The Handbook of Texas, in its history of Black filmmaking in the state, dates some of the first Texas-based motion pictures to 1921 and a Black-owned company, Superior Art Productions of Houston. Little else is recorded about the company. Its films are lost, like nearly all of the early race movies, the industry's term then for films made for Black audiences.
Two Black-owned companies were active in San Antonio in the early 1920s. One, Lone Star, made four motion pictures in 1922 and one in 1923. Because the films no longer exist and were never registered for copyright, the usual way of dating films, historians cannot say which was made first. Their titles survive: Stranger From Way Out Yonder, The Wrong Mr. Johnson, and a film listed as You Can't Keep A Good Man Down, credited with the names Byron Smith, Mae Morris and Frank Brown. The other San Antonio company, Cotton Blossom, is known only by name.
In Dallas the same year, the M. W. Baccus Films Company, which was white-owned, specialized in films for Black audiences. Its only known production was From Cotton Patch To Congress.
None of these companies lasted. The Handbook lists the reasons: the Great Depression, the influenza epidemic, and the more expensive process of making sound films in the late 1920s. These Texas producers of race movies disappeared, and so did their films, which were printed on perishable nitrate stock.
The tradition picked up again in Dallas in the 1940s. Alfred Sack's company backed writer-director Spencer Williams in ten features, and most of those were later found and restored by the Southwest Film-Video Archives in Dallas. The 1920s films had no such luck. In the summer of 1983, the last prints of more than 100 films from the 1920s to the early 1950s turned up in a warehouse in Tyler. Several were restored as the Tyler, Texas, Black Film Collection. The Handbook does not list any of the Houston or San Antonio companies' work among them.