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WORK TITLE: Black Star over Hollywood
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1937
WEBSITE:
CITY: North Las Vegas
STATE: NV
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
www. blackstaroverhollywood.com
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1937.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Television and film historian, documentarian, academic writer, teacher. University of Wyoming, adjunct professor of African American Studies, Professor Emeritus of Mass Communication; consultant/writer for Bill Miles, Educational Films, and WTBS Superstation; written for History of Photography, in England; consultant to the Eiteljorg Museum of the American West, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Seattle Museum of History, and Industry and the Smithsonian Institution on the African-American West.
MEMBER:Western Writers of America.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
John W. Ravage has studied television and film history and has produced books, academic and popular journal articles, and documentaries on the black experience in the Trans-Mississippi West, including Alaska, Canada, and Hawaii. He has an extensive collection of more than three thousand photographic images of blacks in the West. Ravage is professor emeritus of mass media at the University of Wyoming.
Black Pioneers
In 1997, Ravage published Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier, with a second edition released in 2008. The West was not won only by white settlers and prospectors. Using 200 photographs gleaned from public and private collections in every western American state and from Canada, beginning in the mid-1800s, Ravage depicts the range of the black experience in the American West in roles as cowboys and homesteaders, entertainers and ranchers. He presents photographs, line drawings, lithographs, and stereoviews to show historical settings, genealogy, and black contributions to western life.
Ravage also addresses the diversity of races, philosophies, and accomplishments of those who dared to tame the frontier. In Booklist, Fred Egloff praised the book for being “relatively free of the over-revisionism that in recent years has become common in many western studies.” Ravage’s collection is “a welcome and strongly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library Black History Studies and 20th Century American Western History Studies,” according to a reviewer in Internet Bookwatch.
Slick and the Duchess and Grandpa Ben and His Pirates
Also a writer of fiction, Ravage published Slick and the Duchess: The Teapot Dome Scandal and the Death of Warren Harding in 2007, in which he fictionalizes the oil, sex, and murder scandal of the 1920s in one of the most disgraced presidential administrations in history. Ravage tells the story of the Denver Post reporter, lady-of-the-evening, Wyoming fur trapper, and an oil scandal that ended with the death of President Harding.
In his 2012 novel, Grandpa Ben and His Pirates: A Novel of the American Revolution, Ravage follows the first American POWs, who were colonial soldiers taken to Britain in 1776 and held without ransom. Benjamin Franklin and his grandchildren travel to Paris to recruit spies, pirates, liars, and knaves to help release the prisoners. Ravage includes many tidbits of historical information, including King George III, the Masonic Lodge, exotic food, and a woman who makes wax dolls for English royalty.
Black Star over Hollywood
Ravage’s next novel, Black Star over Hollywood, is a tale of the first black cowboy movie star in the Golden Age of Hollywood. The story focuses on burned-out tap dancer and musician Ted Masters who leaves the southern black theater circuit and travels to Hollywood trying to make it big. He meets up with famous theater owner Sid Grauman who turns him into the singing cowboy Rod Lang. Masters gains an agent who is a transgendered cab driver named Frankie who guides him around Hollywood. Masters works with some of the biggest black actors at the time, such as Gone with the Wind’s Hattie McDaniel, and Stepin Fetchit, who often played demeaning roles. Along the way, Masters rekindles a romance with an old flame, deals with racism, and is haunted by the ghost of his ancestors’ slave owner.
A Kirkus Reviews writer commented: “Ravage evokes questions of race with rare delicacy and descriptions of midcentury Hollywood with learned skill …A captivating and inspiring story of struggle and acceptance in the prewar dream factory.” Ella Vincent on the Pacific Book Review website noted: “This book not only looks at the history of Black Hollywood, but the hidden LGBT history of L.A. as well.” The contributor added: “The book would also be great for readers who want to read about minorities in Hollywood during the Depression era.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 1997, Fred Egloff, review of Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier, p. 681.
Internet Bookwatch, April 2009, review of Black Pioneers.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of Black Star over Hollywood.
ONLINE
Pacific Book Review, http://www.pacificbookreview.com/ (June 1, 2018), Ella Vincent, review of Black Star over Hollywood.
Dr. John W. Ravage is Professor Emeritus of Mass Communication at the University of Wyoming, where he also taught as an adjunct professor of African American Studies. His background is in television and film history, writing, production and direction, as well. He has produced books, academic and popular journal articles and television documentaries on the black experience in the Trans-Mississippi West, including Alaska, Canada and Hawaii. His collection of over three thousand photographic images of blacks in the West ranks as one of the larger private libraries in the country. He has served as consultant/writer for groups such as Bill Miles, Educational Films and WTBS Superstation and has written for History of Photography, in England. Ravage serves as consultant to the Eiteljorg Museum of the American West, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Seattle Museum of History and Industry and the Smithsonian Institution on the African-American West and the works of James Presley Ball, a renowned African American photographer of the West. His books include: Television: The Director’s Viewpoint (Boulder: West View Press, 1978), Singletree, a novel of the black experience in the West (Jelm Mountain, 1990), Kenneth Wiggins Porter’s The Negro On The American Frontier (Editor, 2ND. ed., Ames Publishers, 1996), and Black Pioneers, Images Of The Black Experience On The American Frontier (University of Utah Press, 1997, 2002). A member of the Western Writers of America, he is available for lectures on The Black West.
AFFILIATION:
Independent Historian
EMAIL:
jlravage@olypen.com
WEBSITE:
n/a
Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier
Fred Egloff
Booklist. 94.8 (Dec. 15, 1997): p681+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1997 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Ravage, John W. Dec. 1997.217p. index. illus. Univ. of Utah, $24.95 (0-87480-546-5). DDC: 978.
Pioneers in the Old West, to a large extent, have been portrayed as white men, and the roles played by African American men and women have been largely overlooked. Ravage goes a long way in demonstrating that the West was not won by a homogenous group of cowboys and homesteaders. Heavily illustrated with 200 photographs from the author's private collection, many published here for the first time, his book provides graphic evidence of the full range of the African American experience in the West. Starting with the earliest available photographs dating from the mid-1800s, Ravage follows the entire westward expansion; the accompanying text emphasizes that the American West represented diverse races, philosophies, and accomplishments, all linked by people's courage and drive to dare the frontier. A work that is relatively free of the over-revisionism that in recent years has become common in many western studies, this is recommended for collections of both African American studies and western Americana.
YA: The powerful photographs as well as the history
will fascinate teens in 60th high school and junior
high.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Egloff, Fred. "Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier." Booklist, 15 Dec. 1997, p. 681+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20105211/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c45ca0c3. Accessed 18 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20105211
Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier
Brad Hooper
Booklist. 95.12 (Feb. 15, 1999): p1012.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Ravage, John W. Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier. 1997. Univ. of Utah, $24.95 (0-87480-546-5).
To a large extent, pioneers in the Old West have been portrayed as white men, and the roles played by black men and women have been largely overlooked. Ravage provides graphic evidence (200 photographs) of the full range of the black experience in the West; he goes a long way in demonstrating that the West was not won by a homogeneous group of cowboys and homesteaders.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hooper, Brad. "Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier." Booklist, 15 Feb. 1999, p. 1012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A54018161/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3dd2c166. Accessed 18 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A54018161
Ravage, John W.: BLACK STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ravage, John W. BLACK STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD Xlibris (Indie Fiction) $29.99 6, 7 ISBN: 978-1-5434-2602-1
A black vaudevillian finds success and adventure on the silver screen. The latest novel from Ravage (Grandpa Ben and His Pirates, 2012, etc.) opens backstage at the Memphis Star Theater in 1939 at a black vaudeville performance where Ted Masters paces the wings. Ted's a talented, tasteful, teetotaling musician and dancer who, in his own words, gets "kicked on my butt so often it's got Neolite stamped on it." His bandleader fires him; his girlfriend walks out on him; and more than a few of his friends urge him to give up the circuit and start afresh. Arriving in Los Angeles, he meets Francine "Frank" Compton, a cross-dressing cabdriver who shows him the town and introduces him to the cluster of theater owners, promoters, and producers who hustle Ted his first Hollywood gig. Worried at first he might have what booker Benny Pickles calls "the same chances in pictures as any other black man with looks and talent--between zero and none," Ted soon finds luck with Sid Grauman, owner of the eponymous Chinese Theater, and dreams he didn't know he had start coming true. As celluloid cowboy Rod Lang, he rides, strums, and dances his way through his first screen Western, a crossover B-roll for Republic Pictures called Silver Sage. Along the way, he suffers the indignities of low-budget filmmaking, the mysteries of the growing industry ("what amounts to a small town wrapped inside a big city"), and the thrill of seeing his name in lights. He also encounters his old flame Carmen Lassouer, a reunion fraught with so much passion it leads to gunplay. In a ghostly touch, Ravage gives Ted a spectral revenant for an interlocutor, the spirit of the planter who owned Ted's ancestors and from whom his family takes its name. That name is Masters, and the somewhat obvious pun the author exploits with it (the slave owner was one sort of master, but Ted is entirely another) is one of the few moments when the book's gears come too much into view. But in the overwhelming body of the text, Ravage evokes questions of race with rare delicacy and descriptions of midcentury Hollywood with learned skill ("Movie stars are made, not born, bucko. Nobody came out of his mommie looking for the key light or the makeup man"). This is both a pleasurable and an illuminating book. A captivating and inspiring story of struggle and acceptance in the prewar dream factory.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Ravage, John W.: BLACK STAR OVER HOLLYWOOD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192154/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fdd21e49. Accessed 18 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192154
Black Pioneers
Internet Bookwatch. (Apr. 2009):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
Black Pioneers
John W. Ravage
University of Utah Press
1795 East South Campus Drive, #101, Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9402
9780874809411, $22.95, www.uofupress.com
With the end of the American Civil War, the nation's west and the southwest saw an immense migration of former slaves seeking economic prosperity and an escape from the continuing hostility and repression by the white southern populace. To this day it still surprises many that roughly one-third of all 19th century 'cowboys' were black men. Now in an updated and expanded second edition, "Black Pioneers: Images Of The Black Experience On The North American Frontier" by John W. Ravage (Professor Emeritus of Mass Media, University of Wyoming" is a seminal work of meticulous scholarship in which such disparate elements of historical data as oral histories, period photographic images, diary and journal entries, and other written documents reflective of the black experience in the Western united States and Canada have been retrieved from personal and academic archives to present a coherent study that is as informed as it is informative. Of special note in this new addition is the inclusion of sections on black entertainers and ranchers, a chapter on the dating of historic photographs and their genealogical significance, as well as an expanded bibliography related to the black frontier experience. Profusely illustrated throughout, "Black Pioneers" is a welcome and strongly recommended addition to personal, academic, and community library Black History Studies and 20th Century American Western History Studies reference collections and supplemental reading lists.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Black Pioneers." Internet Bookwatch, Apr. 2009. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A197930368/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=28859139. Accessed 18 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A197930368
Pacific Book Review Star
Awarded to Books of Excellent Merit
Black Star over Hollywood relives the Golden Age of Hollywood in a delightful novel by John Ravage. With a mixture of humor, history, and Hollywood glamor, Ravage spins a tale about trying to be a star in La-La Land. This book tells the story of an African- American dancer Ted Masters, who tries to become famous in Hollywood. He meets up with legendary producer Sid Grauman (of the famous theatre), who wants him to star in an all-Black low-budget Western. He ends up working with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, like Gone with the Wind’s Hattie McDaniel. However, the film gets bogged down in production troubles. In addition to those problems, an ex-girlfriend- and a ghost- wreak havoc on Ted’s life.
Black Star over Hollywood sheds light on the often forgotten Black actors of the 30’s and 40’s. Ravage references legends like McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit, who often had to take demeaning roles to survive as actors. Ted must contend with racism throughout the novel, and even has to overcome his own self-doubt. The ghost that haunts Ted is a white supremacist slave owner in his head that plagues Ted and makes him insecure about his ability to succeed.
Ted is a well-developed protagonist that has many layers. He’s an optimist that wants to make it in Hollywood, but is also hindered by segregation in the town. The psychological and supernatural aspects of the novel add depth to Black Star over Hollywood. While the novel has many serious moments, there is plenty of humor and light moments in this book. Ted is often accompanied by his transgender agent/cab driver Frankie, a smart-mouthed and sensible guide through Hollywood. Grauman and other Hollywood executives are more concerned with profit than with the production of their movies. There are also many practical jokes that are played on Ted that add levity to the novel.
This book not only looks at the history of Black Hollywood, but the hidden LGBT history of L.A. as well. Francine is a proud gender-fluid person at a time when binary gender roles were expected. There is also a male muscle pageant that is freely enjoyed by male viewers. Black Star over Hollywood would be perfect for fans of old Hollywood B-movies or classic movies featuring African-Americans. The book would also be great for readers who want to read about minorities in Hollywood during the Depression era. John W. Ravage has written a story that will resonate with readers and make them believe any dream can come true in Hollywood.