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Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood Andrew A. Erish Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2012. 303 pages. Cloth: $60.00
How to honor the man who founded the Los Angeles motion picture industry-who released over 3,500 films during a career that spanned more than four decades, who produced the first American movie serial, horror film, Western, and two-hour-long feature film? Nor were these Colonel William N. Selig's only accomplishments. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Colonel (who never served in the military but attached the honorific to his name in the fashion of the day) a special Oscar in 1948. Four months later, he was dead. Since then, film historians have largely forgotten him. Enter Andrew A. Erish with Col. William N. Selig, the Man Who Invented Hollywood to make amends for this inexplicable neglect.
After providing William Selig's birth date (14 March 1864) and a handful of facts about his upbringing, Erish begins the biography proper with the Colonel already twenty-nine years old and living in San Francisco, primarily for health reasons. By then, Selig had tried his hand as upholsterer, decorator, dime-show magician, fruit and health ranch manager, and co-owner of two itinerant minstrel companies. While on tour in Dallas, Selig saw his first Edison kinetoscope, which changed his life and cinema history. As Erish explains, the Colonel "resolved to develop a means of projection along the lines of popular magic-lantern shows that would provide a simultaneous viewing experience for theater-sized audiences and thus offer the potential for greater profits" (9). Selig continued pulling rabbits from hats, among other jobs, to finance development of his own projection camera. He enlisted the services of a mechanic who had been working on a knockoff version of the Lumière camera-projector, which in turn was based on an Edison design. Because Edison had failed to apply for a foreign patent, the mechanic and Selig believed themselves to be immune from patent infringement. This legal miscalculation would have enduring ramifications for what was to become the Selig Polyscope Company.
Frequently using archival stills (because most...