PB: How did Moon Over Harlem come about?
EGU: That came about through a boy who was very friendly with the man who wrote Green Pastures and Porgy, DuBois Hayward. The boy had a script. I had nothing to do with the organization of the picture but was hired as the director. As a matter of fact, the picture was cast when I came in. It was nearly completely ready to go. They had a contract from the Negro circuit in the South. At that time there were black theatres and there were white theatres. I had four days to make the picture. We had two days in a studio, an old cigar warehouse, which was rigged up in New Jersey, and the actual locations, like the nightclub up in Harlem, which had to be done after two o’clock in the morning.
PB: When everybody had gone home.
EGU: Yah. So it was quite an experience. It was done for very little money. There couldn’t have been $8,000 in cash there. I knew that the singers, we had over fifty of them, were paid 25 ¢ a day and they had to travel back to Harlem and over to Jersey. It was one of the most pitiful things I ever did. It was done on nothing. We didn’t have full reels – it was all done with short ends. So you can imagine – we had to re-load the camera every two minutes, because some of the short ends were only a hundred feet. It was really something. But we made quite a good picture. I tried for the first time what was later on called the Rossellini style. We didn’t use actors, we used real people, and they were very natural.
PB: From the streets?
EGU: Yah. I was given two weeks to rehearse up in Harlem.
PB: It was a musical?
EGU: Musical. Yes. Very much in the style of Three Dark Saints and Porgy and Bess, but really Negro. Donald Hayward did the music. None of the creative people were white.
PB: Except you.
EGU: Except me.
(Peter Bogdanovich, Edgar G. Ulmer. An Interview, Film Culture, 58.59.60, 1974)