David Starkman

David Starkman( - c1947) was an Austrian immigrant who helped to found the Colored Players Film Corporation, an independent silent film studio, as well as write and produce the film company’s most famous film The Scar of Shame.

In 1926 David Starkman helped to found the Colored Players Film Corporation with Sherman H. “Uncle Dud” Dudley, a veteran of vaudevillian and race movies. Dudley and Starkman shared a common vision in which there was a black Hollywood free of the traditional black stereotypes; and so with Starkman’s theatre in Philadelphia as a base of operations the Colored Players Film Corporation was born with Dudley named as the President of the company and Starkman in charge of the management, finances, and operation of the production company. The Colored Players Film Corporation took the morals and ethics of Starkman and Dudley to heart as all their films attempt to show the African American as a successful person able to achieve middle class status and step away from the typical stereotypes and minstrel films of the time period. While only Dudley and the cast comprised the African Americans of the Colored Players Film Corporation, the collaboration between both the white and black staff was an integral part of the company. More importantly the interracial cooperation found in the company allowed for the success of the film The Scar of Shame.

The peak of the Colored Players Film Corporation’s success came when it produced the film The Scar of Shame in 1929, just one year before the closure of the production company. Starkman produced the film and wrote it with the cooperation of the black staff in order to understand the social caste among African Americans living within the same neighborhood. The film primarily focuses on two protagonists each from different levels of society. The main protagonist must choose whether or not to be with a woman from a lower caste of society or leave her in order to keep with the plan his social status has pre-planned for him.

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