Born William Nicholas Selig in Chicago, Illinois. One of the pioneering producers of films for the Nickelodeon Age. Raised in Chicago, by the age of 19 he was residing in California, purportedly because of ill health, where he was a manager of a health spa. Around 1894, he headed out on the minstrel show road as a parlor magic conjurer, billing himself as "Selig, Conjurer". He later added the appelation "Colonel". After viewing an Edison Kinetoscope in Dallas in 1895, Selig quit the minstrel circuit and headed for Chicago where he opened a photographic shop. Wishing to enter the film business with his own equipment, he experimented, but went nowhere. Finally, after seeing the Latham and Lumiere projectors, he, along with assistance from the Union Metal Works, began working on constructing his own projector and camera. Finally, he was able to build his camera and projector, based on the Lumiere system, and shot his first film in 1896 under the auspices of his new enterprise, the Selig Polyscope Company. By 1909, he had three studios in operation, one each in New Orleans, California, and Chicago. In 1909, he became one of the nine producers that Thomas Edison invited to form the Motion Picture Patents Company, which then formed the General Film Company in an effort to control the production, distribution and exhibition of nickelodeon films. Their monopolistic trust was challenged -- and eventually defeated in 1915 -- by independent nickelodeon operators headed by Carl Laemmle and William Fox. In 1910, Selig hired a vaudeville actor bearing a slight resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt, and while the President was on safari in Africa, made a movie (ROOSEVELT IN AFRICA) of a lion hunt in his Chicago studio. The public accepted it as genuine. That same year Selig hired Tom Mix to scout Oklahoma locations and supply cowboy extras for films to be shot there. Mix soon started acting for the company and stayed with them until he signed a major contract with Fox in 1918. Selig is also credited with creating the first real serial (i.e., one in which the story continues episode to episode, rather than one episode being just related to another) with the 1913 "Tribune's The Adventures of Kathryn." This serial was immensely popular with the public and established the unfailing formula for succeeding serials: the maximum of excitement and the minimum of plausibility. In 1915, he closed the Chicago studio and the Edendale studio and moved his entire operations into the Mission Avenue Zoo/Studio (this was probably done in July 1915 during the Selig Exposition Special Train Tour). In 1918, he shut down all production. Although the Selig zoo remained opened for many years more, the Selig Polyscope Company was no more. Selig himself continued to produce pictures into the 1930's.  Special Award 1947: To "one of the small groups of pioneers whose belief in a new medium, and whose contributions to its development, blazed the trail along which the motion picture has progressed, in their lifetime, from obscurity to world-wide acclaim." Winners presented Statuettes. (w. Albert E. Smith, Thomas Armat & George K. Spoor) 1 Special Award