Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (25 page)

“While anybody specializing in Negro feature productions will find it slow doing business with their productions restricted to about 300 colored houses in this country,” he continued, “we make enough money out of our pictures to get along very well, but it was necessary for us to get $20,000 or $30,000 ahead in order to maintain a safe equilibrium.”

Though Micheaux originally had “contemplated filming”
The House Behind the Cedars
“this past fall,” the race-picture pioneer wrote to Chesnutt, “we were unable to financially do so, after completing
Deceit.
So will commence and produce it with great care, starting as soon as the trees are fully bloomed in the spring.”

During the winter of 1922–1923, Micheaux hoped to sandwich in a couple of commercial pictures before proceeding with the more ambitious, artistic-minded production,
The House Behind the Cedars.

As it happened, Micheaux had an ulterior motive for writing Chesnutt. In his letter he enclosed a fund-raising notice announcing the issuance of $30,000 worth of “gold notes bearing interest of 8% payable October 1st and April 1st, due October 1st, 1926.” The bulk of this fund-raising, he wrote, would underwrite
The House Behind the Cedars.
A separate letter from Swan asked Chesnutt if he would take “one or two of these hundred dollar notes, which are first lien on the assets of the corporation, which pay interest of $4.00 each six months, in part payment for the notes you are now holding?”

Though he was painfully sympathetic to Micheaux's troubles, Chesnutt had “pressing obligations of his own” and preferred his regular hundred-dollar payments to investing in the company's evanescent master
plan. “I will be very glad, at some time when you may wish it, to write a story for a scenario,” the author replied graciously.

Again, the filmmaker urged Chesnutt to do just that: write an original script for Micheaux. “As a whole, I prefer stories of the Negro in the south,” Micheaux wrote the author, “and while a good intense love story with a happy ending, plenty action, thrills, and suspense is the main thing, a streak of good Negro humor is helpful.”

Feeling reinvigorated in Roanoke, Micheaux resurrected the idea of adapting
The Conjure Woman
to the screen, suggesting that Chesnutt himself write the first treatment, starting with the book's opening story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” about a white couple who move to North Carolina to escape Great Lakes winters. The couple buy a vineyard, which, they discover, is “goophered,” or in the words of Chesnutt's story, “conju'd,” “bewitch'.”

A believer in dreams and spirits, Micheaux also liked haunted house stories, and this wasn't the last time he'd think to use a spooky setting in one of his films. “Write the case of the man and woman into a good love story,” the race-picture producer encouraged Chesnutt. “Let there, if possible, be a haunted house, the haunts being intrigues to be found out near the end, the heroine to have ran off there and in hiding—anything that will thrill or suspend, but have a delightful ending, and give opportunity for a strong male and female lead.”

Besides letter- and scriptwriting, Roanoke afforded Micheaux time for fishing and hunting breaks, and for catching up with the latest Hollywood movies. Demonstrating how closely he followed major-studio trends, Micheaux encouraged Chesnutt to reread
The Conjure Woman
with a mind to choosing “three of the best of these stories therein and make them into a picture along the lines of Marshall Neilan's
Bits of Life,
or Wm. Fox's
While New York Sleeps
”—two recent Hollywood pictures that showcased the same ensemble in thematically linked short stories.

“These stories are pictures [that] mark a new idea, in that they consist of three or four distinct stories in one production. Nazimova is now making such a picture, and after considering it, it has occurred to me that we might be able to do something like this with your book.” Among “possible changes” he suggested to link the stories is that “there should be some sort of romance interwoven, which I might be able to do according to my own idea.”

More than once during the month of October, Micheaux pleaded
with Chesnutt to accept stock or bonds in lieu of the unpaid hundred-dollar notes the author was still anticipating for
The House Behind the Cedars.
He painted a triumphal vision of his company after fund-raising was complete. “In the next five years,” he wrote to the author, he personally would undertake sales missions to South America, Africa, India, and Japan, vowing to “keep going until Micheaux Productions are being shown through the world.” Marketing abroad was the only way to “make up the deficit forced on account of the restricted showing in this country.”

But the author wanted his money, not stock, and the hundred-dollar installments lapsed. Writing from Danville, Virginia, on November 13, Micheaux apologized for being two months in arrears, and promised to personally mail the next two checks on the first of December and January. He claimed to be “succeeding so well in the disposition of our Gold Notes” that he'd be in Harlem by Thanksgiving to finalize his 1923 schedule.

Yet it was Christmas before Micheaux got to New York, and promissory notes were not cash, so
Deceit
remained frozen in the laboratory, while Chesnutt continued to await his payments.

 

By late 1922, Micheaux had to institute even more drastic cost-cutting. Good-bye to his longstanding practice of touring road show acts with his films. Posters and advertising were rationed. His house organ devoted to race pictures,
The Brotherhood,
was gone—if it ever existed. Office and traveling staff were reduced. In Chicago, Micheaux closed his Loop offices and moved the company into low-rent premises in the Black Belt.

After the New Year he returned to Roanoke, resolving to produce his next few films entirely in the South, exploiting cheap local talent and favoring stories that were heavy on exteriors and Southern locales.

His next letter to Charles W. Chesnutt was posted from Jacksonville, Florida, where Micheaux was planning to shoot “a couple of tropical productions by April, and I am waiting to hear from my office where we have sent out a large volume of notes, taken in the sale of our bond issue, for discount, before starting, and will send you the amount due on our past due note as soon as I hear from there, which should be very shortly.”

Norman Productions, his friendly competitor in race pictures, was based in Jacksonville, and Micheaux had a collegial relationship with the white owner, Richard E. Norman, who had taken over a complete studio, once owned by the Eagle Film Company, in nearby Arlington.

Evelyn Preer, Micheaux's favored leading lady, was by now sought after by other stage and screen directors. She was either engaged elsewhere, or—just as likely—Micheaux couldn't afford her steadily rising salary. Instead, Micheaux would assemble a cast of relative unknowns, at, no doubt, bargain prices.

For the first time, Micheaux's leading lady would be the young high school graduate he'd discovered in Steelton, Pennsylvania: Shingzie Howard. His firm-jawed hero would be William E. Fountaine. Though new to film, Fountaine had a long resumé. A strapping tenor from Cleveland, he had started out with the Tennessee Ten (an act starring Florence Mills, in which Fountaine's rendition of “Swanee River” reliably brought down the house), toured as a soloist with the Smart Set and other road show companies, and recently launched his own vaudeville act, the Four Chocolate Dandies.

One of Micheaux's Roanoke angels, William B. F. Crowell, had the imposing physique and air of gravitas to play the villain. Other amateurs and locals augmented the cast that went before the cameras in mid-January.

Two films were planned back-to-back, using the backdrops of Florida. Both scripts borrowed heavily from
The Homesteader,
though Micheaux found endless nuance and variation in his autobiographical template.

One of the scripts was
The Virgin of Seminole,
with the “Seminole” suggesting an obvious Florida association and the “virgin” kidding the female lead. Still a teenager, Howard was indeed “the virgin,” the baby of the troupe, chaste, early to bed, and holding on tightly to her paycheck. (She was getting fifty dollars a week, Howard recalled, “very, very good money in those days.”) The first-time actress was so light-hued that when the train they were riding crossed into the South, she was left at peace in the whites-only section of the train while the others were escorted to Jim Crow cars. The other film Micheaux had planned was
The Dungeon,
a quasi-horror story with a topical message involving segregated housing.

But the cast didn't get very far on either project after assembling on location: Some kind of trouble—unexplained in Micheaux's letters—stopped the production before it got under way. Perhaps Howard was
affected; and Micheaux felt especially protective of the novice actress. Whatever occurred, Jacksonville proved inhospitable for an all-black enterprise.

“Owing to the hatred that exists among our people and the white people,” Micheaux explained in a letter to Chesnutt, “I was compelled to change my plans with regard to producing the pictures down there—not caring to subject our ladies to possible insult which we are most likely to encounter.” They hastily left Florida and retreated to Roanoke in late February, with only a little scenery on film.

 

The film troupe was warmly greeted in Roanoke. The black citizens threw open their houses, offering room and board to cast and crew, inviting the cameras inside their homes for interiors. “We were received with open arms,” recalled Shingzie Howard. “It was fantastic. We were just swept off our feet by the zeal of the people.”

Even the white-dominated Association of Commerce gave Micheaux an official welcome, and in time the civic organization would schedule private screenings of the Roanoke films for local white businessmen at the city's white theaters.

Micheaux concentrated first on finishing
The Dungeon.
According to synopses published in the black press, the story—set in the fictional city of “Cartersville”—concerned the engagement of Stephen Cameron (Fountaine), “a fine, manly and courageous youth,” to Myrtle Downing (Howard), “a beautiful girl of exceptional character.” But their engagement is broken off after the prospective bride has a foreboding, “terrible dream.” Inexplicably, Myrtle decides to marry “Gyp” Lassiter (Crowell), a notorious crook and bigamist who carts his multiple wives off to “a strange and lonely house,” where they are imprisoned in a deep, dark dungeon.

Off Myrtle goes to the dungeon, unbeknownst to Stephen, who is bound for Alaska, where he strikes a fortune on a claim. Up in Alaska, there are claim-jumpers and a pugilist pal; back in Cartersville, there are social problems of the sort Micheaux had noticed mounting in Chicago. “Redistribution of the congressional district” makes it “possible for a Negro to be elected to Congress,” and Gyp Lassiter is the leading candidate.

However, the corrupt Lassiter has “secretly” formed an alliance with established real estate interests to “permit residential segregation, which deal would compel Colored people to move out of the best section of the city.” Learning of this travesty, Stephen decides to return to Cartersville and oppose Lassiter in the election. He wins the campaign, takes on the racist realtors, and saves Myrtle from torture in the dungeon.

March and April afforded balmy weather, and Alma Sewell, one of the many local residents who emoted in Micheaux's films, recalled the director busily guiding scenes for
The Dungeon
and the other Roanoke productions “in the streets, yards, and for inside scenes, the parlor of anyone who would consent to it.”

All available cash flowed to the filming budget, however, and Charles Chesnutt's hundred-dollar installments failed to materialize. “I am compelled to ask you to give us until about April 15, before making a remittance,” Micheaux wrote the author, “as it will take everything we have in the way of cash to complete this production.”

Then Micheaux rushed the editing and premiere of
The Dungeon,
in order to extract some instant revenue from the movie. In lieu of the road show acts he could no longer afford, he introduced the practice of parading his stars at key premieres. Shingzie Howard took the stage to introduce herself and the new picture before “capacity audiences” at the New Douglas and Lenox theaters in Harlem, and she traveled with the print to Eastern cities. William B. F. Crowell billed as “The Meanest Man in the World,” toured with the picture to Southern theaters.

On-screen and off, virgin actress Howard was a charmer. Her beauty and intelligence overcame any awkwardness, and her touching naïveté on-screen was genuine. The film—a prototypical Micheaux melange of outdoor adventure and indoor evil, with penetrating social preachment—was a winner with audiences, and with some critics. But others found fault with the scenario (“a rambling maze of incidents that have a tendency to confuse the spectator,” according to
The Afro-American
*
), while still others complained about the acting of the amateurs (“
The Dungeon
is very much like
The Brute,
only
The Brute
is the best produc
tion for many reasons, the main reason being that there were better actors in the cast,” wrote the
Chicago Defender
).

The Dungeon
also prompted an astonishing criticism of Micheaux's work, one that the black press would revisit in reviewing future Micheaux films. To caveats that the race-picture pioneer raised disturbing issues and highlighted unpleasant realities of black life in America, now was added the perverse complaint that he color-coded his cast: that his “colored” heroes and heroines were too fair-skinned, his villains too dark.