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Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen: The Films of William F. Cody Sandra K. Sagala. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.
In this fascinating book, Sandra K. Sagala, an independent researcher and historian who has written previously about William Cody, chronicles the showman's venture into filmmaking during the early cinema period. After his Wild West show disbanded, Cody fully embraced the film business, seeing the technology as a way to recoup his financial losses and as a new vehicle for preserving America's history and his own legacy for future generations. For more than thirty years, William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody (18461917) entertained audiences across the United States and Europe with his Wild West show. Scores of books have been written about Cody's fabled career as a showman, and the author wrote an earlier book on Cody's stage career (Buffalo Bill on Stage, 2008), but his involvement in the film industry, following the dissolution of his traveling show, is less well known.
In 1894, Thomas Edison invited Cody to bring some of the Wild West performers to the inventor's kinetoscope studio in New Jersey. From then on, Cody, a master promoter, was eager to participate in this new and increasingly popular phenomenon: the moving picture. In one of these,...