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So you can have being an actor anytime.

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And I also knew that the American Negro was a natural phantomine artist.

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Well I had an idea that there was some day they were going to be talking pictures.

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And pictures by Afro-American players would be the best comedies there were

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when they begin to make talking movement pictures.

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Comedy pictures were outstanding.

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They're the ones that group more than anybody else. Why? I don't know.

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So I credit SNA with one of the pioneers of the high class motion picture people.

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They had in them what it takes to entertain people.

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Everybody knows or heard of the great...

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You can start again. Everybody knows about the great actor.

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When I was selling moving picture machines, he was connected with some firm that was selling used film.

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We used some magazines, Saturday Evening Post, Munchies and other magazines for advertising,

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Boys This Weekly, GWT.

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So coming home one night on the Chicago Northwestern

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commuter crane,

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Somersault Lance,

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Why didn't you like Lubin's productions?

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The photography was very, very poor. You couldn't tell who was who in them. I can't think at this

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time who built that studio, but it was built for the production of pictures.

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Did you do a number of pictures in that studio? Did you make a number of them?

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What kind of pictures? I've seen them. Of course, I was quite a kid. They used to have them at

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McVicker's Jeter. Every year they would come there. That's about all I know. I know they produce a lot

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of laughs. So I thought the matter over for quite some time. That's the only way to do away with

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stuff. The idea of separate schools, that's all fall around. I never went to any. I don't know

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how it is, but the idea of it.

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colored the Negro, he was very little thought of. He was a waiter or he was a attendant,

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and usually a kitchen help or something like that. That was the extent of their ability. At that time

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we used, they used white people in place of them with a cork makeup, a burnt cork makeup.

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That was one of the things that I had to overcome. I had to get my literature and everything all

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around that, to remove that stuff. It was what the exhibitor thought, not what the public thought.

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For example, I bet...

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So I hit upon Burt Williams. I didn't have time to worry about the General Film Company.

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Of course he knocked around with the original and cut it all to pieces and he was almost walking

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on air. He was untouchable because he was an actor, not a movie man. We at the time were doing

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black comedy pictures and we took that up and we ridiculed the Sherlock Holmes idea. We made

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Gillette look like somebody else when we put out our pictures with black Sherlock Holmes with Sam

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Robinson as our star.

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As I see it looking over television, those are the pictures that are going to be American pullers.

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They kept the various groups or some of the various groups out of pictures as they should be. Too long.

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Then I hadn't seen him for some time and when we started the Moving Picture Company, I came

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across him again. In the meantime, I had engaged Ralph Phillips. So the two of them worked together

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to help out on the production.

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Part of the inimitable humor of the Negro. For example, I used to look for ideas.

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I picked up a copy of Yale or Harvard, I forget which, publication one time. It told a story about a colored

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man in a seaside resort down east. That was the beginning. We eventually began an advertising campaign,

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no money down. We used only voices and weekly news Saturday evening post.