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

1. The Birth of a Motion Picture Company

C H A P T E R 1 The Birth of a Motion Picture Company WILLIAM NICHOLAS SELIG (PRONOUNCED SEE-LIG) WAS BORN ON March 14, 1864, at 10 Kramer Street, Chicago, Illinois, to Joseph Franz and Antonia (Linsky) Selig, the fifth of eight children. Selig’s father, a shoemaker, hailed from Bohemia, his mother from Prussia. Not much is known of “Willy” Selig’s early years except that his German-speaking family was poor and staunchly Roman Catholic. Selig attended public school until the age of thirteen and then began serving an apprenticeship as an upholsterer and decorator. While still in his teens Selig rebelled against his parents’ wishes and became apprenticed to a master magician. He developed into a good enough parlor entertainer to quit the upholstery trade and perform magic in small-time dime museums and variety theaters. Selig debuted at Kohl and Middleton’s Museum on West Madison Street in Chicago and eventually toured throughout the Midwest. Dogged by poor health, Selig relocated to the healthier (pre-smog) climate of California sometime during the late 1880s, as was the curative fashion of the time. He became the manager of a fruit and health ranch in the town of Chicago Park in Northern California. During the winter Selig revived his magic act, pulling rabbits out of his hat throughout the area’s mining and farming communities.1 After regaining his health, William Selig quit the fruit ranch and moved to San Francisco to resume a full-time career in show business, performing his magic act as “Selig the Conjurer” in theaters up and down the California coast.2 He witnessed firsthand the transformation of bawdy variety entertainment into what would become known as vaudeville. Traditionally, variety entertainmentcateredexclusivelytoadultmaleaudiences .Vaudeville,asanitized, more profitable format, opened up the variety show to women and children.3 Col. William N. Selig, ca. 1914. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences THE BIRTH OF A MOTION PICTURE COMPANY ∙ 7 ∙ Selig’s early recognition that entertainment suitable for the entire family offered potentially larger audiences and greater box office returns would later influence his filmmaking aesthetic. Prior to the rise of vaudeville, minstrelsy had been the most popular form of American entertainment. Originally, minstrelsy was a performance style in which white entertainers would wear blackface makeup and sing, dance, and joke in an exaggerated manner that was both degrading to and celebratory of blacks. By the 1890s, however, African Americans had begun appropriating minstrelsy as their own. Between 1893 and 1895, William Selig was co-owner of two minstrel companies . For his first venture, he partnered with San Francisco African American barber Lew Johnson to organize a troupe known as “Selig and Johnson’s Colored Minstrels.” Johnson had nearly thirty years’ experience operating a series of small, all-black minstrel troupes throughout the Midwest and West.4 Their twelve-member troupe was called a “wagon show,” for they traveled in their own coach, which was pulled by a team of four horses and equipped with a large performance stage. One of the few documented mixed-race minstrel troupes, the company consisted of Selig, Ed Martin and his trained dogs, a Mexican driver who doubled on trombone, and nine African American minstrel entertainers.5 One of the adjectives often used to describe William Selig was “Falstaffian .” Throughout most of his adult life he was stout, wore a mustache, and was friendly to a fault. The worst said of him was that he was a hail-fellowwell -met, perhaps a little too anxious to please. Following the example of other nineteenth-century itinerant showmen, Selig added the appellation of “Colonel ” to his name. The title connoted a respectability otherwise denied impresarios of popular entertainment. Besides financing and managing the troupe, Col. Selig performed sleight-of-hand tricks during the olio, or variety afterpiece , of his minstrel shows. While the company was being assembled in San Francisco, one of the singers brought a tall, handsome man to audition. In the parlance of the era, he was “high-yaller,” a light-complexioned Negro. The man demonstrated a pleasant baritone singing voice and revealed that he could also dance and play the banjo. He told Selig about how he had been fired from his job on the Southern Pacific Railroad (through no fault of his own) and then been stranded in the Bay area. The way he told his woeful story was hilarious, and...