Biography
Selig was raised in Chicago. He worked as a vaudeville performer and produced a traveling minstrel show in San Francisco while still in his late teens. One of the actors was Bert Williams, who went on to become a leading African-American entertainer. In 1894 Selig saw Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope at an exhibition in Dallas, Texas. He 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. Selig reportedly found a metalworker who had unwittingly repaired a Lumière brothers motion picture camera and with his help, developed a working system. In 1896 Selig founded the Selig Polyscope Company in Chicago, one of the first motion picture studios in America. He began making actuality shorts, travelogues and industrial films for Chicago businesses.
Read more about this topic: William Nicholas Selig
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)