Six Black Composers Score Silent-Era Landmark 'The Flying Ace'

The Jacksonville Symphony will screen the 1926 silent film "The Flying Ace" on Saturday with a new score written collaboratively by six leading Black composers, led by Carlos Simon.

The film is a rarity. Made in Jacksonville, Florida, by a white director with an all-Black cast, it depicted Black characters without malice or prejudice during the Jim Crow era. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 2021. Despite that recognition, it is seldom screened.

On screen, "The Flying Ace" plays like a genre machine. Hannah Edgar, writing for The New York Times, sums up its parts: "A big-money heist. A war hero. A doe-eyed love interest. A climactic aerial chase." But its real significance is as a historical artifact — a surviving example of the "race film" (movies made for Black audiences, largely shut out of mainstream Hollywood) at a moment when most American cinema caricatured Black life.

Why Jacksonville?

The project also digs up a buried chapter of film history. Before the industry consolidated in Hollywood, Jacksonville was a genuine moviemaking center, home to roughly 30 production companies during the silent era.

"It's not perhaps something that people would associate with a city like Jacksonville," said Courtney Lewis, the symphony's music director. "For us, as an orchestra, to be able to have this project that grows organically from the history of our own city is so exciting."

Who made the film?

"The Flying Ace" came out of Norman Studios, founded by Richard E. Norman. Born near Jacksonville in 1891, Norman had already worked as a magic lanternist (an early projectionist using lit slides), a movie accompanist and a soda-pop entrepreneur before he turned to directing and distributing films.

After working in the Midwest, Norman returned home with a specific plan: making race films for Black audiences. From 1919 to 1928, he was one of very few white filmmakers directing movies with all-Black casts. His output included the westerns "The Bull-Dogger" (1921) and "The Crimson Skull" (1922), plus the desert-island drama "Regeneration" (1923).

Almost all of it is gone. Of the seven race movies Norman's company produced, only "The Flying Ace" survives in its entirety. Of Jacksonville's 30-odd silent-era studios, only the Norman Studios site remains standing — it now operates as a museum.

What does the performance change?

For audiences, Saturday's concert turns an archive piece back into a living one. A full symphonic score, written by Black composers and performed live, gives the film the musical scale its original audiences would have experienced — something a rare archival screening can't do on its own. For the Jacksonville Symphony, it stakes a claim to the city's own film history, a legacy that Hollywood's rise largely erased.

If the performance travels, it could also give "The Flying Ace" the wider circulation its Registry status has so far not delivered.