The First Movie Studio in Texas

Gaston Méliès's Star Film Ranch

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by Kathryn Fuller-Seeley and Frank Thompson

Type

Studies

Subject

Silent Cinema

Keywords

western, Georges Méliès, American South, movie sets, 1910s

Publishing date

2026 (February 03, 2026)

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 164 pages
6 ¼ x 9 inches (16 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4773-3312-9

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the authors:
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.

Press Reviews:
The First Movie Studio in Texas is a detailed and remarkably complete history of Gaston Méliès's Star Film Company. It will be an essential source for anyone interested in the films or the fascinating people involved with the company, and it makes an important contribution to the scholarship on the history of filmmaking in Texas. -- Eric Hoyt, author of Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press

The First Movie Studio in Texas will add substantially to the knowledge of scholars interested in the history of American silent cinema. It will certainly contribute significantly to its field by virtue of the simple fact that it draws attention to a time and place and a cast of characters that have been left out of many silent cinema histories. -- Kevin L. Stoehr, coauthor of King Vidor in Focus: On the Filmmaker’s Artistry and Vision

See the publisher website: University of Texas Press