From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell.

You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

My guest, author Patrick McGilligan, has written biographies of many major figures

we associate with studios, from Jack Nicholson to Jimmy Cagney, Clint Eastwood, Robert Altman,

Alfred Hitchcock. His newest book is about a man who was a pioneer in so many ways, a homesteader,

a self-published author, and basically, as far as I'm concerned, the real inventor of the American Independent Film Movement.

He's an African-American director who starred in the silence.

His name is Oscar Michaud.

The book is Oscar Michaud, the Great and Only, and its author, Pat McGillan is singing across from me.

Pat, thanks for being here.

Thank you for inviting me, August.

I want to have you read just one passage, one paragraph from the introduction,

I think, really sums up the book if you do that for me. Okay. Usually, if nothing else,

the reader of a biography can be assured of the name of the central figure and the facts of his birth

and death. Yet the precise place where Michaud was born remains elusive, nor does anyone know

the exact circumstances

of his death. For decades, even his burial sites stayed unmarked and unknown. Now, for me, Pat,

that essentially is so much of what his life is about. I mean, shrouded in this kind of oblivion because

he, for the major American film figures, is not considered to be important

enough because he was black.

...