Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,804

This is the grave of Francis Boggs.

Born in 1870 in Santa Rosa, California, Boggs got interested in acting by the time he was a teenager and by the mid 1880s, he was touring the Southwest with a stock company. He was reasonably successful, enough to earn a living. He lived in Los Angeles in 1900 and moved to Chicago in 1902, as that city had a better theater scene. He was there in 1907 when he started getting interested in the movies. William Nicholas Selig was the big early filmmaker in Chicago and like Thomas Edison in New Jersey, he built himself a studio and made all kinds of short films. Boggs began directing a bunch of them, starting with 1908’s The Count of Monte Cristo, one of many adaptations of that famous story. What was interesting about this film is that Boggs shot most of it in Chicago, but then decided it would be really great if he went back out to California to finish the film with shots of the beach. So he went out to Los Angeles and basically pioneering the film industry there. Evidently, this is the first studio film shot in LA.

In 1908, Boggs started working with L. Frank Baum in the early filming of Oz stories, which turned into The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, a combination of live action, hand-tinted slides, and Baum lecturing. The film is lost, as are most films from this era, but Baum’s notes about survive it and it was certainly innovative, if far too expensive to produce for a profit. Boggs then made Sultan’s Power, in 1909, one of the first films shot entirely in California. He also was one of the first directors to film on location. As we saw, that was first on the beach in southern California, but by 1909, he was shooting in Yosemite and in Hood River, Oregon. He was quite willing to spend producers’ money. Selig seems to have been OK with this given the results.

Later in 1909, Boggs and Selig opened the first permanent movie studio in Los Angeles, Edendale. Boggs tapped into the LA arts scene that he knew well for actors, giving the first film work to people such as Bessie Eyton, Bebe Daniels and Fatty Arbuckle. It did not take long for other burgeoning film moguls to realize Los Angeles’ advantages (largely non-union among them, as well of course as the climate and geography that allowed nearly year-long outdoor shooting seasons and ocean, mountain, urban, and desert landscapes.

Boggs was moving right along. But then in 1911, the studio had a guy named Frank Minnimatsu working as a janitor. He was evidently a drunk who lost his mind. He started smoking in the garage next to flammable materials and then took a gun and started firing into a gasoline tank. He then opened fire on a meeting in the studio. He shot Boggs and killed him, severealy wounding Selig as well, before other employees subdued him. Selig continued working at Edendale, but it soon was surpassed in the new Hollywood film world.

Nearly all of Boggs’ films were lost, but The Sergeant was one of the lost films discovered in 2012 in a New Zealand archive, perhaps the last large-scale uncovering of previously lost silents we will ever have. So that’s preserved at least.

Boggs was 41 years old when he was killed.

Francis Boggs is buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other early figures of silent film, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edwin S. Porter, the first really important early American director, is in Somerset, Pennsylvania, and Frank Marion, co-founder of Kalem Studios, is in Syracuse, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.