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

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. 1947 Academy Awards show recording, MHL. 2. Dorothy Manners, “Selig Death Saddens Pioneers,” Examiner, July 17, 1948, Selig Biography Files, MHL. 3. 1964 BBC television interview with John Ford, quoted in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xiii. 4. Eugene Dengler, “Wonders of the ‘Diamond-S’ Plant,” Motography, July 1911, 19. CHAPTER ONE 1. Contemporaneous with Selig’s restorative sojourn in California, Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in the United States, Jules-Étienne Marey in France, and Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince and William FrieseGreene in England were developing machines for recording and conveying motion pictures. 2. Typewritten, undated family history entitled “Selig Family” and State of California Certificate of Death stamped 48-053534, dated July 15, 1948, for William Nicholas Selig, courtesy of Jeff Look; National Archives, 1880 Census, Roll 189, Sheet 29, Selig, MHL; untitled manuscript, Selig Folder 551, MHL; Jeff Look interview with the author; see also Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture through 1925, 3rd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 302–303. According to Ramsaye, Chicago Park was a health resort, not a fruit farm; Terry Ramsaye, “Col. Selig’s 50 Years,” Motion Picture Herald, March 11, 1944, 35. 3. Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville: From the Honkytonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1953), 10–19, 335–341. 4. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 200–201, 211–212. Notes NOTES TO PAGES 7–10 ∙ 226 ∙ 5. The account of Selig’s minstrel career is primarily taken from an untitled, undated manuscript written by William Selig, Selig Folder 551, MHL, and J. Keeley, untitled article, Selig Scrapbook #10, MHL. Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (London: Macmillan Company, 1970), 18, provides information on producing partner Lew Johnson, but fails to correctly identify Selig, probably because of a typographical error that refers to him as “Seig.” According to two articles written by Bert Williams and quoted in Eric Ledell Smith, Bert Williams : A Biography of the Pioneer Black Comedian (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1992), 9, 11–13, the troupe was called “Martin and Selig’s Mastodon Minstrels.” 6. Toll, 55, 214–215. 7. Keeley. 8. Bert A. Williams, “Bert Williams Tells of Walker,” Freeman, January 14, 1911, 5, quoted in Smith, 11–13; Keeley. 9. William Selig, W. N. Selig, Selig Folder 551, MHL. 10. Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1994), 72–86, and Charles G. Clarke, Early Film Making in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1976), 10–12. 11. Gordon Hendricks, “The History of the Kinetoscope,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 42–56. 12. Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 57–64. According to Terry Ramsaye, Selig witnessed the first public exhibition of a projected motion picture in Chicago that actually predated the Edison program. The projector was built by Woodville Latham. However, extant documentation indicates Selig had not yet arrived in Chicago by the time of the Latham exhibition . Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 191. 13. Untitled manuscript, Selig Folder 551, MHL. 14. Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 304–306; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema, 139, 168; Kitty Kelly, “Films and Such: A Chat with Wm. Selig,” Chicago Examiner , Selig Scrapbook #10, MHL; Ramsaye, “Col. Selig’s 50 Years,” 35–36, says that the camera was known as the “Schustek Camera.” 15. Untitled manuscript, Selig Folder 551, MHL; Scoop Conlon, “First Movie Studio in California Starts in Old Chinese Laundry to Film Pioneer ‘Thrillers,’” San Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 1922, 2E; W. N. Selig, Selig Folder 551, MHL. 16. Of these pioneering production companies, Vitagraph was a licensee of Edison from 1897 to 1901. Jon Gartenberg, “Vitagraph before Griffith: Forging Ahead in the Nickelodeon Era,” Studies in Visual Communication 10, no. 4 (November 1984): 9; Kemp R. Niver, Biograph Bulletins, 1896–1908 (Los Angeles: Locare Research Group, 1971), 4; Joseph P. Eckhardt, The King of the Movies: Film Pioneer Siegmund Lubin (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 24; Anthony Slide, The Big V: A History of the Vitagraph Company (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976), 7. [18...