Born to immigrant parents living in Chicago, Selig apprenticed as an upholsterer, but got his start in vaudeville, touring the Midwest as a magician's assistant.

[4] He returned to Chicago, opened a small photography studio and began investigating how he might make his own moving pictures without paying a patent fee to Edison's company.

Selig reportedly found a metalworker who had unwittingly repaired a Lumière brothers motion picture camera and, with his help, developed a working system.

[7] In 1909, Selig was the first producer[19] to expand filmmaking operations to the West Coast, where he set up studio facilities in the Edendale area of Los Angeles with director Francis Boggs.

Southern California's weather allowed outdoor filming for most of the year and offered varied geography and settings which could stand in for far-flung locations around the world.

Los Angeles also seemed to offer geographical isolation from Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a cartel which Selig later reluctantly joined.

The Sergeant, a Western short shot in Yosemite and produced and directed by Boggs for the Selig Polyscope Company was released in September 1910.

Settling with Edison, Selig joined the Motion Picture Patents Company and in 1913 joined with Vitagraph, Lubin and Essanay to form the V-L-S-E, Incorporated distribution company; prominent productions included Hunting Big Game in Africa 1909, a studio-made film of Theodore Roosevelt's exploits on safari; The Coming of Columbus 1912, a three-reeler which won a medal from Pope Pius X; and The Adventures of Kathlyn 1913, the first serial with Kathlyn Williams.

[7] Selig produced almost a thousand movies[22] and was responsible for developing new film talent such as Roscoe Arbuckle along with early cowboy western stars Gilbert M. "Bronco Billy" Anderson and Tom Mix.

At great expense, Selig created a zoo in East Los Angeles, stocked with hundreds of animals he had collected for his studio's jungle pictures and cliffhangers.

Over thirty years before Walt Disney built Disneyland, Selig made plans to expand it into a major amusement park and resort called Selig Zoo Park, with many mechanical rides, a hotel, a large swimming area, theaters and restaurants, believing thousands of visitors a day would flock to the location.

A business which ten years earlier had been one of the most prolific and widely known movie studios in the world had, in effect, become a struggling zoo on the other side of downtown Los Angeles from Hollywood's booming post-World War I film industry.

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