The Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was an early American motion picture studio. The studio was founded in 1907 in Chicago, and later developed an additional film lot in Niles Canyon, California. Its various stars included Francis X. Bushman, Gloria Swanson and studio co-owner, actor and director, Broncho Billy Anderson. It is probably best known today for its series of Charlie Chaplin comedies from 1915-1916. In late 1916, it merged distribution with other studios and stopped issuing films in the fall of 1918. According to film historian Steve Massa, Essanay is one of the important early studios, with comedies as a particular strength. Its founders, George Kirke Spoor and Anderson, were subsequently awarded special Academy Awards for pioneering contributions to film.
Tillie's Punctured Romance is a 1914 American silent comedy film directed by Mack Sennett and starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand, Charlie Chaplin, and the Keystone Cops. The picture is the first feature-length comedy and was the only feature-length comedy made by the Keystone Film Company.
Harold Fraser, known professionally as Snub Pollard, was an Australian-born vaudevillian who became a silent film comedian in Hollywood, popular in the 1920s.
Lester H. Cuneo was an American stage and silent film actor. He began acting in theatre while still in his teens. His name remains associated with the history of Western film.
Triangle Film Corporation was a major American motion-picture studio, founded in July 1915 in Culver City, California and terminated 7 years later in 1922.
John Steppling was a German-American silent film actor.
Billy West was a silent film actor, producer, and director. Active during the silent film era, he is best known as a semi-successful Charlie Chaplin impersonator. Beyond acting, he also directed shorts in the 1910s and 20s, as well as produced films. West ultimately retired in 1935.
Alice Howell was a silent film comedy actress from New York City. She was the mother of actress Yvonne Howell.
Glen W. Cavender was an American film actor. He appeared in more than 250 films between 1914 and 1949.
Gus "Pop" Leonard was an American film actor.
Frank Hayes was an American film actor of the silent era. He appeared in more than 70 films between 1913 and 1924. An actor with a unique hatchet face appearance he appeared mostly in comedies. His facial appearance naturally lent to comedic effect in silent films — in particular when he would leave out his dentures — but he also showed up in sentimental farces such as A Hoosier Romance (1918), an early film starring Colleen Moore. In his last appearance, even though brief in the theatrical cut, he played "Old Grannis" in the tragedy Greed.
Maurice Elvey was one of the most prolific film directors in British history. He directed nearly 200 films between 1913 and 1957. During the silent film era he directed as many as twenty films per year. He also produced more than fifty films – his own as well as films directed by others.
Anita Bush was an African American stage actress and playwright. She founded the Anita Bush All-Colored Dramatic Stock Company in 1915, a pioneering black repertory theatre company that helped gain her the moniker "The Little Mother of Colored Drama".
William D. Foster, sometimes referred to as Bill Foster, was a pioneering African-American film producer who was an influential figure in the Black film industry in the early 20th century, along with others such as Oscar Micheaux. He was the first African American to found a film production company, establishing the Foster Photoplay Company in Chicago in 1910. Foster had a vision for the African-American community to portray themselves as they wanted to be seen, not as someone else depicted them. He was influenced by the black theater community and wanted to break the racial stereotyping of blacks in film. He was an actor and writer under the stage name Juli Jones, as well as an agent for numerous vaudeville stars. His film The Railroad Porter, released in 1912, is credited as being the world's first film with an entirely black cast and director. The film is also credited with being the first black newsreel, featuring images of a YMCA parade. Foster's company produced four films that were silent shorts.
Harold "Josh" Binney was an actor, film producer, film company executive, and film director in the United States. He worked as an actor before establishing the Florida Film Company in Jacksonville, Florida in 1918 and produced and producing their films through his Harold J. Binney Productions division. He moved on to Canada and then Sonoma, California.
Eldred Kurtz Means was an American Methodist Episcopal clergyman, famed public speaker, and author. A white man, he wrote fictional stories about African/African American characters who lived in an area of Louisiana which he named Tickfall. He described the characters in the most grotesque, comical and sensational terms. His magazine stories were compiled into books. He was a constant and prolific contributor to Frank A. Munsey's pulp magazines such as All-Story Weekly, Argosy and its predecessors. His use of black stereotypes, minstrel show motifs, Jim Crow characters, fantastical mimicry and impressionism of Negro dialect made him a popular author with a niche of white audiences; but the implicit racist message has not aged well.
Two Knights of Vaudeville is an American 1915 short comedy film with an African American cast. Luther Pollard produced and Ebony Film Corporation distributed the film. Jimmy Marshall, Frank Montgomery, and Florence McClain star in the film. A vaudeville spoof, it is preserved at the Library of Congress.
Captain Leslie Tufnell Peacocke was an actor, screenwriter, and director in the United States.
Luther J. Pollard was an advertising executive and businessman in the film industry in Chicago.
Mattie Edwards (1866-1944) was an African-American actress in the United States that appeared in vaudeville theatre shows and early silent film productions from the 1880s through the 1930s. Growing up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, she spent her early life as a Deputy Marshal for the town before joining the P. G. Lowery minstrel group and then films out of Essanay Studios. She moved between multiple film studios in the years following, including Williams and Walker Co. films in the 1900's, Lubin Motion Picture Company and Ebony Film Company films in the 1910s, before ending her major roles in Comstock-Elliot company and Oscar Micheaux films in the 1920s. She had several smaller film roles and ongoing theatre roles in the decades after, before dying in 1944 at the age of 78.
