Broncho Billy Anderson

Anderson played the dancing tenderfoot and the train passenger who gets shot and bandit #1 in The Great Train Robbery (1903). Seeing the film for the first time at a vaudeville theater and being overwhelmed by the audience's reaction, he decided to work in the film industry exclusively. He began to write, direct, and act in his own Westerns under the name Gilbert M. Anderson. • Illustration — Francis X. Bushman, Charlie Chaplin and Anderson, photo taken at the Essanay Studio, Chicago in 1915 In 1907 in Chicago, Anderson and George Kirke Spoor founded Essanay Studios ("S and A" for Spoor and Anderson), one of the major early movie studios. In 1909, he directed the film with the first known instance of the pie-the-face gag, Mr. Flip. Anderson acted in over 300 short films. He played a wide variety of characters, but he gained enormous popularity from a series of 148 silent Western shorts and was the first film cowboy star, "Broncho Billy." Many of these were shot in Niles, a small town in Alameda County, California, south-east of San Francisco, where the nearby Western Pacific Railroad route through Niles Canyon proved to be a very suitable location for the filming of Westerns. Writing, acting, and directing most of these movies, Anderson also found time to direct a series of "Alkali Ike" comedy Westerns starring Augustus Carney. In 1916, Anderson sold his ownership in Essanay and retired from acting. He returned to New York City, bought the Longacre Theatre and produced plays, but without permanent success. He then made a brief comeback as a producer with a series of shorts with Stan Laurel, including his first work with Oliver Hardy in A Lucky Dog (filmed in 1919, released in 1921). After a series of failures as a Broadway producer, he retired again after 1920, this time permanently. Anderson sued Paramount Pictures for naming a character "Bronco Billy" in Star Spangled Rhythm (1943) and for depicting the character as a "washed-up and broken-down actor," which he felt reflected badly on him. He asked for $900,000, but the outcome of the suit is unknown. In 1958, Anderson received an Honorary Academy Award as a "motion picture pioneer" for his "contributions to the development of motion pictures as entertainment." At age 85, Anderson came out of retirement for a cameo role in The Bounty Killer (1965). • Illustration — Naked Hands, 1918 • Illustration — The Son of a Gun, 1919

In 1918, Albert Levering drew a celebrity comic, Broncho Billy, based on the Hollywood western star. Anderson was honored posthumously in 1998 with his image on a U.S. postage stamp. In 2002, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. For the past nine years, Niles (now part of Fremont), California, site of the western Essanay Studios, has held an annual "Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival." Anderson has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1651 Vine Street in Hollywood. A Chicago Park District park, not far from the site of the Chicago Essanay Studio lot, was named Broncho Billy Park in his honor. On March 21, 2018, a historical roadside marker was dedicated in Little Rock, Arkansas, across the street from his birthplace, 713 Center Street. The marker was donated by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation in cooperation with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum and Little Rock's First United Methodist Church.