Norman Studios and Jacksonville as the Film Capital

Before Hollywood became Hollywood, the American film industry seriously considered making Jacksonville its permanent home. In the years between roughly nineteen oh eight and nineteen eighteen, more than thirty film companies operated in and around the city, drawn by the year-round sunshine, the variety of natural backdrops, and the relatively cheap cost of doing business in the South. At a studio in the Arlington neighborhood, a producer named Richard Norman was making something different from the rest of the industry.

Norman's studio, which operated through much of the nineteen twenties, specialized in films with all-Black casts made for Black audiences, at a time when most mainstream films either ignored Black Americans entirely or depicted them in degrading caricatures. Norman's productions featured Black heroes, Black love stories, Black detectives, people who simply lived their lives on screen as full human beings. Films like The Flying Ace, released in nineteen twenty-six, drew on the real history of Black military aviators and presented them as capable, dignified, and worthy of a ticket.

Jacksonville's film era ended when California consolidated the industry's infrastructure and talent. Norman Studios closed in the late nineteen twenties. The building sat vacant for decades.

It was eventually designated a National Historic Landmark and has been restored as a museum dedicated to the history of early Black film. In a medium that spent most of its first century doing real harm to Black dignity, Richard Norman made something that pushed in the other direction, and he made it here, in a studio on the east side of Jacksonville.