ERASED: An Actor of Color's Journey Through the Heyday of Hollywood
“an exciting, disturbing portrait of Hollywood’s cultural power during its heyday.”
Loo Hui Phang’s graphic novel, beautifully illustrated by Hugues Micol, is a fascinating saga of the career of Hollywood actor Maximus Wyld, born Maximus Chanzee Wildorse. The studios preferred WASP names. Mixed-race Wyld is a one-man American melting pot, capable of playing Asian, Native American, Latino, and Black characters. His lover Rita Hayworth, whose ethnicity was erased by her studio, tells him, “You’re not an American. You’re the Americans.” Through their account of Wyld’s career, Phang and Micol offer a history of racial representations in American film during its supposed Golden Age.
Wyld’s career extended from the mid-1930s when the 15 year old was discovered in a Los Angeles gym by Cary Grant to his erasure in the mid-1950s at the order of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist campaign. Wyld had roles in many of the most important films of the period, from Gone with the Wind to Vertigo. He worked with some of the most famous directors and bedded some of the most glamourous stars. Onscreen and off, Wyld was a sexual magnet for men and women.
From the beginning Wyld was a rebel, intent on subverting racial stereotypes. In the midst of a sexual encounter during the making of Gone with the Wind in which, of course, he plays a slave, Wyld tells Vivien Leigh, “I want to invade the white zone, occupy it, overthrow it. I want it begging for more.”
When Louis B. Mayer offers him a generous contract with MGM, Wyld insists on a clause that he will never be asked to play a servant: “I’m too dark to play gentlemen who take tea and I won’t play the slaves who serve it.” Nonetheless he inevitably was cast as various racial stereotypes. In one of Oscar Michaux’s “race movies,” he discovers that Black audiences like their heroes to be light-skinned, their villains darker. When he joined MGM, he was expected to dance in musical numbers. During World War II, he played evil Asians and starred in a documentary as “The Negro Soldier.” For director John Ford, he was a Native American in a series of John Wayne epics.
When Wyld becomes friends with Paul Robeson, he becomes a person of interest to the politicians who were intent on rooting out communism. When the studios gave him less work, he got the starring role he always craved in a Soviet-produced film on the life of Ghengis Khan. Although Wyld did not know that the film was a Soviet production, Senator McCarthy saw his participation as treason. At his hearing, Wyld made an eloquent speech for racial justice that was interpreted as Communist propaganda.
Wyld throughout is articulate—even “woke”—on racial politics far beyond the language of someone who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s. Though uneducated, he knows the history of important figures like Marcus Garvey. However knowledgeable and articulate he is, the overwhelming power of the studios and American racism constantly defeat him. Finally, he is overshadowed by emerging stars Sidney Poitier, Yul Brynner, and Harry Belafonte, who, unlike Wyld, aren’t tainted by scandal.
Erased is preachy at times and somewhat repetitive. Still, Phang’s Hollywood saga, obviously the result of a great deal of research, is fascinating. The portraits of Hollywood stars and moguls and civil rights heroes like Paul Robeson are vividly depicted. Phang’s work is constantly inventive, as in a scene where Wyld performs a Nicholas Brothers-like step duet with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson while arguing about the dangers of racial stereotyping.
There are unique challenges in creating the graphic art for Erased. The narrative demands convincing portraits of dozens of real Hollywood personages, from stars like Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, and Cary Grant, to directors John Ford, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock, to studio heads David O. Selznick, Louis B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn.
Artist Hughues Micol also had to recreate scenes from classics like Gone with the Wind as well as many lesser films like Duel in the Sun. Alternating with these are dreamlike, dystopian images of Hollywood as a giant force disrupting individuals’ identities. Micol’s work is always impressive, joining with Loo Hui Phang’s inventive mock biography to make Erased an exciting, disturbing portrait of Hollywood’s cultural power during its heyday.