William Selig

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William Nicholas Selig (March 14, 1864 - July 15, 1948) was a pioneer of the American motion picture industry.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, William Selig worked as a vaudeville performer and produced a traveling minstrel show in San Francisco after moving there for his health. One of the actors in the show, Bert Williams, went on to become the foremost African-American entertainer of the early twentieth century.

In 1894, Selig saw Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope at an exhibition in Dallas, Texas and was immediately intrigued. Selig began tinkering with a Lumière brothers camera to make his own version of a film projection system and in 1896, he founded the Selig Polyscope Company in Chicago, one of the first motion picture studios in America.

Selig was the first to expand to the West Coast, setting up studio facilities in the Edendale area of Los Angeles for director Francis Boggs. Selig came west not just for Southern California's weather, which permitted outdoor filming year round, and geography, which could be used to stand in for the Sahara desert, the Alps, or New York City, but also for its distance from Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a cartel of which Selig was a reluctant member.

He later created a zoo, stocked with animals he had used for his studio's jungle pictures and cliffhangers, in East Los Angeles. Leo the lion, later made famous in MGM's logo, was one of the residents. After establishing a studio on the grounds of the zoo, he leased the Echo Park studio to William Fox of Fox Film Corporation.

Selig's venture was extremely successful. He developed new talent, such as Fatty Arbuckle, who began his career with the company in 1908, and Gilbert M. "Bronco Billy" Anderson, the first Western star, while making the cliffhanger format popular through the serial The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913). He achieved his greatest success with a Western, The Spoilers (1914), set in Alaska.

Prospects appeared even brighter in 1915, when a United States Supreme Court ruling nullified all MPPC patents. While that decision benefited Selig in the short run, it also brought in competition that ultimately overshadowed him. His studio shut down production in 1918, with Louis B. Mayer leasing the facility.

Selig contributed to his own reversal of fortune, since he believed that short films were the wave of the future. Selig's faith in short films was misplaced, however, as the industry moved instead toward feature films. While he continued to produce movies as an independent producer into the 1930s, he lost the zoo and his fortune as a consequence of the Great Depression, then became a literary agent, selling off the story rights he had purchased years before for his films.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, William Selig has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6116 Hollywood Boulevard. In 1948, Selig, along with several of his fellow pioneers, was given a special Academy Honorary Award to acknowledge his important role in building the film industry.

On his passing in 1948, William Selig was cremated and his ashes stored in the Hall of Memory Columbarium at the Chapel of the Pines Crematory in Los Angeles.