I thought I was there to see Zelig, you know the guy who used to show up in photos with Woodrow Wilson, Babe Ruth, and others, long before photobombing was a thing and Tom Hanks inserted himself into every wedding shot he happened to be in the vicinity of.

Okay, not Zelig, but I also was good with seeing Bud Selig, former Commissioner of Baseball, though I wasn’t sure what he had to do with film. Apparently nothing.

So, instead I learned, from Jeff Spitz, a Columbia College Associate Professor in Cinema and TV Arts, about William Selig and his Selig Polyscope Company, which, as it turns out, was a big deal in the early days of the motion picture industry, building Southern California’s first permanent movie studio, after starting out in Chicago.

If you have one more online experience left in you, watch Selig’s thirteen minute, 1910 version of The Wizard of Oz on YouTube, worth it, if for no other reason, for the humorously rudimentary special effects.

In addition to being the studio to produce the first films of Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd, and Fatty Arbuckle, Selig, in partnership with the Chicago Tribune, is credited with inventing the cliffhanger, in 1913, with the production of The Adventures of Kathlyn, which the paper gave front page coverage to. Where would we be today without cliffhangers? Maybe I’ll tell you next time.