William D. Foster, sometimes referred to as Bill Foster, was an influential part of the up and coming Black Film industry in the early 20th century. He was the first African American to found a film production company. The company he established was the Foster Photoplay Company in 1910, in Chicago, which led the way for many other black film companies to be created in the years and decades to follow. Foster had a vision for the African American community to portray themselves as they wanted to be seen, not as how someone else depicted them. He was influenced by the black theater community and wanted to show and break the racial stereotypes of blacks in film. Foster knew his way around the film industry well. He was an actor and writer under the stage name Juli Jones, as well as an agent for numerous vaudeville stars. One of his first films, The Railroad Porter, was released in 1912 with the flow of a series of comedic chases that portrayed the racial stereotypes of blacks in film. The film is also credited with being the first black news reel to feature images of a YMCA parade.[1] The Company produced four films that were not actually feature films, but silent shorts. William Foster, along with others such as Oscar Micheaux, laid the groundwork for the black film industry.
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William Foster started off his career as a sports writer for the Chicago Defender, a local African American newspaper, where he wrote under the name Juli Jones. The Defender had recently been established in 1905 by Robert Sengstacke Abbott. The paper started out small, but it was just what Foster needed to get his career going. By the first world war, it became the nations “most influential Black weekly newspaper." [2] The Chicago Defender is still around today and continues to be an influential Chicago, and American, newspaper. Foster periodically wrote for other newspapers as well, still under the penname Juli Jones, including an article for the Indianapolis Freeman that went to press in 1913. In the Article Foster “sketches out the public disclosure on the representation of blacks in white-produced films, a disclosure that would define the terms of the debate for the rest of the century”.[3] Even when Foster was just a writer, he knew involvement in the film industry was the next step African Americans needed to take. Foster was no stranger to the world of black film and theater though. He was a press agent for vaudeville stars such as Bert Williams and George Walker (vaudeville) and also worked as a booking agent and business manager for Chicago’s Pekin Theater, which at the time was a well known vaudeville house.[4] With these connections, he had his foot in the door of the theater industry for years before he made the impressive move of starting his own film company. Even most of the white filmmakers of the time made their way into the movie industry by starting out in the theatre business. In 1910 he branched out and founded the Foster Photoplay Company, which is credited as the first African-American independent film company of its time.[5] Foster stated that, “It [the film industry] is the Negro businessman’s only international chance to make money and put his race right with the world”.[6] His goal was not only business success but also to show that African Americans could improve their image and standing all over the world. From the start Foster intended to leave his mark on the film industry and make an impact on the culture of his time and the culture of the future. Film Critic Thomas R. Cripps sums up Foster and his early career adequately by stating that Foster was “a clever hustler from Chicago, he had been a press agent for the [Bert] Williams and [George] Walker revues and [Bob] Cole and Johnson’s A Trip to Coontown [circa 1898], a sportswriter for the [Chicago] Defender, an occasional actor under the name of Juli Jones, and finally a purveyor of sheet music and Haitian coffee. He may have made the first black movie, The Railroad Porter, an imitation of Keystone comic chases completed perhaps three years before The Birth of a Nation [8 February 1915]”.[7]
The movie industry was still fairly new to the media world and offered potential for all sorts of people to get involved. William Foster took hold of this growing industry and quickly made his mark in it. He established the Foster Photoplay Company in 1910 and its films portrayed African Americans “in slapstick humor where a character might first slip, get his head stuck in a barrel, and then be spanked by another Black person wielding a wooden plank”.[8] Slapstick comedy was one were the character would make a complete fool of themselves and the scene. It has been present in the comedic genre since comedies first were produced and its humor is most famous for the time of silent films. The Foster Photoplay Company helped set up the tradition of black comedies and established Foster’s place in the film industry as well. The short films produced and directed by Foster highlighted all black casts with a positive look on the black culture and the African American community as a whole. After The Railroad Porter was released, Foster used his connections from his days working as a press agent at the Pekin Theater to get African American film stars to play in is short films. More black production companies started in Chicago prior to the coming of sound than in any other city.[9] In 1914, Foster went on a tour into the south to promote his three films released in 1913: The Fall Guy, The Butler, and the Grafter and the Maid. Along with those releases, The Railroad Porter was also promoted by the leading lady, Lottie Grady, who would sing in front of the audiences while the film reels changed in between the shorts.[10] The Company produced films from 1910–1913, but eventually folded under due to distribution problems. Within a short amount of years however, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company came to rise in 1915, producing various films such as The Realization of a Negro's Ambition in 1916 and the Trooper of Company K in 1917. The Lincoln Motion Picture Company followed the groundwork that the Foster Photoplay Company started in 1910.
There were four films produced by the Foster Photoplay Company. The most famous of them all was The Railroad Porter. The Railroad Porter was produced in 1912 and was Foster’s most financially successful movie. The movie premiered in Chicago at the States and Grand Theater and was an instant success, at the beginning. A synopsis from September 25, 1913, from the New York Age states that the film “dealt with a young wife, who thinking her husband had gone out on “his run,” invited a fashionably dressed chap, who was a waiter at one of the colored cafes on State Street, to dine. However, the husband did not go out, and, upon returning home found wifey sitting at the table serving the waiter all the delicacies of the season. Mr. Husband proceeds to get his revolver, which he uses carelessly, running the unwelcome visitor back to his home. Then the waiter gets his revolver and returns the compliment… no one is hurt… and all ends happily”.[11] The movie was regarded as one of the first of its time to represent blacks in a positive manner. Also, it has been said to be one of the first films to showcase a chase seen sequence. In 1913 Foster produced three more silent shorts; The Fall Guy was produced in 1913 and was another slapstick comedy produced like The Railroad Porter, The Butler was produced in 1913 and was a detective story, and The Grafter and the Maid was produced in 1913 and was the only melodrama produced by Foster and his company. Foster worked to produce comedies that would appeal to a large range of viewers who were either fed up with the current comedic films and styles, or who wanted to see a different view of the African American community. Comedic and slapstick style still gave the films a light-hearted feel, but the significance of an all black cast, director, producer, crew and so forth, said enough on its own about Foster’s ambition and determination.
The film industry was an entirely different business before Foster got involved and started his legacy there. In the late 19th century, blacks were portrayed in white films, even sometimes as soldiers, like in Edison’s films, The Colored Troops Disembarking and shortly after The Ninth Negro Cavalry Watering Horses.[12] Films like these were stopped being produced abruptly and the comedic and degrading depiction of African Americans became dominant in the white film industry. In 1898, the film A Trip to Coontown was made by Bob Cole. It was the first musical in New York written, performed and directed by blacks, and it played off the stereotypes of minstrel theatre.[13] This film was one of the firsts that gave African Americans the last laugh. It showed that they too could produce entertaining films about blacks, but ones that did not degrade them altogether. These films, along with Foster’s who came years later, showed that the African American’s were starting to fight back against the harmful racial stereotypes being illustrated in white movies. The NAACP started to get involved in the 1910s by criticizing films like The Nigger from 1914 and The Birth of a Nation in 1915 for depicting blacks in a degrading manner.[14] At this same time, Foster was producing his films on the complete opposite side of the spectrum.
When Foster began making films, racial stereotypes of blacks flooded the industry. In the early 20th century, Blackface was still being used to represent blacks in film. Blackface involved white actors covering their faces completely with a black substance-like make up. The actors drew on huge, pretentious red lips to make the face even more over the top. This technique emphasized the racial stereotypes that existed and was most prominent starting in the mid-19th century. Minstrel shows showcased blackface actors at the expense of the African American community. The shows made fun of blacks and impersonated them by making them look like buffoons and imbeciles. Stereotypical characters such as; the mammy figure-a dark-skinned, large female who watched over the white children- Sambo, a young male who is lazy and always lounging around, and Uncle Tom- a docile and loved family member who works on the plantation- ran throughout these shows. Early minstrelsy involved a white man painted with a blackface, but as time progressed and blacks became apart of the film world, blacks started to impersonate themselves with a blackface. Minstrelsy is still a controversial issue to date, for some see it as a racist exhibit of blacks, while others see it as a lasting tradition. Foster tried to break down these stereotypes by stepping into an industry that had never been touched by African Americans before. This form of entertainment dominated culture for over one hundred years, and still exists in world culture today. Films such as Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, made in 2000, which is about a black television executive who decides to make a minstrel show and is appalled by its success, still convey the same stereotypes that Foster was trying to convey nearly one hundred years earlier. Foster’s breakout into an industry that had never had much positive African American influence prior, ignited a spark in the African American community for decades to come.
Foster also came to the forefront of race films. Race films are films that were made with an all-black cast, before the 1950s, shown to segregated African American viewers. They featured black people and black lifestyle, all for a black audience. The history of race films began with Foster and his comedic shorts in 1910. “These independent productions provided black viewers with images of African-American experience that were conspicuously absent from Hollywood films, including black romance, urban migration, social upheaval, racial violence, alcoholism and color prejudice within the black community".[15] The genres range anywhere from comedies and western shows, to dramas and horror flicks. These race films were some of the most successful independent films due to their appeal to the African American community. They were entertaining and provided an atmosphere entirely produced and featured by African Americans. Race films gave African Americans the ability to depict their image the way they wanted it to be, instead of letting others deciding the image for them. Foster also helped to introduce the idea of race films by the Foster Photoplay Company and his films that were produced from there. “Race films by maverick African-American directors such as Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams laid the groundwork for later black filmmaking, from the commercial successes of 1970s ‘blaxploitation’ films to the stylistic references and social commentary of Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Spike Lee,” said Jacqueline Stewart, Professor in English, Cinema and Media studies, and African and African-American studies.[16] This filmmaking and inspiration all of which started from William Foster and his few silent, short race flicks.
Once the Foster Photoplay Company went under after 1913, even with all its success, Foster relocated. At one point Foster even sent reels of his films overseas to the men fighting in World War I, so they could see what he was trying to do back home in the states to help the fight for racial equality. During the 1920s, he moved to Los Angeles to produce musical shorts of black entertainers for Pathe Studios, and then tried to establish a second incarnation of the Foster Photoplay Company.[17] However around this same time, silent films were beginning to be overrun due to the introduction of sound in the movie industry. This revelation began to put the silent movie industry out of business, and Foster’s second shot run at the Foster Photoplay Company went out of business before it even produced its first film.
Foster realized early on that the film industry was the next big step for African Americans. He was correct in wanting to influence blacks to get out there and break into this realm of film, and after his Company diminished many others followed in his direction. Within a few years George Johnson opened the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and shortly after other companies such as the Ebony Film Corp. started producing race films after Foster. By the 1920s, over thirty film production companies had started up and begun to produce films all about blacks and their lives as well.[18] The Lincoln Motion Picture Company was known for making melodramatic films that always portrayed a black hero who prevailed and raised the image of his culture and people. They avoided comedic or risqué issues; films of this nature would decades later be come to known as Blaxplotation films. Nonetheless, a few decades after Foster’s limelight, major motion picture Corporations started to feature blacks on film. These films were nothing like the independently run film corporations, like Foster’s, that focused primarily on the uplift of the black image, but they represented the expansion of the African American influence in the industry. Although not always credited as being the first one to produce race films, Johnson and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company generally get more of the credit, Foster did indeed leave a legacy on the film industry that no one, including himself, had ever expected.