Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (38 page)

The main character in the first story is a screen producer named Marshall, who visits a cabaret called “The Lybia,” scouting talent for his next movie. An obvious Micheaux surrogate (even his name “sounds somewhat like Micheaux,” as J. Ronald Green has noted), Marshall admires one young performer and offers her a plum part in his next picture. The job “doesn't pay much,” he admits, only $3.50 a day—art imitating life—but is she interested? “How would I like to go to heaven without dying?” she replies, batting her eyelashes. “You don't realize how happy this makes me.”

The first story's in-joke playfulness is continued when Alice B. Russell shows up at The Lybia, portraying a hate-driven woman determined to kill the louse who long ago spurned and murdered her best friend. Nightclubs would become the hub of all the plotlines in Micheaux's sound pictures, and soon enough The Lybia welcomes another stranger, a young woman sitting nervously at a table with her boyfriend. The woman is delivered an anonymous note, warning her that she has only “ten minutes to live.” Then, out of the blue, comes a title card. “What mystery here?” it asks. “Why has this beautiful girl been put on the spot? Let's go back…”

Yes, a title card: Long after switching to sound, Micheaux made use of intertitles as an inexpensive way to bridge continuity gaps (and censors' excisions), even to save money on sound recording. In
Ten Minutes to
Live,
for example, the nervous young woman is being stalked by a felon who happens to be deaf and dumb—a character who scribbles his words, allowing Micheaux to limit his dialogue to intertitles!

While the woman awaits her fate at The Lybia, the vengeful felon breaks into the house where she has been staying (lingering on the porch steps, the camera catches the house number “55”—The Homestead in Montclair). That is when the ex-con learns (preposterously, from a telegram sent by his mother: an excuse for another intertitle) that he is being surrounded by police. The felon looks out the window to see if the bad news is true. There, glaring back at him, is none other than the hatted Oscar Micheaux, once again playing a detective.
Ten Minutes to Live
was a Micheaux “home movie” in every sense, with A. Burton Russell once more listed as producer.

A. B. DeComathiere made his final appearance for Micheaux in the film, playing Marshall, the producer. Lawrence Chenault sat at a table in the nightclub throughout the story, observing the action and commenting drolly; it would be his last Micheaux production, too. The sinister-looking William A. Clayton Jr., from the silent-era Micheaux pictures
The Broken Violin, The Wages of Sin,
and
When Men Betray,
played the embittered felon.

Donald Heywood, uncredited, emceed and orchestrated the nightclub numbers, which included Ralph Brown, the tap-dancing soloist for Cab Calloway's orchestra; this was the first of Brown's fiery tap exhibitions in several Micheaux pictures of the 1930s. If the chorus line looked a little weary, perhaps it was because the dancers were working second shift after their regular stint at Connie's Inn. “We'd make these scenes at night,” recalled Lorenzo Tucker. “After they [the dancers] finished work and the cabaret closed, he would have a bus to bring them all to the set.”

If Micheaux had one inarguable genius, it was for using the world around him as his rent-free set. He'd put cameras across from police stations as the cops came off duty, and photograph his uniformed actors walking in and out of the station doors. “In railroad stations he had a trick that I'm telling you was terrific,” recalled Tucker. “He would have the cameraman set up in a telephone booth, and coming off the train or going on the train he got his crowds.” Impromptu, the director also used to steal “a lot of scenes in Bronx Park,” according to the actor, “and the police would come and run Mr. Micheaux out of there.”

The “stolen” footage was the highlight of
Ten Minutes to Live.
In one
sequence the endangered ingenue (Willor Lee Guilford) arrives at an eerily deserted Grand Central Station, hails a cab, and rides through city streets on a drawn-out taxi ride that is part newsreel, part Alice through the looking glass. There is no dialogue, only Micheaux's pictorial travelogue and a soundtrack punctuated by the “intrusive blare of car horns,” in the words of J. Ronald Green, and a “surrealistically serene music track that modulates into Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.”

 

In the early talkie days, there was a distinct changing of the guard among Micheaux's regular actors. Lorenzo Tucker had come to feel frustrated with Micheaux; the jobs were erratic, his parts in some films like
Ten Minutes to Live
trivial. The new, fair-haired kid was a handsome West Indian, Carl Mahon, who got all the hand-holding scenes with the girl with “ten minutes to live.”

Another newcomer was Carlton Moss, from Newark, New Jersey. A theater graduate of Morgan College, Moss was a smart, ambitious young man already carving out a reputation for himself in radio and theater circles. Alice B. Russell, who knew the Moss family, arranged for him to audition for a small acting role in
The Phantom of Kenwood.
“Displaying an attitude of a man who puts great dependence on his wife's opinions,” Moss remembered, “Micheaux looked me up and down and nodded his approval.” The race-picture pioneer took the young man under his wing, even taking him along to New York City's downtown film laboratories, where Moss was acutely aware that they were the only black people in the building. Still, Moss was impressed by how Micheaux commanded respect when he walked into the labs. Everyone snapped to attention, watching him with respect and none of the usual side-of-the-mouth racism.

Moss admired Micheaux, but not his movies—at least not the ones Moss himself acted in, which were made during this hectic period. He thought one of the films' problems was the white cameramen Micheaux hired at the lowest available rates, cameramen who were “declassed, meaning nobody else wanted them,” who had contempt for the stories they were filming, and who started drinking in the afternoons and lost discipline.

Micheaux was feeling challenged by the new generation; youngsters
like Moss didn't really appreciate his stature, kowtow to his wishes, or accept his long experience as wisdom. Moss had written some radio scripts, but when he told Micheaux that he wanted to write film scripts, Micheaux “made it clear that he wrote his own scripts and wasn't interested in what anyone else wrote.” He was “in absolute control of every facet of his productions,” Moss recalled, and “would not listen to any suggestions or changes from anyone, except Mrs. Micheaux.”

To Moss, Micheaux's scripts seemed prolix, the language frequently tangled, or ungrammatical. But only Alice B. Russell dared criticize her husband's scenarios. “She'd edit [the scripts] by being in the rehearsal,” recalled Moss, “and [while] we're playing the scene [she'd say], ‘Dad, I think it'd be proper to say…'”

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 be
hind. 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.