Introduction: Occam’s Ducks

 

 

I’M GLAD OSCAR MICHEAUX and other filmmakers of the separate “race,” or black cinema of the teens through the fifties, are getting their due. They made films, sometimes on less than nothing, sometimes with a budget that would approach one for a regular-movie short subject; to be shown in theaters in black neighborhoods in the North, and at segregated showings throughout the South (where the black audience all sat in the balconies, even though they were the only ones there; it was the same place they sat when a regular Hollywood film was shown). Sometimes Micheaux would get some actors, shoot some photos for stills and lobby cards, and take them around the South, saying to theater owners, “This is knocking ’em dead in Harlem and Chicago, but I only have three prints. Give me twenty dollars and I’ll guarantee you’ll get it first when I get the new prints.” With the money he and his coworkers got that way, he’d go and make the movies, sometimes with different actors than had appeared in the stills . . . (Roberts Townsend and Rodriguez didn’t invent credit-card filmmaking—it was just that credit cards weren’t around back then; if they had been, Micheaux could have saved lots of shoe leather . . .).

Starring in these race pictures (usually the entire cast was black, with a token Honky or two) were black entertainers from vaudeville, theater, the real movies (these were the only times they’d ever have leads in films and be top-billed); plus people who seem to only have acted in race movies (and who probably had day jobs). The films were comedies, dramas, horror movies, gangster films, backstage musicals, even Westerns (Harlem on the Prairie, The Bronze Buckaroo). In other words, the same stuff as Hollywood, only different—all the actors were black and they weren’t under the Production Code, the bête noire of regular filmmaking from 1934 through the late fifties.

Black actors hopped back and forth from playing comedy relief, singing convicts, elevator operators, musicians, and back-lot natives in real movies to these films.

This story is dedicated to two people; the one to Mr. Moreland is self-explanatory after you’ve read the story. I needed someone about five years older for my purposes, but I’m not making up much. Mantan Moreland’s filmography is about as eclectic a one as you’ll find, outside Andy Devine’s, Lionel Stander’s, and Kate Freeman’s. He was everywhere, he did everything; this was besides vaudeville and service-station openings too, I assume. And unlike them, he was in a couple of dozen race movies besides.

The other dedicatee takes a little explaining. Icky Twerp was Bill Camfield, who worked for KTVT Channel 11 in Ft. Worth in the ’50s and ’60s. In the afternoons and on Saturday mornings he was Icky Twerp, with a pinhead cowboy hat, big glasses, and some truly Bad Hair; he showed the Stooges on Slam-Bang Theater, with the help of gorilla stagehands named Ajax and Delphinium, on a pedal-powered projector he mounted like a bicycle, from which sparks shot out. That’s six days a week of live TV: But wait! There’s more!—Saturday nights he was Gorgon, the host of Horror Chiller Shocker Theater (which ran the Shock Theater package of Universal classics plus some dreck). Unlike Count Floyd, he was good: Not only that, he did stuff with videotape, then in its infancy, that matched some of what Kovacs was doing. Since it looked real, kids would scream and yell, “How’d he do that?”

I think his real job, the one he’d been hired for, was as announcer and newsman. Besides all that, when Cap’n Swabbie (another newsman) had had too much spinach the night before, Camfield filled in for him on Popeye Theater, on just before Slam-Bang. . . .

What does that have to do with race pictures? Not much. But Camfield and Moreland are what it’s all about; work where, when, and how you can. And be funnier than hell, which both of them were. They’re both gone. I miss them.

Twist the dial on your Weibach Machine to just after WWI. . . .