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William Nicholas Selig (March 14, 1864 – July 15, 1948) was a vaudeville performer and pioneer of the American motion picture industry. His stage billing as Colonel Selig would be used for the rest of his career, even as he moved into film production.
The Selig Polyscope Company was an American motion picture company that was founded in 1896 by William Selig in Chicago, Illinois. The company produced hundreds of early, widely distributed commercial moving pictures, including the first films starring Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd, Colleen Moore, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.
May 20, 2009 · William Selig is one of the unsung heroes of the early days of cinema in Los Angeles. A jack-of-all-trades, he worked as a vaudeville performer and even produced a traveling...
- Writer
Learn about William Selig, one of the first American motion picture producers and studio founders. He was a vaudeville performer, a patent challenger, and a West Coast filmmaker.
William Nicholas Selig. Producer: Something Good - Negro Kiss. Born into a large Bohemian-Polish family in Chicago on March 14, 1864, William N. Selig was one of the true pioneers of the motion picture industry.
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- Chicago, Illinois, USA
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- Los Angeles, California, USA
William Nicholas Selig (14 March 1864 – 15 July 1948) was an early American cinema pioneer. He founded the Selig Polyscope Company that made the first films of the Oz books of L. Frank Baum.
William N. Selig was a magician and later a minstrel show operator who left Chicago in poor health to travel the far western and southern states. In 1896 he saw a Kinetoscope in Texas and returned to his hometown to open a commercial photographic printing studio while trying to make a motion picture projector.
