Afterword

The idea for Death at the Selig Studios came to me when I attended the 2013 Chicago Book Expo, which was held at St. Augustine College in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. I was surprised to learn that the building we were in had once been a film studio for Essanay. At the Expo, Michael Corcoran and Arnie Bernstein, the authors of Hollywood on Lake Michigan: 100+ Years of Chicago and the Movies (2013), gave a presentation. Another recent book, Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry (2015), by Michael Glover Smith and Adam Selzer, also describes the early Chicago filmmakers.

What captured my interest was the fact that silent films were being made in Chicago around the time the Emily Cabot mysteries are set, just before the industry moved out to California. One of the reasons this series is set at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century is that was a time when the seeds were planted for many things that grew, and were later of huge importance, in the twentieth century. I hadn’t realized that Chicago was the place where two of the earliest silent film producers made movies. Like the fields of social work and the sciences, which I portrayed in the earlier books of the series, the film industry continued to grow and become extremely influential over the course of the next century. It seemed like a perfect setting for Emily—and her friends and family—to confront another new technology.

When I began to do research, I found that both the Essanay and Selig Polyscope studios were active at the time. Eventually, I settled on the date of 1909, and I chose Selig as the setting, with Essanay in the background. The fact that Broncho Billy Anderson started at Selig, and then formed the competitive studio, was useful. The fact that Edison was feuding and litigating patent rights with other film companies at the time became a good conflict for the plot. I’ve taken some license with the timeline for the Motion Picture Patents Company agreement, which was actually signed a little earlier in the year than I portray it in this book. That ‘trust’ lasted until 1918. The fact that it restricted films to a single reel was one reason it was eventually abandoned. The Chicago studios were just about to move their operations to California, largely for the sunlight necessary to filming, and that circumstance was also quite useful to the plot.

Two books that were helpful in researching Col. Selig were Col. William N. Selig: The Man Who Invented Hollywood (Andrew Erish, 2013) and Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company (Kalton C. Lahue, 1973). In 1910, Selig moved to Los Angeles and took with him all the animals he’d purchased from the defunct circus. When the film company went under, he ran an animal park that was open to the public until it finally closed during the Great Depression.

Olga Celeste, the Leopard Lady, was a real person who worked in the film industry for many years, even working on the 1938 Katherine Hepburn film, Bringing Up Baby. Big Otto, Tom Mix, Otis Turner, and Tom Nash were actual people who worked for Selig. Mix went on to have a major Hollywood career, starring in over two hundred films for Selig.

I’ve taken some literary license with the timeline for Kathlyn Williams, whose main career at the Selig studios did not develop until after the time period of this novel. She did indeed star in The Adventures of Kathlyn, a thirteen-part serial filmed by the Selig studios, which was released in 1913. The scenario for the film was written by Gilson Willets.

Very few Selig Polyscope films remain from that time period. However, there are a few available on YouTube. The Cowboy Millionaire (starring Tom Mix, directed by Otis Turner, and released in 1909) is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKL1otPY_LY.

Selig’s version of The Wonderful World of Oz can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB1D3MQTLY0. This production came about because L. Frank Baum had used the Selig studios to create films that were part of his presentation of The Fairylogue and Radio Plays, in which he presented a sort of travelogue of Oz using films, slides, and live actors. Those productions were not a financial success, and Baum couldn’t pay Selig what he owed him, so Selig made a deal with him to produce the first Wizard of Oz film, which was released in 1910.

A much longer film, The Spoilers, was filmed by the Selig studios after their move to Los Angeles and released in 1914. It is a multi-reel film based on a novel by Rex Beach and stars Kathlyn Williams. It can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pojdDGvAaxE

Hunting Big Game in Africa was indeed produced by Selig in 1909, but no prints exist. The studio filmed it, waited for news that Roosevelt had shot a lion, then released it. They never claimed it was really Roosevelt in the film, but the artful depiction was far more popular than the more boring actual film clips from the real trip, which were released later.

Fred Busse was really the mayor of Chicago in 1909, but it was Edith Ogden Harrison, the wife of Chicago’s five-term mayor, Carter H. Harrison, Jr., who had her novel The Lady of the Snows made into a film by Essanay in 1915. There was indeed a board for film censorship and Selig supported it, as he had a vision of film entertainment extending beyond the nickelodeons to a wider, more general audience. He wanted families to be able to watch the films, and he was a visionary in that, as in many things. George Hyde, Babe Greer, and Alonzo Swift are all fictional characters invented for this novel. Babe and Alonzo are loosely based on real people like Gloria Swanson and Francis X. Bushman, who were getting a start in Chicago films at the time this novel is set. Arnold Leeder is also fictional. What we would today call a “director” seems to have been referred to as a “producer” during the early days of the film industry. Also, the term “movies” was used to refer to people involved in the industry. It is interesting to discover how many of the procedures that are still prevalent in filmmaking were there right at the beginning. They would film a scene three times, then look at the negatives, before allowing the actors to go for the day, in case they had to re-shoot the scenes—much like what are now referred to as “rushes.”

You can still see parts of three of the buildings mentioned in this book. The Selig building, minus the glass-walled studio on the top and the backlot, is at 3900 N. Claremont (near the intersection of Western and Irving Park). It now houses condo apartments. The Essanay building, at 1345 W. Argyle, is now the home of St. Augustine College. Just a few blocks away, the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge stands at the corner of Broadway and Lawrence, in what remains of Pop Morse’s roadhouse.