Gaston Méliès

Gaston Méliès ( born February 12, 1852 in Paris, † April 9, 1915 in Ajaccio on Corsica) was a French film producer and director.

Life

Méliès was born the son of a Parisian shoe manufacturer. He took over in 1888 with his older brother Henri father's company, which, however, was a few years later, no longer competitive. With the medium of film he came by his younger brother Georges Méliès in contact. He occasionally performed as an actor in his brother's early films, including Une partie de cartes (1896 ), and worked as a production assistant for him.

After circulating in particular, more and more illegal copies of his films in the U.S., Georges Méliès was the name of his film company film Star register as Registered trade. He sent to protect his business interests in the USA Gaston to New York to set up an office for the sale of film prints and prevent unauthorized distribution. After the system of film distribution replaced the copy of sale, Gaston Méliès expanded the sales in 1908 in the north with a branch in Chicago. The film distribution, he organized over the Chicago Film Exchange of Max Lewis. Due to an investor fraud with Lewis lost Gaston Méliès 1909, the Edison distribution license for Star Film and G. Méliès Manufacturing Company was part of the Motion Picture Patents Company. Georges Méliès ' films were stylistically now no longer meet the demands of the American market.

Late 1909 Gaston Méliès 's films after the U.S. model began to produce. In 1910 he founded the Texas San Antonio a new studio that " Star Film Ranch ". Under Gaston Méliès ' and William Haddock Director Western movies were filmed with the cameraman William Paley. Méliès also appeared in his films The Immortal Alamo (1911 ) and The Kiss of Mary Jane (1911 ). In 1911 he moved with the company to Santa Paula in California, but was up against the competition do not exist there. 1913 Méliès traveled with actors and technicians in the South Seas and filmed a month in Tahiti, where the business of film screening just boomed. Without the success with the public, he was forced to close film in the U.S. in the same year the company star. Together with his wife, whom he married in France in 1907, he moved in the winter of 1913 to Corsica. He died in April 1915 at a shellfish poisoning and was buried a few days later in Paris.