[1] The company produced hundreds of early, widely distributed commercial moving pictures, including the first films starring Tom Mix, Harold Lloyd, Colleen Moore, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle.

Selig Polyscope also established Southern California's first permanent movie studio, in the historic Edendale district of Los Angeles.

[3] In 1947, William Selig and several other early movie producers and directors shared a special Academy Honorary Award to acknowledge their role in building the film industry.

He then went on to successfully produce local actualities, slapstick comedies, early travelogues and industrial films (a major client was Armour and Company).

Effectively a cartel, Motion Picture Patents Company dominated the industry for a few years until the Supreme Court (in 1913 and 1915) ruled the firm was an illegal monopoly.

The company produced the first commercial two-reel film, Damon and Pythias, successfully distributed its pictures in Great Britain, and maintained an office in London for several years before the outbreak of World War I.

Company location scouts reportedly searched for three hundred sites for actors and actresses to "re-enact the [historical] scenes on the identical grounds where they occurred."

[8] Attracted by Southern California's mild, dry climate, varied geography for location shooting and isolation from Edison's legal representatives on the east coast, Selig set up his studio in Edendale in 1909 with director Francis Boggs, who began the facility in a rented bungalow and quickly expanded, designing the studio's front entrance after Mission San Gabriel.

Selig Polyscope also made dozens of highly successful short movies involving wild animals in exotic settings, including a popular re-creation of an African safari hunt by Teddy Roosevelt.

[11] In 1913, through a collaborative partnership with the Chicago Tribune, Selig produced The Adventures of Kathlyn, introducing a dramatic serial plot device which came to be known as the cliffhanger.