[Untitled Outs - Very Last Laugh]

Transcript (Download)

So you can have being an actor anytime.

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

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

And pictures by Afro -American players would be the best comedies there were when they begin to make talking movement pictures.

Comedy pictures were outstanding.

They're the ones that group more than anybody else.

Why? I don't know.

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

They had in them what it takes to entertain people.

Everybody knows or heard of the great...

You can start again.

Everybody knows about the great actor.

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

We used some magazines, Saturday Evening Post, Munchies and other magazines for advertising, Boys This Weekly, GWT.

So coming home one night on the Chicago Northwestern commuter crane, Somersault Lance, Why didn't you like Lubin's productions? The photography was very, very poor.

You couldn't tell who was who in them.

I can't think at this time who built that studio, but it was built for the production of pictures.

Did you do a number of pictures in that studio? Did you make a number of them? What kind of pictures? I've seen them.

Of course, I was quite a kid.

They used to have them at McVicker's Jeter.

Every year they would come there.

That's about all I know.

I know they produce a lot of laughs.

So I thought the matter over for quite some time.

That's the only way to do away with stuff.

The idea of separate schools, that's all fall around.

I never went to any.

I don't know how it is, but the idea of it.

colored the Negro, he was very little thought of.

He was a waiter or he was a attendant, and usually a kitchen help or something like that.

That was the extent of their ability.

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

That was one of the things that I had to overcome.

I had to get my literature and everything all around that, to remove that stuff.

It was what the exhibitor thought, not what the public thought.

For example, I bet...

So I hit upon Burt Williams.

I didn't have time to worry about the General Film Company.

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

He was untouchable because he was an actor, not a movie man.

We at the time were doing black comedy pictures and we took that up and we ridiculed the Sherlock Holmes idea.

We made Gillette look like somebody else when we put out our pictures with black Sherlock Holmes with Sam Robinson as our star.

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

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

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

In the meantime, I had engaged Ralph Phillips.

So the two of them worked together to help out on the production.

Part of the inimitable humor of the Negro.

For example, I used to look for ideas.

I picked up a copy of Yale or Harvard, I forget which, publication one time.

It told a story about a colored man in a seaside resort down east.

That was the beginning.

We eventually began an advertising campaign, no money down.

We used only voices and weekly news Saturday evening post.

Identifier

F.2017-12-0024

Format

16mm

Extent

500 feet

Color

Color

Sound

Mag Full

Reel/Tape Number

1/1

Has Been Digitized?

Yes

Notes

Outtakes from The Very Last Laugh. Switches between image and full coat magnetic sound.

Element

Trims and Outs ➜ Magnetic Soundtrack (Mag Track)

Related Collections

SERIES I: The Very Last Laugh

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