Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson
Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson
"I happened to read a story by Peter Kyne with a character called Broncho Billy and I stole the name for the films. Later I met Kyne and he said it was alright. We never bought anything in those days; we even stole our plots from Argosy and other magazines."
Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson
Birth name:
Maxwell Henry Aronson
Born:
21st March 1880, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA
Died:
20th January 1971, South Pasadena, California, USA
Years active:
1903 - 1965
He might not have been the screen’s first cowboy, but Gilbert Maxwell Anderson provided cinema with its first serialised western hero: Broncho Billy, the star of over 140 one-and-two-reel films. Anderson didn’t confine his activities to just acting; he also possessed a keen business brain, and in 1907, founded the Essanay Studios with George Kirke Spoor. During his nine-year association with the studio, it produced over 300 films, including the Broncho Billy adventures and fourteen Charlie Chaplin shorts.
Anderson was born Maxwell Henry Aronson on 21st March 1880 in Little Rock, Arkansas. His father, Henry, was a dry goods salesman who moved his family to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1883. In his teens, Aronson worked as an office clerk, and at twenty he was a cotton buyer in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, with his brother-in-law, Louis Roth. But Maxwell disliked the clerical life and had such a deep longing to work on the stage that, after enrolling in a St. Louis acting school, he headed to New York, intent on becoming a star on Broadway. However, the only work he found was in a minstrel show from which he was fired because his off-key backing singing distracted the show’s tenor.
Unable to find work because of his lack of acting talent, he posed for the Saturday Evening Post until a theatrical agent suggested he try the flickers. Theatrical actors stigmatised working in movies, but Aronson was desperate, so he changed his name to George M. Anderson and strode into the Edison studios at 41 East Twenty-first Street, where he was hired as an extra for fifty cents an hour.
One of his first assignments was on Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery. Porter cast him as a robber because he falsely claimed he could ride a horse, a lie that quickly came to light when the horse he tried to mount from the wrong side threw him off. Nevertheless, Porter kept him on and cast him in three roles: a robber, a passenger shot when he tries to escape, and a tenderfoot forced to dance at gunpoint by the robbers. Upon seeing the audience's reaction to Porter’s film, Anderson decided movies were for him.
But in 1904, he left Edison and returned to St. Louis. He was soon back in New York, though, in a vaudeville act with his younger sister, Leona, which quickly failed. The following year, Anderson saw the hit play Raffles, about a gentleman thief, and felt it would make an excellent subject for the movies. He took his idea to Vitagraph and suggested they make a 17-minute film of the play. His connection with Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, which was still packing cinemas, convinced them to take Anderson up on his idea, and they allowed him to both produce and direct it. The movie, Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman, released on 23rd September 1905, became a smash hit, and Vitagraph kept Anderson on the payroll. However, Anderson left in 1906 when the studio heads refused to make him a partner.
He travelled to Chicago and convinced William Selig, the city’s only film producer, to make story movies in addition to the scenic pictures he had been producing. They made ten films in six months, and when the weather turned inhospitable, Anderson decamped for Denver, where, in a single month, he and cameraman Harry Buckwalter made a further twelve.
Again, Anderson quit when Selig refused to promote him to a more senior position in his expanding business. However, Anderson’s luck turned when he walked into George K. Spoor’s office at 62 North Clark Street in downtown Chicago. Spoor manufactured the Kinodrome projector and also rented films to theatres across the western United States. Using $2,500 of Spoor’s money, the two men founded the Peerless Film Manufacturing Company on 29th April 1907.
Their first film, An Awful Skate, was an enormous hit. In July 1907, convinced of enduring success, Spoor and Anderson announced the formation of the Essanay Manufacturing Company. The new organisation’s name was derived from the initials of its founders’ surnames – S and A. It was now that Anderson changed his forename to Gilbert.
Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson in Broncho Billy and the Schoolmistress (1912)
Anderson was a minority stockholder and secretary of the company, responsible for writing, producing, directing, and editing its films until they hired a second director in 1908. In December of that year, he travelled to San Francisco to make a series of comedies featuring Ben Turpin. Historians often cite one of these, Mr. Flip, as featuring the first pie in the face gag, although it’s possible that the Biograph comedy Family Troubles claimed that comic milestone in 1900. On the way back to Chicago in 1909, Anderson stopped off in Yuma, Arizona, to make The Road Agents, his first western in the real West. He made three more in Colorado in March 1909 that were so successful he returned in October to make more. It was then that Anderson started acting in his films, appearing firstly in The Ranchman’s Rival. He made Broncho Billy’s Adventure, the first of his 140 Broncho Billy westerns, during this period.
In 1910, Anderson married Mollie Schabbleman, whom he met at the Sherman House Hotel in Chicago. They remained married until Anderson’s death in 1971 and produced one child, Maxine. In September of that year, he left for California with a company of ten, stopping to film at various locations before arriving at Niles in California on 1st April 1912. Within weeks, he rented a barn on 2nd Street for their studio. The area, with its access to Niles Canyon, proved so ideal for shooting westerns that Anderson persuaded his business partner to provide $52,000 to build a studio on Front Street.
Anderson pulled off a major coup in late 1914 by signing comic sensation Charlie Chaplin, whose contract with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios was ending. Against Spoor’s wishes, he offered the Englishman $1,250 per week plus a $10,000 signing bonus. Chaplin made fourteen shorts for Essanay and made a cameo appearance in the Broncho Billy film His Regeneration.
Early in 1916, a disillusioned Anderson sold his shares in Essanay – worth an estimated $500,000-$1,000,000 – to George Spoor, with whom his relationship had grown increasingly difficult. However, he wasn’t idle. In that year alone, he co-financed a play, Nothing but the Truth, on Broadway, bought shares in a New York theatre, bought land in San Francisco on which he planned to build another theatre, co-founded the Andermat Aeroplane Company, bought into the Boston Red Sox baseball team and directed Vera, the Medium for Lewis Selznick. Unfortunately, none of these ventures succeeded for long. Their failure was a portent of the business fortunes that lie ahead for the former star.
The Golden West Production Company, which he co-founded with several San Francisco businessmen in 1918, folded after producing just two feature films and a two-reeler. Undeterred, Anderson formed the Amalgamated Producing Company, where he made several Stan Laurel comedies (including The Lucky Dog, Laurel’s first screen pairing with his future partner, Oliver Hardy). However, this venture also failed, and Anderson, once one of cinema’s most influential personalities, left the movie business in 1923.
He lived in San Francisco throughout the 1920s and 1930s, managing an apartment house on O’Farrell Street before moving to Los Angeles with his wife in 1942. Anderson led a quiet life, largely forgotten by the industry, apart from when he sued Paramount Pictures, the producers of Star-Spangled Rhythm, for portraying him as a “washed up and broken down actor.” He was in court again in 1947, insisting he didn’t have the funds to repay a debt that had been owing for 27 years.
In 1958, at 78, he received an honorary Academy Award for the development of motion pictures as entertainment. In 1964, Anderson, frail, almost deaf and wheelchair-bound, moved into the Woodland Hills Motion Picture Home. The following year, he briefly came out of retirement to make his last screen appearance in The Bounty Killer, a low-budget western featuring a host of veteran western stars. He spoke two lines – the only words he ever uttered on screen.
In 1970, Anderson’s frail health deteriorated further, and he was moved to the Academy’s Brierwood Convalescent Home. He died there on 20th January 1971 at the age of 90.
Sources: Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, David Kiehn; Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood, Andrew Brodie Smith.
Gilbert M. 'Broncho Billy' Anderson filmography:
The Great Train Robbery (short) (1903) (a), The Messenger Boy's Mistake (short) (1903) (a), What Happened in the Tunnel (short) (1903) (a)
A Brush Between Cowboys and Indians (short) (1904) (a), Western Stage Coach Hold Up (short) (1904) (a)
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (short) (1905) (a), The Train Wreckers (short) (1905) (a)