AUSTIN, Texas — A popular series of action-adventure movies that captured stories about the good guys and the outlaws from the old West were made over 100 years ago in San Antonio and the Hill Country.
Star Film Ranch would produce as many as three 15-minute movies a week in 1911. They were some of the earliest Westerns made, and audiences back then loved them, eagerly paying a nickel to watch the newest films in small theaters, including several that had opened for business along Austin’s Congress Avenue.
We owe the existence of these early cowboy movies to a French film producer in New York City, Gaston Melies. Since westerns shot in New York weren’t very convincing and hard to shoot in winter, Melies headed south to Texas…