Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood.

Ascarate, Richard John

Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood

Andrew A. Erish

Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2012. 303 pages. Cloth: $60.00

How to honor the man who founded the Los Angeles motion picture industry-who released over 3,500 films during a career that spanned more than four decades, who produced the first American movie serial, horror film, Western, and two-hour-long feature film? Nor were these Colonel William N. Selig's only accomplishments. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Colonel (who never served in the military but attached the honorific to his name in the fashion of the day) a special Oscar in 1948. Four months later, he was dead. Since then, film historians have largely forgotten him. Enter Andrew A. Erish with Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood to make amends for this inexplicable neglect.

After providing William Selig's birth date (14 March 1864) and a handful of facts about his upbringing, Erish begins the biography proper with the Colonel already twenty-nine years old and living in San Francisco, primarily for health reasons. By then, Selig had tried his hand as upholsterer, decorator, dime-show magician, fruit and health ranch manager, and co-owner of two itinerant minstrel companies. While on tour in Dallas, Selig saw his first Edison kinetoscope, which changed his life and cinema history. As Erish explains, the Colonel "resolved to develop a means of projection along the lines of popular magic-lantern shows that would provide a simultaneous viewing experience for theater-sized audiences and thus offer the potential for greater profits" (9). Selig continued pulling rabbits from hats, among other jobs, to finance development of his own projection camera. He enlisted the services of a mechanic who had been working on a knockoff version of the Lumiere camera-projector, which in turn was based on an Edison design. Because Edison had failed to apply for a foreign patent, the mechanic and Selig believed themselves to be immune from patent infringement. This legal miscalculation would have enduring ramifications for what was to become the Selig Polyscope Company.

Frequently using archival stills (because most of the Colonel's films have been lost to time), Erish demonstrates how many of Selig's early experiments and innovations antedated film techniques and elements that we now take for granted. A camera mounted on the back of a streetcar while shooting a horse-drawn fire engine in Denver Fireman's Race for life (1902), for example, offers a tracking shot in a moving frame. Selig's Humpty Dumpty (1903) consists of multiple scenes that can be viewed independently as self-contained episodes or together as a continuous narrative. And When We Were Boys (1907), wherein two old men reminisce about their mischievous youth, may present the first use of flashbacks in American cinema history.

Selig's most lasting contributions to cinema may lie within the quintessentially American genre of the narrative Western. As Erish explains, the Colonel began by filming actualities of Western landscapes from moving trains and exhibiting them not only throughout the United States but in Canada, Mexico, England, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain as well. Occasionally, chance intervened. Runaway Stage Coach (1902) began as an actuality featuring attractive young ladies out for a ride. Rounding a bend, the horses became frightened by the unfamiliar sight of a cameraman, giving the film its title and the Western a familiar visual idiom. And long before German director Werner Herzog was celebrated for casting South American natives in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Selig was hiring members of the Great Sioux Nation as actors and advisors to ensure authenticity in his films. Indeed, his On the Little Big Horn; or, Custer's Last Stand (1909) featured Native American survivors of the eponymous battle. And Selig made a fortuitous choice in hiring the athletic and seemingly indestructible Tom Mix to star in his Westerns. For the sake of cinematic immortality, the cowboy actor at various times allowed himself to be filmed being dragged along the ground from a horse's tail, rolling down a rocky embankment while handcuffed, leaping from one galloping horse to another (after having overshot during the first take and knocking himself out), and leaping from a moving horse to a moving train. As Erish argues, "William Selig was defining what the Western should look like not only for audiences but for competitors" (43).

Ever the astute businessman, Selig established operations in Los Angeles well before rivals in the Northeast had discovered the region's variegated landscapes and hospitable climate. Nevertheless, he hedged his bet by maintaining a production facility in Chicago. Denied permission to accompany ex-President Theodore Roosevelt on his celebrated 1909 African safari, the Colonel hired circus animals and their wrangler to film a simulated safari with a Roosevelt impersonator. He even purchased an aged lion whose onscreen slaughter, unfortunately, was all too real. Selig finished the production before Roosevelt had landed in Kenya. Meanwhile, the small collection of animal actors grew to encompass leopards, horses, elephants, tigers, camels, pumas, monkeys, parrots, bears, alligators, a water buffalo, and more lions. Opened for business in East Los Angeles in 1915, the Selig Zoo was, as Erish explains, "conceived as the original motion picture theme park" (114). Lauded by audiences and critics worldwide for its genuine, thrilling productions, the Selig Polyscope Company eventually succumbed to the loss of its overseas market due to the First World War.

Consistently informative, occasionally humorous, ultimately touching, Erish's richly illustrated study may yet disappoint those looking for a fleshier portrait of the Colonel. Perhaps because of the business-oriented nature of the author's source documents, the reader puts down the volume fully apprised of Selig's travails and achievements but not particularly enlightened regarding what the man thought or felt about his life and times. For example, Erish refers to several rounds of litigation lasting a decade and almost invariably for patent infringement-brought by Thomas Edison. Each round, whatever the outcome, placed significant financial and creative strains on Selig's company. Eventually, the Colonel was forced to pay Edison back royalties for films shot using the Selig Polyscope projector or face further lawsuits, an expense that Erish describes as essentially extortion (25). Later, Selig had to cease filming his highly successful Westerns for two years to cover legal expenses. But in 1916, he released The Crisis, a film sympathetic to the abolitionist cause and to President Lincoln's reunification efforts, and one that many contemporary critics believed surpassed D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) in artistic merit. When solicited for an endorsement by the Colonel himself, Edison wrote that the portrayal of Lincoln was so true to life that it recalled the Great Emancipator as the inventor knew him (145). The question remains open whether Edison ever met the sixteenth president, but what had occurred between the longtime rival filmmakers and legal adversaries to elicit such collegiality? Unfortunately, this question also remains open.

Still, those who appreciate Erish's study would do well afterward to take up Eric Ames's Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments (Seattle: University of Washington, 2008). Though each makes only a cameo appearance in the other's volume and lived an ocean apart, Selig and the German Hagenbeck possessed intriguing career parallels. Both men established menageries for public exhibits and to provide animal actors (sadly, sometimes victims) for the nascent film industries in their native countries. Both were deeply concerned to infuse authenticity into their creative tableaux, be they on the movie screen or in the zoological park, going so far as to hire native performers instead of using black-faced Caucasian actors. And both participated aggressively in international trade, Selig by exporting films and Hagenbeck, exotic animals, around the world. Indeed, the Colonel received several shipments of beasts from Hagenbeck's company in Hamburg. Many of these undoubtedly appeared in Selig Polyscope Company productions.

In the end, Erish is to be lauded for offering the reader--be she amateur film enthusiast or professional film scholar--a well-written, solidly supported labor of love. In the introduction, the author describes how he spent years mining the Academy's twenty-one linear feet of material, including Selig's business records, correspondence, production documents, scripts, scrapbooks, photographs, and film stills. Erish's research and analysis shed light on the early history of American film and on one of its greatest figures, creating new knowledge and correcting many academically sanctioned misconceptions along the way. One can hardly ask for more.

Richard John Ascarate

F&H