Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (48 page)

Lorenzo Tucker stopped by one day, and Micheaux confided part of his dream had always been “to have this thing so I can sit in my office and just ship these things out. That's the way the boys do it out on the coast!”

Late in the summer of 1947 the race-picture pioneer left for Chicago, accompanied by his wife, who would help him finalize the script, make arrangements with a studio and laboratory, scout locations, and cast the film.

 

World War II changed prospects for the Negro in America. Black Americans had served dutifully and with distinction, and they came back from the war a force for social progress. They were being employed and educated as never before under government grants. They were slowly moving into all sectors of the economy, agitating for equality.

Race pictures had long since been relegated to a worse than ever marginal existence, in part—ironically—because the war had helped to raise Hollywood's consciousness. Soon Hollywood would embark on a new round of earnest antiprejudice pictures like
Pinky
(about “passing”) and
Intruder in the Dust
(about lynching), co-opting subject matter—and, in the latter case, lead actor Juano Hernandez—from Micheaux and the handful of producers still stubbornly turning out race pictures. To some, these postwar Hollywood “preachments” would seem weak tea; others would see them as auguries of better things to come.

Feature-length motion pictures were no longer produced in post–World War II Chicago. The old Essanay Studios had been whittled away and long abandoned. The only technical work was in advertisements, industrials, local radio, or a few fledgling television operations. Show business venues had dwindled in the city's Black Belt, and local
black entertainers were struggling harder than ever to carve out remunerative careers. The sound and lighting and camera unions were lily-white.

Most of the professionals Micheaux had known in the late 1930s, during his last fling of film activity, were retired or deceased. Robert Abbott, publisher of the
Chicago Defender,
had passed away in 1940. Nahum David Brascher, the onetime head of the Associated Negro Press, whose column in the
Defender
had long been friendly to Micheaux, died in 1945, leaving Micheaux with no up-to-date contacts at the still-thriving black newspaper.

In bygone days, Micheaux's activities had rated front-page coverage. His current stature was such that the
Defender
carried only a small item in its “Swinging the News” column, noting that the race-picture producer was in town “seeking talent for the 20–reel movie epic” he was planning “to be filmed here and”—the old ballyhoo—“in Hollywood.”

Mr. and Mrs. Micheaux found quarters in a comfortable hotel on Fifty-first Street on the South Side, along with their chauffeur and “odd jobs” man. The chauffeurs were always temporary hires; people who encountered Micheaux on this trip recall that this one was a black gentleman named Obie, who drove them everywhere in Micheaux's ebony limousine.

Micheaux made arrangements with a South Side community center that was willing to donate rehearsal space. He leased a studio at a former radio news station on Twenty-ninth Street, ordered sets built and equipment brought in. Who can guess at his thoughts as he toured his old Black Belt neighborhood, and picked out two or three brownstones that might stand in for the residences of the major characters in the story, characters and places that evoked bittersweet memories of Chicago before World War I?

He engaged a local assistant director, a black college graduate with a broadcasting résumé. The audio and camera crew he hired were, by necessity, white—members of the all-white local, which enforced union employment. That included the director of photography, a man named Marvin Spoor, whom everyone called Major Spoor. Spoor was related to George K. Spoor, who had founded Essanay in Chicago at the turn of the century, though these days the Major mostly shot television, commercials, and industrials.

When it came time to cast his new production, Micheaux put out feelers and flyers to black churches, high schools, colleges. The majority
of the cast, as it ended up, hailed from Chicago; nearly all were making their first—in most cases, only—screen appearances.

A local girl, Verlie Cowan, was picked to play Linda Lee, the preacher's daughter who marries the homesteader. Her hellcat sister, Terry, would be played by Yvonne Machen, a Chicagoan with New York experience; she had been part of the replacement cast of
Anna Lucasta
on Broadway. Harris Gaines, a son of prominent Chicago civil rights activists, had done some radio work in New York; he would play the Reverend, in this rendition called Doctor Lee. Alice B. Russell, who also served as producer, would portray the Reverend's wife.

It was Mrs. Micheaux who found Myra Stanton, phoning her mother to tell her that Mr. Micheaux wanted to consider her daughter for the part of Deborah Stewart, the Scottish girl with Negro blood. “How he found out about me we never knew,” Stanton recalled. Micheaux might have seen Stanton's photograph in one of the magazines of the
Ebony
empire, the black-owned Johnson Publishing Company, which was headquartered in Chicago. Stanton was a local model but also a college student, brainy as well as pretty.

Twenty-two-year-old Leroy Collins Jr. was attending nearby Roosevelt University on the GI Bill. A varsity football player in high school, Collins had also done a little acting in school and community groups before his army service, and he looked the part: a blend of athlete, soldier, and movie star, tall, well-built, dreamily handsome, with an intelligent face and a warm smile. Collins and his fraternity brothers heard about an all-black movie being shot in Chicago and they went over to the studio where interviews were being held to look for summer jobs as stagehands. Collins was standing in line, hoping for any kind of work, when the assistant director tapped him on the shoulder and beckoned him into another room to meet two people.

Barely into his teens when the director had made his last picture in 1940, Collins had never heard of Oscar Micheaux, had never read his novels or recalled seeing any of his movies. The man he was introduced to was in his sixties, tall, heavyset, and balding, with salt and pepper tufts of hair, dressed in suit and tie. They shook hands. Close by was a lighter-skinned woman in her late fifties, slender, well-dressed, cultivated.

Micheaux asked Collins a few introductory questions and then briefly outlined the story of the picture—his own life story, he said, fictionalized. Then to his astonishment, Micheaux handed the college student a thick
script and asked Collins to read a scene in which he would be playing Martin Eden, the lead character.

“Just read it in your own style,” the director encouraged him.

So Collins read a page, as Micheaux stared at him. Then another page. Finally, after a few more, Micheaux glanced over at his wife and said, “I think this is the one.” And Alice B. Russell nodded her approval.

“You are Martin Eden,” Micheaux explained, “and Martin Eden was me.”

Micheaux's assistant director later informed Collins that many people, including prominent professionals, had been auditioned for the lead role, “people like Oscar Brown, a writer, singer, and all-around entertainer,” in Collins's words. “But I got the part because I looked like Oscar Micheaux wanted me to look.”

Leroy Collins
was
Martin Eden: not only in the story, but also in Micheaux's eyes. The director never addressed the college student as Leroy, or Roy, as his friends called him. Instead Micheaux always called him “Martin,” just as he always called Myra Stanton “Deborah.”

“Never in his life did he call me by my real name,” Collins marveled years later. “From the first moment he laid eyes on me he didn't call me anything other than the name of the character in his book.”

 

Micheaux, by this point, was walking with a slight limp, using a cane. He took pills at intervals, and once in a while smoked a cigar. But people associated with the director's last film production don't remember him having any obvious health concerns. In rehearsals and on the set he radiated strength and authority.

The same could be said of his methods. Though his budget was as feeble as ever, he was imaginative about making do with what he had. Again and again, surviving eyewitnesses have contradicted the legend that Micheaux was an intentionally cheap, fast, and shoddy director: the mistaken notion that the partial remains of his censored, maltreated films represent a deliberate “style.” When Micheaux found the money and time—and, most important to this last project, the willpower—he worked hard, from read-throughs to “dailies” and retakes.

In August the cast gathered at the community center, sitting in a circle of chairs in a big room. Besides the principals, there were about
twenty other actors with speaking parts, an assemblage that in some ways epitomized Micheaux's casting over the years. Quite a few were college students from Roosevelt. Micheaux recruited favorites from earlier films, like Edward Fraction from
The Symbol of the Unconquered
(a quarter of a century ago) to play the old grandfather, and Gladys Williams from
The Notorious Elinor Lee;
he even flew one veteran character actor in his sixties out from Hollywood. Chicago calypso dancer and choreographer Vernon B. Duncan, the son of the man who had played the Reverend McCracken character in
The Homesteader,
played one of the unscrupulous lawyers trying to rig the betrayal of Martin Eden.

Always dressed formally, Micheaux sat to one side during the initial read-throughs, while the actors with the lengthiest dialogue scenes stood up in front. Most of the scenes were overlong, Leroy Collins thought, and
talky.
The script seemed as long as a telephone book, and Martin Eden was in over 70 percent of the scenes.

Micheaux would volunteer little suggestions. “Speak up.” Or: “Try reading it a different way.” Though he was addressing a room full of amateurs, he rarely expounded on acting; instead he offered valuable camera-specific tips, such as never to look directly at the lens. “He wanted to get it down to a fine point before you got in costume,” recollected Collins, “because he was spending a great deal of his own fortune to do this movie.”

Mrs. Micheaux was at all the rehearsals, reading her own part or holding the master script. The couple had silent ways of communicating. As the actors spoke their parts, Mrs. Micheaux made sure they were tracking her husband's written lines, and quietly consulted with her husband about necessary small changes.

The script was a strange mix, mingling some archaic language (as though it were recycled from silent-era intertitles), with modern slang and innuendo. Micheaux was still willing to test the censors, with lines like “How's your hammer hanging?” and “You might be able to ‘make' her,” that the local authorities in some parts of the country were bound to notice. But he bowed to postwar sensibilities by stopping short of using the n-word, long a point of pride in his populist approach. The word had been conspicuous in the novel on which the script was based, but whenever the film's characters started to utter the slur, they were inevitably cut off in mid-syllable.

The time frame of the story was curiously jumbled. At one point, for instance, the self-referential Micheaux couldn't resist having Martin Eden
mail a copy of
The Case of Mrs. Wingate
—a book Micheaux published thirty years
after
his homesteading—to his neighbors.

If the director was anxious about spending so much of his own money, he didn't show it during the three or four weeks set aside for rehearsal before the actual filming. If the actors became comfortable with their parts, then the production would go more smoothly and Micheaux would save on film stock and studio time. The crew was small, but Micheaux had his bases covered. He even sprang for costume fittings and makeup artists. All the actors except Leroy Collins wore makeup. “He stipulated that at no time was I ever to use any makeup,” Collins said. “I guess he wanted me to look more rugged, like he was as a young person.”

The all-white crew was paid union scale. But the cast of mostly young amateur unknowns felt grateful for their decent compensation. Their checks were handed over to them on time, weekly, by Micheaux himself.

 

After rehearsals had run their course, the cast moved into the Twenty-ninth Street studio for two or three weeks of interior photography. His spirits lifted by the work, Micheaux scurried around, scrutinizing the set and lighting. He gave exacting instructions to the cameraman, sometimes peering through the lens himself. He blocked the actors' movements, and perched on a stool to watch intently as the scenes unfolded.

There was no money in the budget for the elaborate musical sequences of old, but then again, Micheaux was no longer the nightclub aficionado he once had been. Yet Micheaux did find a way to weave favorite music into the story, using the jazz standard “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which he whistled to work, recurrently in the background of several scenes.

Micheaux's directing style was courtly, though he could be gruff and blustery with some of the amateurs, the men more than the women. “He never shouted at me, not once,” recalled Collins. “He was gentle with me, and the leading ladies, and two or three other ladies. I think he was quite the guy with the ladies, at one time.” He was also gracious with Jesse Johnson, one of Collins's fraternity brothers, who played a small part as Martin Eden's white homesteader friend. At a certain point, Johnson got up the courage to ask Micheaux for additional work as a “a go-fer on a part time basis,” carrying klieg lights and other equipment during the
filming. Johnson was trying to pay for night school. Micheaux said sure. “Three or four hours a day,” recalled Johnson gratefully. “Twenty five bucks a week. Back in 1947, without a part-time job, that was a fortune. I did that until they wrapped up the movie.”