William Selig
| William Nicholas Selig | |
|---|---|
Selig in 1916
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| Born |
March 14, 1864 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | July 15, 1948 (aged 84) Los Angeles |
| Other names | "Colonel" Selig |
William Nicholas Selig (March 14, 1864 – July 15, 1948) was a pioneer of the American motion picture industry.
Selig was born and raised in Chicago in a Bohemian-Polish immigrant family. After starting as a furniture upholsterer, he worked as a vaudeville performer and produced a traveling minstrel show in San Francisco while still in his late teens. One of the actors was Bert Williams, who went on to become a leading African-American entertainer. In 1894, Selig saw Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope at an exhibition in Dallas, Texas. He returned to Chicago, opened a small photography studio and began investigating how he might make his own moving pictures without paying a patent fee to Edison's company.
Selig reportedly found a metalworker who had unwittingly repaired a Lumière brothers motion picture camera and, with his help, developed a working system. In 1896, Selig founded the Selig Polyscope Company in Chicago, one of the first motion picture studios in America. He began making actuality shorts, travelogues and industrial films for Chicago businesses.
In 1909, Selig was the first producer to expand filmmaking operations to the West Coast, where he set up studio facilities in the Edendale area of Los Angeles with director Francis Boggs. Southern California's weather allowed outdoor filming for most of the year and offered varied geography and settings which could stand in for far-flung locations around the world. Los Angeles also seemed to offer geographical isolation from Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a cartel which Selig later reluctantly joined. The Sergeant, a Western short shot in Yosemite and produced and directed by Boggs for the Selig Polyscope Company was released in September 1910.
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