William Nicholas Selig was a pioneer of the American motion picture industry.

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.

In 1909 Selig was the first producer to expand film-making operations to the West Coast, where he set up studio facilities in the Edendale area of Los Angeles with director Francis Boggs. Southern California’s weather allowed outdoor filming for most of the year and offered varied geography and settings which could stand in for far flung filming locations around the world. Los Angeles also seemed to offer geographical isolation from Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, a cartel which Selig later reluctantly joined.

In 1911 Boggs was murdered by a Japanese gardener employed by the company. Selig was shot and wounded in the arm while trying to defend him.

Charles William “Billy” Haines was an American film actor and interior designer. A star of the silent era, Haines’ career was cut short in the Thirties as a result of his refusal to deny his homosexuality.

Haines was probably born on January 2, 1900, the third child of George Adam Haines, a cigar maker, and Laura Virginia Haines. Two older siblings died in infancy. He had four younger siblings: Lillian, born in 1902; Ann, born in 1907; George, Jr., born in 1908; and Henry, born in 1917. He was baptized at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton at the age of eight, where he later sang in the choir. He became fascinated with stage performance and motion pictures at an early age, spending hours watching early silent films in the local theatres.

Haines ran away from home at the age of 14, accompanied by another unidentified young man whom Haines referred to as his “boyfriend”. The pair went first to Richmond and then to Hopewell, which had a reputation for immorality. Haines and his boyfriend got jobs working at the local DuPont factory, producing nitrocellulose for $50 a week. To supplement their income, the couple opened a dance hall, which may have also served as a brothel. His parents, frantic over his disappearance, tracked him through the police to Hopewell. Haines did not return home with them, remaining instead in Hopewell and sending money back home to help support the family. The couple remained in Hopewell until most of the town was destroyed by fire in 1915. Haines moved to New York City. It is unclear whether his boyfriend accompanied him. Following the bankruptcy of the family business and the mental breakdown of George, Sr., the family moved to Richmond in 1916. Haines returned home in 1917 to help support them. With his father recovered and employed, Haines returned to New York City in 1919, settling into the burgeoning gay community of Greenwich Village. He worked a variety of jobs and was for a time the kept man of an older woman before becoming a model. Talent scout Bijou Fernandez discovered Haines as part of the Samuel Goldwyn Company’s “New Faces of 1922” contest and the studio signed him to a $40 a week contract. He traveled to Hollywood with fellow contest winner Eleanor Boardman in March of that year.

Haines’s career began slowly, as he appeared in extra and bit parts, mostly uncredited. His first significant role was in Three Wise Fools. He attracted positive critical attention and the studio began building him up as a new star. However, he continued to play small, unimportant parts at Goldwyn. It was not until his home studio loaned him to Fox in 1923 for The Desert Outlaw that he got the opportunity to play a significant role. In 1924, MGM lent Haines to Columbia Pictures for a five-picture deal. The first of these, The Midnight Express, received excellent reviews and Columbia offered to buy his contract. The offer was refused and Haines continued in bit roles for Goldwyn. Haines scored his first big personal success with Brown of Harvard opposite Jack Pickford and Mary Brian. It was in Brown that he crystallized his screen image, a young arrogant man who is humbled by the last reel. It was a formula to which he was repeatedly returned for the next several years.

William Dieterle was a German actor and film director, who worked in Hollywood for much of his career.

He was born Wilhelm Dieterle, the youngest child of nine, to Jewish parents Jacob and Berthe Dieterle. As a child, he lived in considerable poverty and earned money by various means including carpentry and as a scrap dealer. He became interested in theater early and by the age of sixteen, he had joined a travelling theater company. His striking good looks and ambition soon paved the way as a leading romantic actor in theater productions. In 1919, he attracted the attention of Max Reinhardt in Berlin who hired him as an actor for his productions. He started acting in German films in 1921 to make more money and quickly became a popular character actor. He tired of acting quickly and wanted to direct.

He directed his first film in 1923, Der Mensch am Wege, which co-starred a young Marlene Dietrich, but he returned to acting for several years and appeared in such notable German films as Das Wachsfigurenkabinett and F.W. Murnau’s Faust. In 1927, Dieterle and his wife, Charlotte Hagenbruch, formed their own production company and returned to directing films, such as Sex in Chains in which he also played the lead role.

In 1930, Dieterle emigrated to the United States when he was offered a job in Hollywood to make German versions of American films; he became a citizen of the United States in 1937. He adapted quickly to Hollywood filmmaking and was soon directing original films. His first, The Last Flight, was a success and has been hailed as a forgotten masterpiece. Other films made during the 1930s include Jewel Robbery, Adorable, A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Reinhardt, The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola, Juarez and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo.