By Martin Cooper
The story of Black filmmakers in the San Fernando Valley has to begin under the unflattering light shined on the region’s history of racism until well after World War Il.
Bigotry was in full flower from the 1920s through the 1950s in the Valley; the Valley-based studios largely restricted their portrayals of Black actors to musicians, athletes, maids, or comedic players. Behind the cameras, nary a Black face was to be seen.
Warner Bros. displayed greater social consciousness than others with The Green Pastures (1936), a story of God, heaven, and Old Testament stories. The film used the perspective of rural, Black Americans, with a predominantly Black cast. While it portrayed Black people as simplistic and naive, it was not truly racist; more of a well-intentioned but patronizing artifact of its era.
The Green Pastures starred Rex Ingram, Oscar Polk and Eddie Anderson, who played Rochester on Jack Benny’s radio program from 1937 to 1955, and on Benny’s TV program from 1950 to 1965. Many of the TV programs with Anderson were filmed at Revue Studios, today’s Radford Studio Center.
Actors such as Herb Jeffries, who was deeply involved in independent Black filmmaking, starred in a series of all-Black cast cowboy films in the late 1930s. Harlem on the Prairie (1937), a pioneering all-Black Western musical, was filmed on the Iverson Movie Ranch. Late in life Jeffries lived in Woodland Hills and died in 2014 at West Hills Hospital at 100 years old.
Lockheed’s Burbank plant employed thousands of Black workers during World War II, many of them depicted in training films, industrial shorts, and wartime documentaries produced nearby. These were among the first motion pictures to portray – in a positive light – Black labor, skill, and patriotism even while on-screen representation in mainstream features remained limited and stereotyped.
After World War II, when mass migration changed the face of the Valley, redlining – the practice of denying house sales or rentals to minority groups – began to diminish. But it wasn’t until the 1968 Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, color, religion, or national origin, that significant numbers of Black people, including those in entertainment, began moving to the Valley in any numbers.
The postwar era brought a subtle but important shift. Television production exploded in the Valley and the boundary between TV and movies meant that Black performers and craftspeople increasingly worked in Valley studios and locations.
But no portrayal of a Black person before the early 1950s was as positive as that of Sam in 1942’s Casablanca, filmed entirely in the Valley. He was not only portrayed with dignity; he was Humphrey Bogart’s long-time friend in the film. It was Dooley Wilson’s career highlight.
Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to win an Academy Award (Gone With the Wind, 1939), also appeared in a substantial supporting role in Warner’s In This Our Life (1942), in a film dealing explicitly with racial issues, shot on the studio lot. She lived her last years at the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, where she died in 1952.
And what about Black actors of the past 60 years, where a number of Black actors have achieved parity with white thespians in terms of roles and compensation?
The one individual who should be credited with doing the most for recognition of Black actors is Sidney Poitier, the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor (Lilies of the Field, 1963). He starred in three major hits in one year, 1967, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and To Sir, with Love.
In 2002 he was awarded an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement in breaking racial barriers and a distinguished film career; the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009); made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE, 1974); received a Cannes Film Festival Tribute for lifetime contributions to cinema and was presented with France’s Order of Arts and Letters (2006); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1992; and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1999.
A personal list of the top ten Black actors beyond Poitier: Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Eddie Murphy, Viola Davis, Jamie Foxx, Whoopi Goldberg, Idris Elba, and Cynthia Erivo.
What about the Black experience behind the cameras? Tune in next month.
Martin Cooper, President of Cooper Communications, supervised public relations for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for 10 years; held executive positions with Disney and Universal Studios; and was Board Chairman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
An award-winning author, he has written four books, two of them on the San Fernando Valley. His fifth book, The ‘Reel’ Hollywood: The San Fernando Valley, the history of motion pictures in the valley, will be out in February.
