The First Movie Studio in Texas

The story of the Star Film Ranch and its pioneering crew, who created the first “authentic” Westerns filmed in Texas.

In 1910, the MÉliÈs Star Film Company of Manhattan set up a moving-picture studio outside San Antonio, the first in Texas. Determined to make the most authentic Westerns possible, the company filmed there for a little over a year. In that brief time, it created more than seventy single-reel films, leaving a lasting mark on moviemaking. Film historians Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Frank Thompson return to a moment when on-location filmmaking was emerging as an artform. We meet producer Gaston MÉliÈs, older brother of early-cinema legend Georges MÉliÈs, and his cast and crew of young innovators, old hands, and genuine cowboys—like seventeen-year-old Edith Storey, the tomboy star who helped to ignite modern celebrity culture, and Francis Ford, who learned the art of film directing on the job and mentored his younger brother, Hollywood legend John Ford. The First Movie Studio in Texas traces the company’s trials and accomplishments, its influence on the depiction of race and gender in Western filmmaking, its surviving works, and its crowning achievement: The Immortal Alamo (1911), the earliest cinematic depiction of that famous battle. Finally recovered from the shadows, the forgotten MÉliÈs brother proves to be one of the key founders of the Western myth on screen.

Author Biography

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is the William P. Hobby Centennial Professor of Communication in the Radio-Television-Film Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy and many other works.

Frank Thompson is a film historian, writer, and author of nearly fifty books, including The Compleat Beau Geste.