UPTOWN — When sunny Los Angeles still was a one-horse town, Chicago played the role of movie capital of the United States, turning out hundreds of silent films for a public with an monstrous appetite for the flickering new form of mass entertainment.
On Saturday, a production stage at Essanay Studios in Uptown, once hot with big film lights and whirring cameras, will be dressed up again for the big show. The Obscura Society of Illinois is putting on a 100th anniversary viewing of "Sherlock Holmes," the first American version of the British detective stories ever committed to film.
The 1916 movie, which ran an unusually long for the time two hours, starred William Gillette, a stage actor who had played the role for more than 20 years. Gillette never appeared in another movie, according to Adam Selzer, an author who writes about Chicago and works as a guide for Mysterious Chicago Tours.
Reporter Mark Schipper talks about the history of the Essanay Studios.
But Gillette’s contribution to movie history and his cast of players will be brought back to life on the very walls of the studio where the movie was filmed, a parade of ghosts dancing again on the walls used to transform a Chicago neighborhood into 19th century London.
“The room is pretty much still intact,” Selzer said. “The big sloping walls where they would have set up the Baker Street set — it’s remarkably intact. The Selig Polyscope studios [Essanay’s period rival] are all condos now, for example.”
Selzer has planned an “immersive party experience” for the showing, encouraging people who buy tickets to dress their Victorian best, with a live piano playing an original score to match the film.
“It’s the type of movie experience you will have for cocktail party conversation the rest of your life,” Selzer said. “‘I saw Sherlock Holmes projected on the wall where they actually filmed it 100 years earlier.’”
The print of the movie itself was thought lost. It was found unexpectedly in France, where many obscure American art treasures, good and bad, eventually are found — whether they be works of William Faulkner or Jerry Lewis.
“A couple of guys, I don’t remember who they were with now, found it in a vault in France about a year and a half ago now,” Selzer said. “It’s the only known print of the movie left in the world.”
Many thousands of reels of the original silent movies are lost forever, Selzer said. It could be difficult and expensive to store them properly, and they were dangerously flammable. At that time, movies were cranked out like any other product with a short shelf life, meant for immediate consumption and disposal. There was not the general sense that these reels one day would be considered valuable works of art.
“What we have of silent movies are just the tip of the iceberg, maybe 1 percent of what was actually made,” Selzer said. “But they’re always finding new prints at yard sales and vaults and weird places like that. Who knows what’s still out there?”
Alongside rival Selig Polyscope, Essanay Studios at 1345 West Argyle St. was the cream of the crop, employing a cadre of creative minds in an age when the terrain for telling stories on film was being pioneered. The company was established in 1907 by George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. Anderson, and did nearly a decade's hard work until it closed in 1915 and moved West. Spoor and Anderson had combined the first initials of their last name—“S” and “A”—to create Essanay.
“Between Essanay and Selig Polyscope, they sort of invented a movie city and became the prototype for Hollywood,” Selzer said. “There were a whole lot of firsts here: The first major serials, first mockumentaries and a lot of the experimental stages of movie-making and getting the movie industry off the ground were done here by Essanay.”
The old studio buildings and back lot, with its weathered red bricks and capacity for sending the mind back in time, sit intact, folded into the campus of St. Augustine College. The city made the grounds a Chicago landmark for preservation in 1996, and they are considered by film aficionados to be one of the first, and now among the very last, silent movie studios in the world. The original entrance, a colorful and ornate terra cotta portal with the studio’s trademark Indian chief heads facing off, jumps out at passersby on a mostly residential stretch of Argyle Street.
The terra cotta portal into the old Essanay Studios in Uptown. (DNAinfo/Mark Schipper)
Some of Essanay’s biggest stars were “Broncho Billy” Anderson (also Essanay’s co-founder), who is credited with building up and refining the Western genre before later filmmakers like John Ford expanded it. Charlie Chaplin spent a year in Chicago making comedic movies for Essanay that involved heartbreak, triumph and disaster for his tramp character, emotions that had not been used in “funny pictures” until he tried it.
Charlie Chaplin on the Essanay set in Chicago (Courtesy Adam Selzer)
Gloria Swanson was one of the most famous actresses of the silent era who lasted well into the time of the “talkies.” When Swanson said she was “ready for her close-up” in 1950's “Sunset Boulevard,” the black satire of an aging Hollywood actress who didn’t know her day had come and gone, it was a meta throwback to her early days as a silent star in Chicago.
Chicago’s movie and television industry has entered another boom phase, with multiple high-profile TV series and huge blockbuster films like “Batman” and “Transformers” using the now towering cityscape for their settings. But this is not a new idea, more like the rivers circling back to the headwaters from which they originally flowed.
Charlie Chaplin looks over the back lot facing St. Boniface Catholic Cemetery at the former Essanay Studios. (DNAinfo/Mark Schipper)
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