Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett have been household names for 100 years, but few people know how they got their start in the film industry. Who were the people behind the scenes; the career-makers of the early 1900s in film? They were brave pioneers like author Jillian Ada Kelly's great-grandfather Charles O. Baumann who helped forge a new industry and set the standard for how films are made to this day. Before there was ever a Hollywood, there were great filmmakers, producers, directors, and movie executives; those who paved the way for the greatest industry in the world, the movie industry. In the new book THE MOVIE MAKER: CHARLES O. BAUMANN: Silent Era Film Pioneer Who Discovered Chaplin, Sennett, Ince, and More, Kelly shares her great-grandfather's journey and phenomenal success in the early film industry. She writes, "Not only was Charles Baumann a producer, director, distributor, financier, and an executive of filmmaking, he was also a visionary and a man of many firsts in an industry of imitators. He was the first to supply movie houses with posters for advertising in 1909; the first to hire Mack Sennett, the "King of Comedy," as a director in 1909; the first to make multiple-reel weekly movies in 1910; the first President, and co-founder, of Universal Film Manufacturing Company (now Universal Studios, the oldest studio in the U.S.) in 1912; the first to hire Charlie Chaplin for a movie role in 1913; the first to bring together top directors Mack Sennett, Thomas H. Ince, and D. W. Griffith, with top actors, including first time movie actor Douglas Fairbanks, to form the powerhouse Triangle Film Corporation in 1915; and the first to create a money-lending corporation, the Great Northern Finance Corporation, to fund aspiring movie producers to create excellent cinema in 1921. These are just a few, but certainly not all, of the pioneering things that Charles O. Baumann did to help mold and bring greatness to the motion picture industry." Kelly shares her inspiration for writing this book, "My great-grandfather had such a profound impact on the early film industry, I wanted to ensure that he was not forgotten."
