Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (23 page)

But in these earliest letters to Chesnutt, Micheaux was also thinking about story elements that had nothing to do with reality or budget. In the 1950s, the French cinephiles of
Cahiers du Cinéma
and
Positif
would break critical ground by anointing a number of American directors who “wrote with the camera,” regardless of whether they wrote the actual scripts of their films, hailing these pantheon directors as the “auteurs,” or true authors of their bodies of work. In this way, too, Micheaux was a pioneer, an auteur before the term was coined. He always wrote as well as directed his films. He consistently drew on stories from his own life, of course, but he also “personalized” other people's stories with his ideas.

Though he insisted that he loved everything about Chesnutt's story, Micheaux suggested that one of its characters could be enhanced in such a way that would enable Micheaux to turn a relentlessly grim drama, concluding with Rena's death, into a story with a rosier ending. Rena didn't have to die, he proposed; she could revive and marry a man of her own race. Micheaux zeroed in on one of Chesnutt's secondary characters, a hardworking black man named Frank who grows up across the street from Rena and stays her loyal friend through life. In Chesnutt's novel, the goodhearted Frank can only tell Rena that he loves her, on her deathbed. Micheaux wanted to “improve” the humble character, gradually transforming him into someone audiences would accept as Rena's soulmate. “I would make the man Frank more intelligent at least towards the end of the story,” Micheaux suggested, “permitting him to study and improve himself, for using the language as he does in the story he would not in any way be obvious as a lover.”

Despite the “wonderful version” of a tragic ending Chesnutt had devised for his novel, such an unhappy ending was wrong for a Micheaux film, he said. The race-picture pioneer was always mindful about possible viewers' reactions; it was a cornerstone of his philosophy to be at one with his audience. Explaining how he wished to please the “colored people
whom we must depend upon as a bulwark for our business,” Micheaux said he always tried to “visualize just how they would leave the theatre after the close of a performance.”

The way to fix the story, Micheaux advised Chesnutt, would be to make Frank “stronger, and while good as he is portrayed, unselfish and devoted, but in the meantime for permit him to have become sufficiently intelligent, such a reasonably courageous fellow, that during Rena's illness she would be able to see and appreciate in him the wonderful man he really was, and to have her heart go out to him in the end, as his reward.”

Micheaux said he was “sure” this changed ending would send “our people” streaming “out of the theater with this story lingering in their minds, with a feeling that all good must triumph in the end,” which was preferable to the audiences' “gloomy muttering and a possible knocking with their invisible hammers.” Besides, wrote Micheaux, it was his experience that an upbeat finale “would result much more profitably from a financial point of view.”

 

Everything Micheaux proposed met with Chesnutt's approval. And even if Micheaux's five hundred dollars didn't excite the author, he realized that it was “better than nothing”—that is, he had no other bids. Yet Chesnutt's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, urged him to ask for one hundred dollars upfront, not the paltry twenty-five.

So Chesnutt wrote to inform Micheaux that he could have
The House Behind the Cedars
if he could afford to pay one hundred dollars as the first of five installment payments. He had been encouraged by his meetings with Micheaux and by his letters, but it was the quality of his films that really won him over. “I have no doubt that you will make it an interesting and credible picture,” Chesnutt wrote. “That you can do so I am well aware, from the specimen of your work that I saw in Cleveland several months ago.”
*

Corresponding with his publisher, Chesnutt showed himself to be the model of an accommodating author. He fully expected Micheaux to “chop” his favorite book up “more or less, and probably change the em
phasis on certain characters,” he wrote, but “this is no more than the usual fate of a novel which is filmed,” in Chesnutt's words. Besides, he added, “I have seen one of the films produced by this company, and it wasn't at all bad.”

A jubilant Micheaux wrote back to say he would strike the first check promptly after the contract was formally worded and mutually signed. In the first flush of their new partnership, he urged Chesnutt to consider writing original screen stories for other Micheaux productions. He said he'd eagerly pay him for “at least four.”

“It is not, when writing directly for the screen, necessary to write a long book,” Micheaux explained, giving insight into his filmmaking regimen during the silent era, “synopsis being sufficient. I find that mine approximate 8,000 to 15,000 words, a detailed synopsis setting forth a concrete tho't from which I can make an adaptation.”

A concise descriptive synopsis with dialogue highlights was preferable to a novel-length manuscript that might “run to conversation,” Micheaux warned. “Bear this in mind if you decide to write more stories for us—description and not such much conversation, plenty of action, intensity, and strong counterplot…

“Write of the things you have known more intimately. I like stories of the South—strange murder cases, mystery with dynamic climaxes—but avoid race conflict,” i.e., conflict between black and white people, “as much as possible, which does not mean that I want stories ‘all colored'—I do not. I desire them as the races live in relation to each other in every day life.”

Micheaux said he expected to get right to work on
The House Behind the Cedars.
He hoped the script would come easily and the film version of Chesnutt's novel might rush before the cameras by May or June 1921.

 

But the hundred-dollar pledge to Charles W. Chesnutt was another figment of Micheaux's imagination. He didn't have the money to spare. Stalling Chesnutt, the filmmaker returned to his own voluminous story file, and pulled out a “strange murder story,” set in the South, on a theme that would come to preoccupy him as obsessively as the subject of “passing.”

The Leo Frank case involved a sensational crime, a Negro versus a Jew
in the courtroom, and a lynching. Micheaux had first delved into the case in his novel
The Forged Note,
making a study of the trial in Atlanta; and he was not the only person, especially in black America, who believed the Negro in the case might have told the truth, and the Jew was the actual killer.

He tended to impugn Frank in his books, embracing the prosecution's inference that Frank was a “sexual pervert” who disliked ordinary lovemaking and was therefore compelled to rape or sodomize his victim after killing her. But his films about the case were more searching and enlightened: Though the Negro was always innocent in his on-screen versions of the story, the Jew wasn't necessarily guilty either. Instead, Micheaux suggested that a third, unsuspected party might be culpable.

It appears from press accounts that Micheaux began working on a scenario about the Frank case on his first swing through the South in 1919, promoting
The Homesteader.
At that time, the working title was “Circumstantial Evidence.” Although the names and places would be changed when Micheaux switched the setting from Atlanta to New York, there was no question as to the antecedents. In early drafts the victim's name was Little Mary, as in Phagan; later, it would be changed to Myrtle Gunsaulus, giving the film its final, unwieldy title,
The Gunsaulus Mystery.
(“I like odd and peculiar names,” the Sidney Wyeth character says in the sound remake of
The Gunsaulus Mystery—Lem Hawkins' Confession—
as though alluding to its predecessor.)

Micheaux boldly inserted himself into the story, writing his
Forged Note
alter ego Sidney Wyeth into the script as a West Indian selling his novel door to door, in order to finance his law degree. Wyeth is captivated by a woman who buys his book, but they are separated by a misunderstanding.

Some time later, Wyeth, now a successful attorney, is drawn into a peculiar homicide and forced to investigate the crime himself to dig out the true facts. Wyeth thus becomes the first “race detective” in film; indeed, most of literature lagged behind.
*
Like many of Micheaux's innovations, this idea sprang from his own experience: Wyeth, the first of many black gumshoes and undercover agents in his films, was a melding of his Wyeth
persona with the two mixed-race operatives he counted, in
The Forged Note,
as part of Leo Frank's defense team.

Wyeth agrees to defend the chief suspect in the sordid murder of a female factory worker. As in the actual Frank case, the initial suspect is a night watchman, in this instance, the brother of the woman from Wyeth's past. Reunited, Wyeth and the woman team up as sleuths. Their detective work shifts suspicion to a Negro janitor, who, after being arrested, implicates the factory superintendent.

Micheaux shot
The Gunsaulus Mystery
in the New York area in early 1921. E. G. Tatum played the night watchman; Louis DeBulger was Lem Hawkins, the Negro janitor (the James Conley figure); and Evelyn Preer played the sister quietly in love with the author, lawyer, and “race detective” played by Ed “Dick” Abrams, a well-regarded lead for the Lafayette Players. Lawrence Chenault, with his relatively light complexion, played the sleazy white factory boss.

The seven-reel drama was ready for Micheaux's first Harlem premiere at the Lafayette Theatre in April 1921, and by all indications the film was a crowd- and critic-pleaser. The
New York Age
reported that
The Gunsaulus Mystery
“holds the interest of the audience from start to finish…[and] is one of the best pictures the Micheaux Film Corporation has produced.” Other black newspapers agreed, praising the suspenseful handling of the plot while noting Micheaux had also managed to sneak in uproarious “bits of comedy.”

Micheaux heavily promoted the film's parallels to the Frank case. “The evidence shows that Leo Frank committed the crime and got a COLORED MAN to help him dispose of the body,” read a 1921 advertisement in the
Chicago Whip,
“And then tried to blame the crime on the COLORED MAN.” But the marketing avoided the word “Jew,” and the factory boss in the 1921 film (and its remake) bore the WASPish name of “Brisbane.”

Scholars have differed over Micheaux's attitude toward Jews. Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor argued that some of Micheaux's “public remarks and some of the language in his later novels reflect a bitter anti-Semitism that he always denied.” Film scholar J. Ronald Green, who has analyzed Micheaux's Jewish fixation, conceded that the race-picture producer was capable of “ethnically prejudicial observations” in his work, but insisted that Micheaux always stopped short of outright anti-Semitism. And believing in the ultimate innocence of the Negro in the Leo Frank case was
entirely consistent with Micheaux's lifelong stance against the racial profiling of black people and other travesties of the legal system. He was against wrongful accusation, lynchings, or corporal punishment, for Jews and Negroes alike.

In Atlanta, where feelings about the case were still raw,
The Gunsaulus Mystery
wouldn't find a booking until 1923. But officials there didn't need to parse the characters' names or hear the word “Jew” to recognize the picture's origins in the Frank case.

Characteristically, Micheaux managed to skirt the three-person (all-white) censorship committee and screen his movie initially at a black theater on Decatur Street in Atlanta. He was busy advertising a second opening, on West Mitchell, when a police sergeant, acting on “several complaints,” hauled the print before censors. They promptly ascertained that Micheaux had peppered his roman à clef with “many identical details” of the Frank case. The Atlanta censors unanimously condemned
The Gunsaulus Mystery,
ordering Micheaux's film “shipped out of the city”—an action so drastic, according to film scholar Matthew Bernstein, that it rated mention in the local white press.

 

One can only speculate on the merits of
The Gunsaulus Mystery,
however, because Micheaux's fifth film is another “lost” work. Charles W. Chesnutt was one of those who saw it, however; and in a September 1921 letter to Micheaux he didn't mention any anti-Semitism, but celebrated Micheaux's latest production as another positive augury for his novel. “I visited the theatre on Central Avenue [in Cleveland], where your picture
The Gunsaulus Case
[sic] was shown, and enjoyed it very much,” Chesnutt wrote. “The picture was well made, and gives me reason to feel confident that
The House Behind the Cedars
will not suffer at your hands.”

The contract for
The House Behind the Cedars
was not yet cemented, however: Micheaux was so strapped for cash that he still hadn't come up with the hundred-dollar advance. The race-picture producer approached the
Chicago Defender,
cooking up a scheme whereby the newspaper would serialize the novel, along with advertisements selling a new edition of the book, to be republished by Micheaux's company. The serialization,
in theory, would provide the godsend that would allow Micheaux to pay Chesnutt his five hundred dollars.

Swan Micheaux had written Chesnutt in June 1921, apologizing for the fact that the company's financial morass, which he attributed to a “depression in business throughout the country,” had forced them to delay finalization of the contract. However, if Chesnutt was willing to surrender serial rights to the book, the company would raise its original offer to seven hundred dollars, with the first one hundred upon signing, and six additional hundred-dollar installments “each month until the full contract is paid.”