“The First Movie Studio in Texas” by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Frank Thompson

When you think about the early days of motion pictures, you might recall the New York/New Jersey area where Thomas Edison set up shop in 1893. Maybe you reflect on those very early days when producers in search of sunshine ventured to shooting locations in Florida and pre-Hollywood California. But you probably don’t think of Texas.Yet that’s where Gaston Melies went to make movies in 1910 at the Star Film Ranch outside of San Antonio. Gaston was the older brother of Georges Melies, the famous French filmmaker whose 1902 epic, A Trip to the Moon, indelibly imprinted that scene where the Moon struggles with a rocket in its left eye.Not so much is known of this other French brother, noted Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Frank Thompson, authors of The First Movie Studio in Texas (University of Texas Press). But it turns out that Gaston and his troupe created some of the first authentic cowboy films shot in the “real” West.This book wasn’t Thompson’s first rodeo, as they say. His 1996 effort, The Star Film Ranch: Texas’ First Picture Show, described how Gaston went about the business of producing more than 230 films between 1903 and 1913. Only about 16 of them survive, mostly in fragmented form, but Fuller-Seeley and Thompson are optimistic more might be found in the years ahead.Gaston was thrust into the world of movies when Georges enlisted him to go to New York to safeguard the Melies copyrights. “Gaston was then obligated to start producing films himself to ensure that his brother’s films could continue to be released under the auspices of Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Co., also known as the Edison Patents Trust,” stated the authors.The brothers had their own movie preferences, noted the authors. While Georges celebrated the magical in his pictures, Gaston sought realism. “Contemporary articles about Gaston’s sojourns in Texas stressed that his films would feature ‘real cowboys, Mexicans, and Indians,’” wrote Fuller-Seeley and Thompson.Among the stories told in First Movie Studio is the tale of “Big Bill” Gittinger, the “real-life” horseman/cowboy who went on to an extensive career in westerns—never as a star—but working alongside the silent cowboy stars of the day, people like Harry Carey, Hoot Gibson, and Buck Jones. Gittinger, who also worked under legendary director John Ford and later with Buster Keaton in 1930, had a tendency to always be changing his name. “For reasons unknown, Gittinger found it nearly impossible to settle on a screen name or even a consistent spelling of his given name,” the authors noted.However you spell the names, the book provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at 1910 San Antonio and that time when Americans first went to the movies—not to watch a specific film--but to see a program of four or five 15-minute shows created by this budding film industry that, for a time, set up shop in Texas.