Essanay Studios Chicago Film History: How the City That Invented Hollywood Lost It and What’s Being Built in Its Place
Most people associate the birth of American cinema with Hollywood. They’re wrong. Before the palm trees and the studio lots, before the Walk of Fame and the sign on the hill, the American motion picture industry was born in Chicago. In the early 1900s, the city boasted more production companies and filmmakers than any other in the nation. Its studios churned out hundreds of films per year, its theaters pioneered mass exhibition, and its entrepreneurs defined the business models that the entire industry would adopt. Understanding this Essanay Studios Chicago film history is essential context for anyone working in the city’s production community today from major studio operations at Cinespace to freelancers offering Chicago videographer services in the same neighborhoods where Chaplin once performed.
The Selig Polyscope Company and Chicago’s First Moving Pictures
Chicago’s film story begins with William Selig, a former magician who began making and showing films in 1897 using a reverse-engineered imitation of the Lumière brothers’ camera that he called the Polyscope. Selig built a production facility near Irving Park Road and Western Avenue that employed over 200 people. His 1898 film “Something Good Negro Kiss,” rediscovered by scholar Allyson Nadia Field in 2018, is likely the first on-screen depiction of Black love in American cinema a remarkable artifact that connects Chicago’s earliest filmmaking to the city’s long history of Black cultural production.
Selig’s competitor, George Kleine, operated one of the major distribution companies from Chicago, importing European films and establishing the city as a hub for both production and exhibition. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Chicago filmmakers and producers controlled nearly 80% of the film distribution market in the entire nation.
Essanay Studios: The Company That Made Chicago Hollywood
On August 10, 1907, George Kirke Spoor and Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson founded the Peerless Film Manufacturing Company in Chicago, quickly renaming it Essanay a phonetic rendering of their initials, S and A. The studio’s first film, “An Awful Skate, or The Hobo on Rollers,” starring Ben Turpin (then the studio janitor), was produced for a couple hundred dollars and grossed several thousand establishing the economics of early cinema in miniature.
By 1908, Essanay had moved to its famous address at 1333–45 W. Argyle Street in the Uptown neighborhood, where Spoor oversaw construction of what was recognized as a state-of-the-art filmmaking facility. The complex housed three large studios, a carpentry shop, prop and wardrobe storage, dressing rooms, film processing labs, storage vaults, and administrative offices. The building’s distinctive terra-cotta Indian head logo at the entrance became one of early cinema’s most recognizable trademarks.
Essanay’s output was staggering. The studio produced hundreds of films featuring stars including Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Ben Turpin, Francis X. Bushman, and Colleen Moore. Anderson himself starred in 376 Broncho Billy westerns, making him the first cowboy hero in cinema history. The studio created America’s first film adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” (1908), the first biopic about Jesse James, and the first American Sherlock Holmes film (1916). The first pie-in-the-face gag on screen is believed to have hit Ben Turpin in Essanay’s “Mr. Flip” (1909).
The Chaplin Chapter
In late 1914, Essanay made the acquisition that would define its legacy: hiring Charlie Chaplin away from Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios with a higher salary and his own production unit. Chaplin made fourteen short comedies for Essanay in 1915–1916, working at both the Chicago and Niles, California facilities. His first Essanay film, “His New Job,” cheekily referenced the studio switch in its title.
The landmark film of the Chaplin–Essanay collaboration was “The Tramp” (1915), in which Chaplin’s vagabond character finds work on a farm and falls for the farmer’s daughter. The film injected moments of pathos unprecedented in slapstick comedy and ended with what became one of cinema’s most iconic images: the lonely tramp walking down the road with his back to the camera. Chaplin’s Essanay work represented a crucial transition point in his artistry more disciplined than the Keystone roughhouse, with stronger story values and character development.
Chaplin, however, didn’t stay long. He reportedly disliked Chicago’s weather and departed within a year for warmer climates and a bigger paycheck at Mutual Film Corporation. His departure was a blow from which Essanay never recovered.
The Motion Picture Patents Company and the Westward Migration
The story of how Chicago lost its film industry is fundamentally a story about monopoly, resistance, and geography. In 1909, the Motion Picture Patents Company was established as a trust of the major studios including Essanay, Selig, Vitagraph, and Kleine to control the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures. The trust required theaters to pay weekly rental fees for films and equipment, and it used legal threats and physical intimidation to enforce compliance.
Independent filmmakers who refused to comply with the trust’s restrictions began migrating west to escape legal jurisdiction. Southern California offered year-round sunshine for outdoor filming, diverse landscapes, and distance from the trust’s enforcers. Carl Laemmle, who had opened his first nickelodeon on Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, left to form Universal Pictures. Other independents followed, and by the late 1910s, the gravitational center of American filmmaking had shifted permanently to Hollywood.
Essanay collapsed in 1917 following Chaplin’s departure, disputes between Spoor and Anderson, and the broader industry migration. The company was absorbed into what would eventually become Warner Brothers. Spoor continued working in Chicago, developing an unsuccessful 3-D system in 1923 and a 65mm widescreen format in 1930. Both founders were later awarded special Academy Awards for their pioneering contributions to film.
The Legacy in Brick and Mortar
The Essanay Studios building still stands at 1333 W. Argyle Street in Uptown, designated as a Chicago landmark for its significance as the most important structure connected to the city’s role in early cinema. The terra-cotta Indian head logo remains at the entrance. The building was used continuously for filmmaking through the mid-1970s under industrial film producer Norman Wilding before becoming part of St. Augustine College, which built a Charlie Chaplin memorial theater on site. Today, the building also houses Essanay Studio and Lighting Company, a production equipment rental operation that maintains the filmmaking connection in the original space.
From Essanay to Cinespace: The Arc of Recovery
Chicago’s film industry spent nearly seven decades in the wilderness after the Hollywood migration. The city remained a vibrant exhibition market Balaban & Katz built their iconic theater chain here, and the city’s audience enthusiasm for cinema never waned but production was minimal until the 1980s, when films like “The Blues Brothers,” “Sixteen Candles,” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” began to showcase Chicago as a cinematic location.
The real revival came in 2008 when Illinois introduced its production tax credit, and in 2011 when Cinespace Chicago Film Studios opened on the former Ryerson Steel complex. Today, Cinespace’s 36 stages occupy 1.6 million square feet a facility that would have been unimaginable to Spoor and Anderson, yet one that fulfills the same industrial ambition they brought to Argyle Street over a century ago. The city that once controlled 80% of America’s film distribution market is rebuilding, not by imitating Hollywood, but by leveraging the same qualities industrial infrastructure, a deep labor pool, entrepreneurial ambition, and sheer civic stubbornness that made it the film capital of the world in the first place.
