Theater package of Universal classics plus some dreck). Unlike Count Floyd, he was good: Not only that, he did stuff with videotape, then in its infancy, that matched some of what Kovacs was doing. Since it looked real, kids would scream and yell, “How’d he do that?”

  I think his real job, the one he’d been hired for, was as announcer and newsman. Besides all that, when Cap’n Swabbie (another newsman) had had too much spinach the night before, Camfield filled in for him on Popeye Theater, on just before Slam-Bang. . . .

  What does that have to do with race pictures? Not much. But Camfield and Moreland are what it’s all about; work where, when, and how you can. And be funnier than hell, which both of them were. They’re both gone. I miss them.

  Twist the dial on your Weibach Machine to just after WWI. . . .

  Occam’s Ducks

  Producers Releasing Corporation Executive: Bill, you’re forty-five minutes behind your shooting schedule.

  Beaudine: You mean, someone’s waiting to see this crap??

  —William “One-Shot” Beaudine

  FOR A WEEK, LATE IN THE YEAR 1919, some of the most famous people in the world seemed to have dropped off its surface.

  The Griffith Company, filming the motion picture The Idol Dancer, with the palm trees and beaches of Florida standing in for the South Seas, took a shooting break.

  The mayor of Fort Lauderdale invited them for a twelve-hour cruise aboard his yacht, the Gray Duck. They sailed out of harbor on a beautiful November morning. Just after noon a late-season hurricane slammed out of the Caribbean.

  There was no word of the movie people, the mayor, his yacht, or the crew for five days. The Coast Guard and the Navy sent out every available ship. Two seaplanes flew over shipping lanes as the storm abated.

  Richard Barthelmess came down to Florida at first news of the disappearance, while the hurricane still raged. He went out with the crew of the Great War U-boat chaser, the Berry Islands. The seas were so rough the captain ordered them back in after six hours.

  The days stretched on; three, four. The Hearst newspapers put out extras, speculating on the fate of Griffith, Gish, the other actors, the mayor. The weather cleared and calm returned. There were no sightings of debris or oil slicks. Reporters did stories on the Marie Celeste mystery. Hearst himself called in spiritualists in an attempt to contact the presumed dead director and stars.

  On the morning of the sixth day, the happy yachting party sailed back in to harbor.

  First there were sighs of relief.

  Then the reception soured. Someone in Hollywood pointed out that Griffith’s next picture, to be released nationwide in three weeks, was called The Greatest Question and was about life after death, and the attempts of mediums to contact the dead.

  W. R. Hearst was not amused, and he told the editors not to be amused, either.

  Griffith shrugged his shoulders for the newsmen. “A storm came up. The captain put in at the nearest island. We rode out the cyclone. We had plenty to eat and drink, and when it was over, we came back.
”

  The island was called Whale Cay. They had been buffeted by the heavy seas and torrential rains the first day and night, but made do by lantern light and electric torches, and the dancing fire of the lightning in the bay around them. They slept stacked like cordwood in the crowded belowdecks.

  They had breakfasted in the sunny eye of the hurricane late next morning up on deck. Many of the movie people had had strange dreams, which they related as the far-wall clouds of the back half of the hurricane moved lazily toward them.

  Nell Hamilton, the matinee idol who had posed for paintings on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post during the Great War, told his dream. He was in a long valley with high cliffs surrounding him. On every side, as far as he could see, the ground, the arroyos were covered with the bones and tusks of elephants. Their cyclopean skulls were tumbled at all angles. There were millions and millions of them, as if every pachyderm that had ever lived had died there. It was near dark, the sky overhead paling, the jumbled bones around him becoming purple and indistinct.

  Over the narrow valley, against the early stars a strange light appeared. It came from a searchlight somewhere beyond the cliffs, and projected onto a high bank of noctilucent cirrus was a winged black shape. From somewhere behind him a telephone rang with a sense of urgency. Then he’d awakened with a start.

  Lillian Gish, who’d only arrived at the dock the morning they left, going directly from the Florida Special to the yacht, had spent the whole week before at the new studio at Mamaroneck, New York, overseeing its completion and directing her sister in a comedy feature. On the tossing, pitching yacht, she’d had a terrible time getting to sleep. She had dreamed, she said, of being an old woman, or being dressed like one, and carrying a Browning semiautomatic shotgun. She was being stalked through a swamp by a crazed man with words tattooed on his fists, who sang hymns as he followed her. She was very frightened in her nightmare, she said, not by being pursued, but by the idea of being old. Everyone laughed at that.

  They asked David Wark Griffith what he’d dreamed of. “Nothing in particular,” he said. But he had dreamed: There was a land of fire and eruptions, where men and women clad in animal skins fought against giant crocodiles and lizards, much like in his film of ten years before, Man’s Genesis. Hal Roach, the upstart competing producer, was there, too, looking older, but he seemed to be telling Griffith what to do. D. W. couldn’t imagine such a thing. Griffith attributed the dream to the rolling of the ship, and to an especially fine bowl of turtle soup he’d eaten that morning aboard the Gray Duck, before the storm hit.

  Another person didn’t tell of his dreams. He saw no reason to. He was the stubby steward who kept them all rocking with laughter through the storm with his antics and jokes. He said nothing to the film people, because he had a dream so very puzzling to him, a dream unlike any other he’d ever had.

  He had been somewhere; a stage, a room. He wore some kind of livery; a doorman’s or a chauffeur’s outfit. There was a big Swede standing right in front of him, and the Swedish guy was made up like a Japanese or a Chinaman. He had a big mustache like Dr. Fu Manchu on the book jackets, and he wore a tropical planter’s suit and hat. Then this young Filipino guy had run into the room yelling a mile a minute, and the Swede asked, “Why number-three son making noise like motorboat?”, and the Filipino yelled something else and ran to a closet door and opened it, and a white feller fell out of it with a knife in his back.

  Then a voice behind the steward said, “Cut!” and then said, “Let’s do it again,” and the guy with the knife in his back got up and went back into the closet, and the Filipino guy went back out the door, and the big Swede took two puffs on a Camel and handed it to someone and then just stood there, and the voice behind the steward said to him, “Okay,” and then, “This time, Mantan, bug your eyes out a little more.” The dream made no sense at all.

  * * *

  After their return on the yacht, the steward had performed at the wrap party for the productions. An Elk saw him, and they hired him to do their next initiation follies. Then he won a couple of amateur nights, and played theaters in a couple of nearby towns. He fetched and carried around at the mayor’s house in the daytime, and rolled audiences in the aisles at night.

  One day early in 1920, he looked in his monthly pay envelope and found it was about a quarter of what he’d earned in the theater the last week.

  He gave notice, hit the boards running, and never looked back.

  * * *

  So it was that two years later, on April 12, 1922, Mantan Brown found himself, at eight in the morning, in front of a large building in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He had seen the place the year before, when he had been playing a theater down the street. Before the Great War, it had been part of Nestor or Centaur, or maybe the Thantouser Film Company. The Navy had taken it over for a year to make toothbrushing and trench-foot movies to show new recruits, and films for the public on how to spot the Kaiser in case he was working in disguise on your block.

  It was a commercial studio again, but now for rent by the day or week. Most film production had moved out to the western coast, but there were still a few—in Jersey, out on Astoria, in Manhattan itself—doing some kind of business in the East.

  Mantan had ferried over before sunup, taken a streetcar, and checked in to the nearby hotel, one that let Negroes stay there as long as they paid in advance.

  He went inside, past a desk and a yawning guard who waved him on, and found a guy in coveralls with a broom, which, Mantan had learned in two years in the business, was where you went to find out stuff.

  “I’m looking for The Man with the Shoes,” he said.

  “You and everybody else,” said the handyman. He squinted. “I seen you somewhere before.”

  “Not unless you pay to get in places I wouldn’t,” said Mantan.

  “Bessie Smith?” said the workman. “I mean, you’re not Bessie Smith. But why I think of her when I see you?”

  Mantan smiled. “Toured with her and Ma Rainey last year. I tried to tell jokes, and people threw bricks and things at me till they came back on and sang. Theater Owners’ Booking Agency. The TOBA circuit.”

  The guy smiled. “Tough On Black Asses, huh?”

  “You got that right.”

  “Well, I thought you were pretty good. Caught you somewhere in the City. Went there for the jazz.”

  “Thank you—”

  “Willie.” The janitor stuck out his hand, shook Mantan’s.

  “Thank you, Willie. Mantan Brown.” He looked around. “Can you tell me what the hoodoo’s going on here?”

  “Beats me. I done the strangest things I ever done this past week. I work here—at the studio itself, fetchin’ and carryin’ and ridin’ a mop. Guy rented it two weeks ago—guy with the shoes is named Mr. Meister, a real yegg. He must be makin’ a race movie—the waiting room, second down the hall to the left—looks like Connie’s Club on Saturday night after all the slummers left. The guy directing the thing—Meister’s just the watch chain—name’s Slavo, Marcel Slavo. Nice guy, real deliberate and intense—somethin’s wrong with him, looks like a jakeleg or blizzard-bunny to me—he’s got some great scheme or somethin’. I been painting scenery for it. Don’t make sense. You’d think they were making another Intolerance, but they only got cameras coming in Thursday and Friday, shooting time for a two-reeler. Other than that, Mr. Brown, I don’t know a thing more than you do.”

  “Thanks.”

  * * *

  The waiting room wasn’t like Connie’s; it was like a TOBA tent-show alumnus reunion. There was lots of yelling and hooting when he came in.

  “Mantan!” “Why, Mr. Brown!” “Looky who’s here!”

  As he shook hands he saw he was the only comedian there.

  There was a pretty young woman, a high-yellow he hadn’t seen before, sitting very quietly by herself. She had on a green wool dress and toque, and a weasel-trimmed wrap rested on the back of her chair.

  “Somethin’, huh?” asked Le Ro
i Chicken, a dancer from Harlem who’d been in revues with both Moran and Mack and Buck and Bubbles. “Her name’s Pauline Christian.”

  “Hey, Mr. Brown,” said someone across the room. “I thought you was just a caution in Mantan of the Apes!”

  Mantan smiled, pleased. They’d made the film in three days, mostly in the Authentic African Gardens of a white guy’s plantation house in Sea Island, Georgia, during the mornings and afternoons before his tent-shows at night. Somebody had called somebody who’d called somebody else to get him the job. He hadn’t seen the film yet, but from what he remembered of making it, it was probably pretty funny.

  “I’m here for the five dollars a day, just like all of you,” he said.

  “That’s funny,” said fifteen people in unison, “us all is getting ten dollars a day!”

  While they were laughing, a door opened in the far corner. A tough white mug who looked like an icebox smoking a cigar came out, yelled for quiet, and read names off a list.

  * * *

  Mantan, Pauline Christian, and Lorenzo Fairweather were taken into an office.

  “Welcome, welcome,” said Mr. Meister, who was a shorter version of the guy who’d called off the names on the clipboard.

  * * *

  Marcel Slavo sat in a chair facing them. Willie had been right. Slavo had dark spots under his eyes and looked like he slept with his face on a waffle iron. He was pale as a slug, and smoking a Fatima in a holder.

  “The others, the extras, will be fitted today, then sent home. They’ll be back Thursday and Friday for the shooting. You three, plus Lafayette Monroe and Arkady Jackson, are the principals. Mr. Meister here”—Meister waved to them and Marcel continued—“has got money to shoot a two-reeler race picture. His friends would like to expand their movie investments. We’ll go on to the script later, rehearse tomorrow and Wednesday, and shoot for two days. I know that’s unusual, not the way you’re all used to working, but this isn’t the ordinary two-reeler. I want us all to be proud of it.”