In the early months of 1932, Smith heard that Mezchrabpom, a Soviet film production company, was interested in casting black Americans to appear in a movie project titled Black and White. Details of the film were sketchy, but a U.S. committee charged with choosing the cast and sending it to Russia described the movie as a sweeping panorama of the black American experience, one that would correct the lies of racists, capitalists, and imperialists who often twisted the history of blacks in America.
Smith wasn’t sure if he should abandon his home and career to be in a faraway movie. But the choice forced itself upon him. “One day, after some heated words in a restaurant about not getting waited on,” he wrote, “I made my decision.” He would have to pay his own way to Europe, but the chance to witness the social experiment underway in the Soviet Union, with its professed veneration of the working classes and disdain for racism, was irresistible.
Although only two of the 22 people selected for the cast had any acting experience, the group included an impressive mix of people who would play important roles in black American culture and politics for years to come. Langston Hughes, probably America’s best-known black writer, signed on, along with Harlem Renaissance author Dorothy West, future civil rights lawyer and California Superior Court Judge Loren Miller, National Urban League leaders Frank Montero and Henry Lee Moon, social activist Louise Thompson, and journalist Ted Poston.
In Russia, work on the film began badly. The director, a German named Carl Junghans, spoke English and Russian poorly and knew almost nothing about the lives of black Americans. He complained that many of his actors were too light-complexioned to convincingly play real American blacks, and he lamented their inexperience as singers of spirituals and slave work songs. Georgii Grebner, a Russian screenwriter, and Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a black American Communist who had lived in Russia for many years, had cooked up a highly improbable script that had pre-Civil War enslaved women dancing in ballrooms with their masters and climaxed with the invasion of Alabama by the Red Army to help striking black steelworkers.
Hughes declared this screenplay too absurd and ill informed about black American history to be filmed. He wouldn’t even try to doctor it. For weeks the cast had no script, rehearsals of musical numbers went terribly, and the film’s progress halted. Mezchrabpom officials sent the Americans to Odessa to get them out of the way until the movie’s future could be untangled.