11 Facts About Essanay

Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was an early American motion picture studio.

Essanay produced silent films with such stars as George Periolat, Ben Turpin, Wallace Beery, Thomas Meighan, Colleen Moore, Francis X Bushman, Gloria Swanson, Ann Little, Helen Dunbar, Lester Cuneo, Florence Oberle, Lewis Stone, Virginia Valli, Edward Arnold, Edmund Cobb and Rod La Rocque.

Essanay's productions include the first American film version of A Christmas Carol as well as the Western short The James Boys of Missouri, which is notable for being the first biopic about the nineteenth-century American outlaw brothers Jesse and Frank James.

Essanay told The Denver Post in 1909, "Colorado is the finest place in the country for Wild West stuff".

Essanay opened the Essanay-West studio in Niles, California, in 1912, at the foot of Niles Canyon, where many Broncho Billy westerns were shot, along with The Tramp featuring Charlie Chaplin.

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In late 1914, Essanay succeeded in contracting Charlie Chaplin away from Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios, offering Chaplin a higher production salary and his own production unit.

Chaplin's stock company at Essanay included Ben Turpin, who disliked working with the meticulous Chaplin and appeared with him in only a couple of films; ingenue Edna Purviance, who became his off-screen sweetheart as well; Leo White, almost always playing a fussy continental villain; and all-purpose authority figures Bud Jamison and John Rand.

Essanay's departure caused a rift between founders Spoor and Anderson.

Chaplin was the studio's biggest moneymaker, and Essanay resorted to creating "new" Chaplin comedies from file footage and out-takes.

In 1915, the Essanay entered into an agreement, in a last-ditch effort to save the studio, with Vitagraph Studios, Lubin Manufacturing Company, and Selig Polyscope Company to form a film distribution partnership known as V-L-S-E, Incorporated.

Essanay building in Chicago was later taken over by independent producer Norman Wilding, who made industrial films.