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Like thousands of other Hollywood hopefuls, he works at an unlikely job, awaiting a casting call and then fame in the movies. But Lorenzo Tucker's lifelong quest is twice as poignant. He already has his own footnote in film history. Lorenzo Tucker, 77, genial, gray-haired, was once the movie star of black films and was known as "The Black Valentino."
He starred in about 20 movies for independent producers who made all-black films from the '20s to the '40s, including "Wages of Sin," "The Black King," "Daughter of the Congo" and "Temptation." With his dashing good looks, he became black film pioneer Oscar Micheaux's leading man, the first in the history of black cinema. His career also included vaudeville and the legitimate theater, where he acted and directed his own troupe.
He now works the graveyard shift for Pettis Security Systems at a mid-Wilshire office building, logging people in and out and keeping an eye on the lobby. But he's not one to idly reminisce among the many mementos and fading photographs that hang in the small apartment on Las Palmas Avenue near Sunset Boulevard where he lives with his fifth wife, Paulina. Instead, he's eager to return to the movies. "I'm down at the studio two or three times a week, interviewing," he says. "That's why I took a night job."
Although he's been trying, with little success, since 1977, he's not wholly forgotten. He was given the Oscar Micheaux Award for career achievement by the Black Film Makers Hall of Fame in 1975. He's working on a documentary on the history of black entertainers with author Henry T. Sampson. He has spoken at the annual memorial for Rudolph Valentino for the last two years at Forest Lawn Mortuary; last year, he appeared at the Compton Cinema Classics festival. (The festival was put together by Valerie Shaw, who runs L.A.-D.C. Connection, Inc., specializing in black entertainment history. Shaw has helped develop an elementary-to-high-school-level teaching package on black film history, "Black Hollywood Yesterday."
(Covering the 40 years of black cinema, from 1917 to 1957, the course features subjects such as the Harlem Renaissance and its West Coast counterpart on Central Avenue, actress Madame Sul-Te-Wan, cowboy-actor Bill Pickett, film maker Oscar Micheaux...