29 Facts About William Selig

William Nicholas Selig was a vaudeville performer and pioneer of the American motion picture industry.

William Selig's stage billing as Colonel Selig would be used for the rest of his career, even as he moved into film production.

In 1896, William Selig created one of the first film production companies, William Selig Polyscope Company of Chicago.

William Selig produced a string of commercially successful films in the early years of the film industry.

William Selig produced the first Wizard of Oz film in 1910, the first two-reeler film, Damon and Pythias, and the first true serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn.

William Nicholas Selig was born March 14,1864, at 10 Kramer Street, Chicago, Illinois, to Antonia and Joseph Franz Selig, a Bohemian-Polish immigrant family, in a predominantly Polish section of Chicago and attended primary school there.

William Selig apprenticed to a magician, and, still a teen, toured the Midwest as a vaudeville performer in his own minstrel show.

In 1894, at the Texas State Fair in Dallas, Texas, William Selig met employees from Thomas Edison's laboratory who were demonstrating the Kinetoscope.

William Selig 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.

William Selig reportedly found a metalworker who had unwittingly repaired a Lumiere brothers motion picture camera and, with his help, developed a working system.

In 1896, William Selig founded the William Selig Polyscope Company in Chicago, producing not only motion pictures but film equipment, as one of the first motion picture studios in America, making actuality shorts, travelogues and industrial films for Chicago businesses.

In 1896, in a loft, at 43 Peck Court in Burlington, Wisconsin, William Selig co-founded his first film company, the Multiscope and Film Company, and his made first film, The Tramp and the Dog.

William Selig copied the productions of others, like other pioneer companies, for his sale, through his own catalogues, his activity brought the attention of the lawyers of Edison.

In 1909, William 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.

William Selig was shot and wounded in the arm while trying to defend him.

William Selig had studios in Chicago and the Edendale, Los Angeles, and produced animal pictures, with the William Selig's Jungle Zoo near Eastlake Park growing to the then-largest collection of 700+ wild animals.

William Selig popularized the cliffhanger format through the serial The Adventures of Kathlyn.

In 1916, William Selig sued George Fabyan on the grounds that profits from forthcoming films of Shakespeare's works, along with a film on "The Life of Shakespeare", would be damaged by Fabyan's assertion that Francis Bacon was the real author of Shakespeare's work, a popular claim at the time.

William Selig had already obtained an injunction stopping the publication of a book by Fabyan on the subject, in which Fabyan promoted the discovery of ciphers in Shakespeare's plays, identified in his private laboratory Fabyan Villa.

William Selig was hoping to capitalize on the celebrations organized for the upcoming 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, scheduled for April 1916.

William Selig determined that the ciphers identified by Fabyan's analyst Elizabeth Wells Gallup were authentic and that Francis Bacon was therefore the author of the works.

At great expense, William Selig created a zoo in East Los Angeles, stocked with hundreds of animals he had collected for his studio's jungle pictures and cliffhangers.

Under these circumstances, William Selig Polyscope was unable to compete and closed in 1918.

Over thirty years before Walt Disney built Disneyland, William Selig made plans to expand it into a major amusement park and resort called William Selig Zoo Park, with many mechanical rides, a hotel, a large swimming area, theaters and restaurants, believing thousands of visitors a day would flock to the location.

William Selig did some work as an independent producer and expedition promoter into the 1930s, but ultimately lost the zoo and his assets during the Great Depression.

William Selig then became a literary agent, re-selling story rights to film properties he had produced or acquired years before.

William Selig retired and ceased most film production in 1918, due to the same poor health that had sent him to California in 1893.

William Selig continued some independent film production and sponsored mountaineering expeditions and explorers.

William Selig's ashes were stored in the Hall of Memory Columbarium at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.