The Texas movie studio run by a Frenchman that was 10 years ahead of Hollywood
Texas still has an important place in today’s cinematic ecosystem, but it was also the birthplace of an unusual inflexion point in international cinema.
Although a majority of America’s film production is centred around the coastal cities of New York and Los Angeles, many other states have become more active sites for more cost-efficient productions. Texas may have birthed iconic filmmakers such as Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Terrence Malick, but it has now become a destination place because of the massive operation Taylor Sheridan has created to run many of his shows out of.
Even if the place seems like it could become the future of Hollywood, it has also had a critical role in the past, as it was where one of the most important filmmakers of all time, Gaston Méliès, first made a splash in the United States. The French filmmaker and brother of Georges Méliès, the legendary director who made iconic silent films such as A Trip to the Moon and The Impossible Voyage, Gaston set up the production studio Star Film Company in San Antonio, where it played a major role in developing early silent westerns.
The Star Film Company had originated as a way for Gaston to distribute his brother’s films in the United States, but it expanded to begin making documentaries. While these were not successful, the company was still the biggest production studio in Texas that wasn’t founded by Texan artists. Gaston’s best option was to begin adapting to the times, and Star Film quickly became a go-to space for westerns.
Although the genre is now one of the most iconic of all time and is responsible for multiple ‘Best Picture’ winners at the Academy Awards, it started out with much more humble origins. At a time when the early films shot in New York were limited to being filmed on sound stages and rooftops, Gaston realised there was potential to shoot on location in environments that could resemble the Wild West.
Given that the actual ‘Wild West’ era in which these films were set wasn’t that far in the past at the time when he was the most active, the work put out by Star Film Company was as accurate as Hollywood westerns will ever get.
The production house had many notable actors like Francis Ford and William Clifford under contract, and made many of the earliest hits of the era. Even if his brother’s work tended to be more supernatural and surrealist, Gaston produced one of the silent era’s first masterpieces with The Immortal Alamo, which was based on the iconic 1836 battle in which a San Antonio fort was raided by the Mexican Army during the Texas Revolution.
Directed by William F Haddock, The Immortal Alamo is responsible for kicking off Hollywood’s longstanding infatuation with the battle, wherein John Wayne offered his own version of The Alamo with a 1960 film he directed, and John Lee Hancock made a remake in 2004 that starred Patrick Wilson and Billy Bob Thornton.
Sadly, a majority of the films made by the Star Film Company are lost, as there simply wasn’t an archive that preserved many of these early works of the silent era. However, it was undeniably a major point in the history of cinema that should be remembered as a sign of Texas’s cinematic roots.
