Nearly a century after Richard Norman (a white man)
blazed a trail making black silent films, Norman Studios is ready for its
close-up
story by SHELTON HULL
It’s February 1921, and
Richard Norman is on the road again.Driving the dusty backroads of the Deep South was second nature to
him by this point, paths well worn in a career that had already taken him
across half the country. Streets were not nearly as smooth as they are today,
but still he drove carefully, for he carried precious cargo in the back: Fresh
prints of The Green-Eyed Monster, his first film as the head of his
own studio. As a white man making silent films with an all-black cast,
ostensibly for an all-black audience, there was no massive studio
infrastructure to fall back on, so he crafted his own distribution and
profit-sharing deals with individual theaters, meticulously, one-by-one.
He sealed these deals
with a handshake as he personally handed prints to theater owners, in the
process building relationships that would prove crucial as he fought to survive
amid the chaos that was the film industry in those years. Norman (1891-1960)
was about halfway through the journey of his life at this point, a life that would
transform American cinema and help define the city we live in today. He started
his studio at age 29, having spent the previous decade traversing the nation as
a freelance film producer and camera operator. Along the way, he learned every
aspect of the business, from writing to directing to financing to distribution,
all key pieces of a puzzle he finally assembled just in time to help document
what we know today as “The Jazz Age.”
Fast-forward to 2018.
It’s been 90 years since Norman’s dream was deferred, and Devan Stuart Lesley
is pursuing a dream of her own: Calling attention to the Normans and what they
helped do for the city. She is part of an all-volunteer staff that’s spent much
of this 21st century trying to reclaim, reinvent and reinvigorate these remnants
of the century before, efforts that have gained much traction in recent years,
thanks to a new generation of scholars and historians.
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The main portion of
Norman Studios sits in a two-story, wood-frame building at 6337 Arlington Rd.,
where it intersects with Westdale Drive. The complex was built in 1916, when the city’s film industry
was at its commercial peak. “I don’t think it ever really got started,” says
Lesley of its original incarnation as a cigar factory. “Eagle Film City bought
this, and bought the other four buildings. Their plan was to make this an area
where the actors and the crew would all live—a literal filmmaking city.
“They went out of
business around 1920, and Mr. Norman bought it. He’d already started his career,
but he was traveling, so he decided to come home. He found a beautiful young
redhead … .”
Isn’t that always the
way these stories go?
The story really begins
with an unknown executive at Kalem Studios, who was first to spread the word
about Jacksonville’s charms. “[He] comes off the train at Prime Osborn, and he
sees this ultra-modern, gleaming downtown,” says Lesley. “The reason for that
is the Great Fire in 1901 destroyed the entire downtown core.
“We had to rebuild, and
architects from all over the country came here, so for the next 10 to 20 years,
Jacksonville was the most modern downtown in the country—but we still had the
beaches and the country, pasturelands. We had the swamps, which could double
for the Nile, and close by, we had St. Augustine, which Mr. Flagler had already
been building up as a playground for the rich and famous, plus we had those
centuries-old buildings there. The Astors and Carnegies and those guys were
hanging out at Jekyll Island, so it was just a happening place to be.”
Northeast Florida was,
in short, a filmmaker’s dream location, a temperate climate with lots of land
and a wide variety of settings to serve as backdrops for almost any kind of
production, as well as a population that was eager to be part of the next wave
of American entertainment. “[He] sent word back to New York, and said ‘I think
we’ve found our winter filmmaking home.” This was 1908.
“The film industry
really started in New York, New Jersey, Chicago,” she says. “They had a lot of
problems with filming outside year-round. The cold weather would cause a static
look, and sometimes the film stock would just freeze together. They could shoot
inside, but the problem was that the lights they used were incredibly volatile,
so the studios would have a lot of fires.” Thus, moving operations to Florida
was not only ideal for aesthetics, but also about personal safety and financial
freedom.
In her 2013 book, Richard
E. Norman and Race Filmmaking, Barbara Tepa Lupack notes that Jacksonville
had more film studios than Los Angeles at one point. “At our height, we had a
little more than 30 studios,” says Lesley. “Some of them were the small,
fly-by-night studios that didn’t last long, but some of them were the
beginnings of MGM, Paramount and the studios that are the big boys today. At
some point during that next 10 to 20 years, all the big players were here”
including original matinee idol Rudolph Valentino, early cinematic sex symbol
Theda Bara and comedic great Oliver Hardy.
When Norman, born in
Middleburg, returned to Jacksonville to launch his own film studio, he knew
that success in the highly competitive silent-film market of the 1920s would
require thinking outside the box. He immediately recognized that Black America
was a massive and largely untapped market; there were not a lot of films
catering to that audience, and the “race films” that did exist then were, in
most cases, little more than stylized minstrel acts with shoddy production
values and no social uplift worth mentioning. By infusing his films with a
sense of dignity, he showcased the pride of an ascendant black culture at the
absolute perfect time in history.
Black migration to the
North was booming, and the industrial jobs they found bankrolled rapid advances
in social and cultural progress. The Harlem Renaissance was just beginning, and
Duke Ellington would soon move his band there from Washington, followed quickly
by an extended booking at the Cotton Club that got the Swing Era rolling.
Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong had joined King Oliver in Chicago, and had begun
spreading the Storyville style to teenagers from the suburbs, who would end up
being the first generation of white jazz stars, changing America forever.
This was the context in
which Richard Norman operated. He was a businessman first, but he was firmly
aware of the social implications of his work. By coupling the aspirational
qualities of the material with the superior aesthetics available by shooting in
Northeast Florida, he was able to craft a product that was not only superior
within the “race film” genre, but which also had broad appeal to mainstream
white audiences nationwide. For a decade, his formula worked like alchemy, for
a brief time making Norman one of the most influential men in all of cinema,
and Jacksonville briefly a real force in American culture.
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Norman Studios released
its eighth and final film, Black Gold, on the Fourth of July,
1928. The movie was shot the
year before in Tatums, Oklahoma, founded by Lee Tatums and his wife Rose in
1895. The population was listed at 151 in the 2010 census, and apparently it
peaked at 281 in 1980. This all-black town sits just two counties away from
Texas, which was an issue at certain points in the past. It was only 15 months
later that the 1929 stock market crash unleashed economic shock waves that
leveled whole cities faster than Godzilla and The Avengers combined.
The people of Oklahoma
suffered worse than folks in most states, and its black community saw two
generations of hard-earned wealth and social capital obviated, along with what
little civil rights they enjoyed at the time. They were already traumatized and
terrified by the complete obliteration of “Black Wall Street,” which killed
between 39 and 800 black folks in and around the Greenwood neighborhood of
Tulsa in 1921, an act of stylized evil exceeded only by the destruction of the
Second Temple and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. And within a decade, their
peers around the state had seen their net worth reduced to dust in the wind.
Viewed in that
context, Black Gold is a time capsule portrait of Black
Excellence, at the exact moment before the wave of progress rolled back and
drowned the dreams of the first blacks to ever enjoy real autonomy in that
region. Unfortunately, no surviving copy of Black Gold is
known to exist, so the people of Tatums, one of only 13 all-black towns that
survived out of the 50 there had once been, are thus unable to access a major
foundation document of their own history.
That happened a lot back
then—thousands and thousands of times. Martin Scorcese, one of the greatest
filmmakers ever, estimates that “half of all American films made before 1950
and over 90 percent of films made before 1929 are lost forever.” The Library of
Congress figured about 75 percent of all silent films are gone, including all
but one of Norman Studios’ productions. “We’re always hopeful that another full
Norman film will show up,” says Lesley, but at this point it seems unlikely.
A major factor was the
improper storage of nitrate film, the industry standard for the first half of
the 20th century, which was more combustible than a Mafia funeral, a lesson
every major studio learned the hard way. The stuff was literally too hot for
TV, and that’s why we can’t watch it on NetFlix, AMC or TCM, whose website
lists 15 calamitous conflagrations between 1914 and 1993. Universal destroyed
nearly 5,000 silent films in 1948, scrapping a goldmine, just to get the
silver. Paramount has 250 left out of 1,200; Fox lost 40,000 reels in 1937, and
today has only 120. At MGM, the stuff that didn’t decompose was trashed on
purely aesthetic grounds.
Thus, many of the
original icons of global cinema had most or all of their entire creative output
snuffed out. The film debut of the Marx Brothers, one of only seven featuring
Zeppo, gone. The very first sci-fi film, lost forever. Two of the first films
ever made in 3D cannot even be seen in their original form. Out of the eight
films produced by Norman Studios, 1926’s The Flying Ace is the
only one that survives.
“I hope we can find more
of the Norman films, but if we never do, I’m thankful that we have The
Flying Ace, because it was inspired by Bessie Coleman. From what we
understand, Bessie saw The Bulldogger,” which featured pioneering
black cowboy Bill Pickett, “and said ‘Well, if he’s interested in what
[Pickett’s] doing, he’ll be interested in what I’m doing,” says Lesley.
“She came here to Jacksonville
in April 1926; we don’t know if they met in person, but we assume that they
were planning to.” Coleman, the first black woman to earn a pilot’s license,
was killed in a plane crash in Jacksonville within the month, so she never got
to appear in any of the films herself, though both lead characters in The
Flying Ace were based on her.
“He released that in
’26,” says Lesley. “It was by far his most successful film, and we’re told by
some war historians that some young boys who went to watch the film were
inspired to fly, as well, and some of them became Tuskegee Airmen.” (A bronze
plaque was installed five years ago at Paxon School for Advanced Studies, near
the spot where her final flight took off.)
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Perhaps appropriately
for a company built around costumes and makeup, Norman Studios was officially
designated as the newest of Florida’s 96 National Historic Landmarks in 2016,
on Halloween. It had already
been added to the 92,149 other listings in the U.S. National Registry of Historic
Places two years earlier. (Norman is one of 1,760 such places in Florida, and
94th of the 96 in Duval County, since followed by the Downtown Historical
District and Memorial Park.)
The end was already
approaching for the local film industry by the time Norman set up shop, but his
technical skill and political savvy kept it going for another decade.
Eventually, though, time caught up with him and, like other entrepreneurs of
the era, the Normans were eventually forced to adapt as the economy changed. An
increasingly conservative political environment, led by future Mayor (then
governor) John W. Martin, eventually killed Florida’s nascent film industry
once and for all.
While Richard Norman
continued grinding out films for outside clients, mostly industrial films, his
wife Gloria launched a lucrative new career as a dance instructor. In those
capacities, they remained cultural forces in the city. At one point, Gloria
Norman had more than 200 students, putting on recitals at places like The
Florida Theatre, Jacksonville Civic Center, Arlington Grammar and Landon High
School. Meanwhile, their son Richard Jr. became a decorated World War II
veteran, helping to liberate Europe from behind the wheel of a B-25 bomber;
noted Francophile Bessie Coleman would approve.
By all accounts, Gloria
des Jardin, the beautiful redhead he’d met all those years ago, was a truly
unique character of local history, an actress and dancer who was her husband’s
Girl Friday for all of the 40 years they spent together. Decades after Norman
Studios had gone defunct, she was still exerting a significant influence on the
city’s cultural life through the dance studio he’d built for her in the same
building, keeping her husband’s name alive long enough to pique the interests
of a new generation of scholars, activists and historians.
A veteran local
journalist, Lesley has worked with First Coast News, News 4 Jax and even Folio
Weekly. She discovered Norman Studios while on assignment for the Jacksonville
Business Journal 15 years ago and, like any good reporter, she knew a good
story when she saw one. She walked me through the building on a blustery day in
late January, going into detail about the building’s history. We were joined by
Elizabeth Lawrence, a fellow volunteer and founder of the Documentary Film
Festival; she was there in her capacity as the auteur of Creative Schemes,
shooting footage for her own upcoming documentary about the studio, which takes
things full-circle.
Richard Norman died in
1959, but Gloria continued running her studio in the building until the 1980s,
at which point it and most of the materials inside were auctioned off, and from
there the story might have ended, but for a few enterprising locals. “Ann Burt
and Melanie cross-realized, ‘This is a national treasure, and we’re about to
lose it,’” says Lesley. (The great Rita Reagan, one of the city’s real human
treasures, has also played an indispensable role in this process.) “They
connected with then-City Councilman Lake Ray, who was a huge champion for us,
and they got the city to purchase the four buildings that were available—that’s
the [main] building that we’re in now, the generator shed behind that, and a
wardrobe cottage, and the prop storage garage behind that. It cost about a
million dollars to purchase the buildings, address the structural issues and
renovate the exterior.”
The main building still
needs a lot of work. Pressed-wood floors, exposed ductwork and a leaky roof all
underscore an “in-progress” feel, while the large antique machinery lends it
all a certain gothic majesty. Lesley points out a second-floor window in the
fifth building, which they hope to eventually buy from Circle of Faith
Ministries. “You can see where it kind of dips; there was a swimming pool
buried under there,” she says. This was where Norman shot a lot of his lakeside
scenes.
Fast-forward to 2018.
It’s been 90 years since Norman’s dream was deferred, and Devan Stuart Lesley
is pursuing a dream of her own: Calling attention to the Normans and what they
helped do for the city. She is part of an all-volunteer staff that’s spent much
of this 21st century trying to reclaim, reinvent and reinvigorate these
remnants of the century before, efforts that have gained much traction in
recent years, thanks to a whole new generation of scholars and
historians.
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Read Shelton Hull’s
interview with Barbara Tepa Lupak, author of Richard E. Norman and Race Filmmaking.
