Patrick Milligan’s Book on Film maker Oscar Micheaux

Patrick Milligan’s exceptional new book Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only, The Life of America’s First Great Black Filmmaker (HC) should be mandatory reading for everyone remotely concerned with African-American culture and history, as well as that of American film. Despite growing up and spending his entire life in an era where state-sanctioned racism was at its height, Micheaux still produced and directed 27 silent films and 16 sound productions. He wrote, produced and directed a film before Charlie Chaplin did, and he often took his films from place to place physically. Micheaux refused to acknowledge defeat, and wouldn’t accept the images he saw on screen of docile, ignorant and lazy Black people as the only ones that society at large would know. Milligan’s book doesn’t sugarcoat Micheaux’s faults (among them bad judgment both fiscally and personally, occasional arrogance and a pride that led him to a tragic case of plagiarism), but he also puts his achievements squarely into perspective. It was amazing that any Black man during the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s was not just making films, but also creating a network for them to be shown. Micheaux also made every type of movie conceivable from musicals to westerns, and wasn’t afraid to buck conventional wisdom regarding content, even showing interracial love scenes in his work at a time when there were several states with laws forbidding even dating between races, let alone marriage.The volume also shows that a solidarity within the Black film world (indeed the larger Black community) that isn’t quite as evident today. It is deplorable that there are no Black dramas on television and so few films that aren’t comedies, and it’s sad that it doesn’t even seem to be much of an issue these days. Programming executives aren’t even considering the issue of expanding opportunity for Black actors, directors, writers and producers judging from the figures that keep coming back from the Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild and Directors Guild surveys. Even with 500 plus channels out there, the scarcity of African-American programming outside the arenas of comedy and music remain glaring.

Perhaps the greatest lesson that can be learned from Oscar Micheaux is that at some point if you want to see it, you have to create it yourself, then market it. Until we become more active as a community in the distribution and marketing end of cultural commerce, we’ll continue getting a steady diet of what’s now regularly trotted out.