OFFICIAL HISTORIES have a way of ignoring Do-It-Yourself activities, when individuals and their friends, unsatisfied with things-as-they-are, have taken matters into their own hands by starting their own businesses.
Case in point is the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, founded by African-American actor Noble Johnson and his brother George in 1916. According to wikipedia, their studio was "the first to produce movies portraying African-Americans as real people instead of as racist caricatures."
To finance the project, Johnson appeared as a character actor in scores of movies produced by other studios (he appeared in 144 films total). This included several early classics, from "Thief of Baghdad" to "King Kong." As an actor, Noble Johnson was kind of a jack-of-all-trades, in that he played every possible ethnicity, including Latino, Arab, Native American, Egyptian, and even as a Russian in "The Most Dangerous Game." (See below photo.)
Though the project ultimately dissolved in 1923, its brief success producing movies served as inspiration for budding movie makers of every stripe.
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