with Micheaux to adapt The Homesteader into a
film. Unable to reach an agreement on Micheaux’s
desire to direct the film, Micheaux formed his own
film business in 1918, the Oscar Micheaux Cor-
poration, which began making short movies and
then feature films.
Having learned how to network his novels, Mi-
cheaux followed the same strategy for his films.
Using his renowned charm, he managed to con-
vince theater owners, including southern whites,
that there was an existing, eager black audience
ready to pay to see an all-black cast on screen.
His boasting proved prophetic, and from 1919 to
1948 he made and released more than 40 films,
though only a few survive today. Some of the
better-known movies included The Homesteader
(1919), Body and Soul (1925), The Exile (1931),
God’s Stepchildren (1937), Lying Lips (1939), and
Betrayal (1948).
The marketing of his movies has been a point
of praise as much as the movies themselves. Ac-
cording to one plan, Micheaux would go to ven-
ues to talk up his most recently completed movie,
asking for an advance payment to book the film,
and then he would return to New York, where he
lived and worked, to shoot the film on a budget
from the advance money. His other notable strat-
egy was to publicize his black actors by associating
them with popular Hollywood personalities. For
example, he billed black actor Lorenzo Tucker as
the “black Valentino” and black actress Bee Free-
man as the “sepia Mae West” (Bogle, 114).
Although his early films examined politically
charged topics such as interracial dating, lynching,
and Ku Klux Klan terrorism, Micheaux was both
lauded and berated because many of his films fo-
cused on middle-class aspirations and the black
characters who lived within those “cultured” envi-
ronments. Committed to using his movie images
to counter the racial stereotypes in Hollywood
features, Micheaux’s recurring emphasis on edu-
cated, professional blacks often excluded the black
working class. However, even while presenting the
accomplished black milieu, Micheaux’s films criti-
cized the flaws and hypocrisies he perceived in that
group, as in his film Body and Soul. In that piece,
black legend Paul Robeson played a dual role—an
immoral black minister and his hardworking,
conscientious twin brother. The movie condemns
both the minister’s exploitive behavior and a con-
gregation’s willingness to permit his actions just
because he is church leader.
By the 1940s, Hollywood decided to capitalize
on the proven black and white audience for all-
black cast films, and, unable to compete with stu-
dio budgets and distribution power, black-owned
film companies, including Micheaux’s, began to
disappear. During this decade, Micheaux began
writing novels again, including The Winds from
Nowhere (1941), another autobiographical novel
that reworked the material in his first novel; The
Case of Mrs. Wingate (1944, a detective novel); The
Story of Dorothy Stanfield (1946), about an insur-
ance con; and The Masquerade (1947), which owes
much to CHARLES CHESNUTT’s The House behind
the Cedars (Bolden, 254).
Micheaux died in 1951 of a heart attack, but he
became an inspiration for many independent and
black filmmakers who followed him. In 1974, the
Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame began presenting
the annual Oscar Micheaux Award to deserving
black filmmakers who exemplified pioneering cre-
ativity, and in 1987, Micheaux received a star on
the Hollywood Walk of Fame to acknowledge his
contributions to American cinema.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies,
and Bucks. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Bolden, Tanya. “Oscar Micheaux.” In African Ameri-
can Writers: A Dictionary, edited by Sharon
Dorante Hatch and Michael Strickland, 253–254.
Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2000.
Bowser, Pearl, and Louise Spence. Writing Himself
into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and
His Audiences. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 2000.
Green, J. Ronald. Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar
Micheaux. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2000.
Reid, Mark A. Redefining Black Film. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1993.Mel DonalsonMicheaux, Oscar 355