Essanay Studios

1333 W. Argyle Street, Chicago, IL 60640

Founded in 1907, Essanay made around 2,000 films during its 11-year existence, many at its California location. The movie studio took its name from a combination of the founders’ last names–George K. Spoor and Gilbert M. Anderson. The “S” of Essanay, Spoor, came from Highland Park and worked as a box office manager for Waukegan’s Phoenix Opera House in the late 19th century. Spoor partnered with an inventor to create the world’s first 35 mm movie projector capable of being used in large audience showings. The “A” of Essanay, Anderson, was best known for his cowboy character, Broncho Billy. Anderson acted (and often wrote and directed in) more than 300 short films (some accounts credit Anderson for producing one a week). Nearly half of these films featured Broncho Billy, and many were shot at Essanay’s Niles, California studios. Niles was a small town in Alameda County, California, just southeast of San Francisco, where the nearby Western Pacific Railroad came through Niles Canyon. Many of the Broncho Billy films were shot in small railway towns, like San Rafael, Fairfax, Niles and Santa Barbara. Though the Broncho Billy films were almost all filmed in California (and in other locations out west), the earliest titles were, it seems, filmed partly in Chicago. St. Augustine College’s Essanay Studios website includes a photo, circa 1910, that shows one of the films being shot on an Essanay Chicago set; St. Boniface Cemetery is recognizable in the background. Broncho Billy Park, located at 4437 N. Magnolia Avenue, Chicago, IL 60640, is named after Anderson and his famous character. The U.S. Postal Service honored Anderson with a stamp in his likeness in 1998.

Architect Jeremiah J. Cerny built this movie studio in 1908, with additions made through 1915. Essanay produced many important early films, including those starring Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson. It was designated a Chicago Landmark on March 26, 1996.

Charlie Chaplin starred in The Tramp, which was filmed at Essanay’s Niles, California studios. Chaplin moved to Chicago shortly after that film’s release. He accepted a $1,250 per week contract, making him the highest-paid film actor in the world. Chaplin stayed with Anderson and his family at their apartment at 745 Gordon Terrace, in Uptown’s Buena Park area. Chaplin shot just one of his 15 Essanay films in the city. He worked at Essanay’s Chicago studios for just a short time, arriving on December 23, 1914, and departing less than a month later, after he’d made one two-reel comedy, His New Job. Anderson’s wife Mollie later talked about Chaplin’s stay at their apartment: “The day he came in, he walked around the apartment. We had a beautiful Christmas tree, shining with decorations, and my daughter was just a baby. Charlie looked at the tree, then at little Maxine. He walked around the tree with a radiant expression on his face. And he kept exclaiming: ‘A Christmas tree, a baby, a Christmas tree. It’s wonderful!’ He was so happy. He had never been in a home like ours.”

He often slept late. “Very late,” Mollie Anderson said. “And when he appeared, it was without a shirt collar. He had curly hair and never ran a comb thru it. The maids kept his food waiting. We heard no apology from him. So I simply did what I could. I was a young person, too, and I told him, ‘Charlie, run a comb thru your hair, and make yourself a little more presentable, and we’ll have breakfast.’”

Chaplin left Chicago in mid-January 1915. On January 20, the Los Angeles Times reported that he was back in California, where he complained that Chicago was “too damn cold.”

Gloria Swanson, who eventually would be nominated for an Academy Award for her starring role in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Strip, got her start as an uncredited extra in His New Job. Essanay stars and non-stars also frequented Albert Stenberg’s bar (now Top Tao Tea, 5000 North Broadway and Winona Gardens (now South-East Asia Center, 5120 North Broadway.

That entrée into the film business came about because Swanson, raised on Chicago’s North Side, did a tour with her aunt, Inga, who was friends with Spoor. Swanson was 15 years old at the time. That walk-on role led to Essanay hiring Swanson on a stock-players contract. About a year later, Gloria Swanson played opposite her future husband, Wallace Beery, in Sweedie Goes to College. Beery, who moved to Chicago in 1913 to work with Essanay, would go on to make more than 250 films and earn the distinction as the highest-paid actor in the business; he won an Academy Award for his starring role in the 1931 film, The Champ. Rumors have it that Beery left Chicago for California because of a scandal involving a underage girl; Swanson also later accused him of raping her. The Beery-Swanson marriage lasted a very short time, but both actors remained in Hollywood.

Swanson wrote about this in her 1980 memoir Swanson on Swanson. “I was now a member of the great conspiracy of silence,” she wrote. “I had joined it in the moment I stifled my screams after Wally said to be quiet or I would wake up the whole hotel. … The world of 1916 was a man’s world.”

Local talent of all stripes found opportunity in Essanay’s productions. Edith Odgen Harrison, Mayor Carter Harrison’s wife, directed the adaption of her 1912 Himalayan adventure novel, The Lady of the Snows, which the film company had purchased.

In 1917, Essanay produced Men Who Have Made Love to Me, which controversial author Mary MacLane wrote and starred in. The movie was based on MacLane's 1910 same-titled article, which was published in a Butte, Montana newspaper. In the film, for possibly the first time in cinema history, MacLane breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to her audience. MacLane, born in Canada but raised in Minnesota and Montana, had visited Chicago after Herbert S. Stone & Company, a local concern, published her debut novel, 1901’s The Story of Mary MacLane. She settled in Chicago after the fervent (often negative) reception of the film dissipated. Essanay contracted MacLane to make other films, but she never did so, partly due to ill health (she was afflicted with scarlet fever as a girl and tuberculosis as a woman). MacLane returned to Chicago later in life, living not among the literary and cultural elite, but in an African-American neighborhood. Photographer Harriet Williams, a longtime friend, cared for MacLane in her later years. MacLane died in her room at the Michigan Hotel, on South Michigan Avenue, on August 6, 1929. Williams and Harriet Monroe, another long-time friend and admirer, arranged her funeral.

Today the Essanay lot is the home of St. Augustine's College. The college’s main meeting hall has been named the Charlie Chaplin Auditorium, which includes an image of Chaplin from The Kid (it was not filmed there). The Essanay Centers are meant to preserve and articulate Essanay Studios’s history and also to be used for various cultural performances. Adam Selzner, tour guide and author, writes about the college’s preservation efforts in a March 7, 2016 blog. He says, “Gloria Swanson got her start here. Ben Turpin used to borrow flowers from the nearby cemetery to use as props. Francis X. Bushman drove to work in a purple limousine with a spotlight on the dashboard so everyone could see him. Charlie Chaplin crashed on Broncho Billy Anderson’s couch. It’s exciting now just to stand in the space – a major piece of film history hiding away in Uptown.”

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