The Tramp and the Dog: How Chicago Learned Early Filmmaking
- Chicago Movie Tours
- Sep 29, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Long before Hollywood dominated the industry, early filmmaking in Chicago was taking shape in surprising ways. Discover how The Tramp and the Dog (1896) reveals the city’s first steps into this new medium.
Before Hollywood dominated American cinema, Chicago was one of the earliest centers of film production.
For National Silent Movie Day (September 29), we revisit The Tramp and the Dog (1896), a silent short linked to Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood and the early filmmaking experiments of William Selig.
Guard Dogs and Warm Pies: The Tramp and the Dog Explained
The Tramp and the Dog (1896) is an 80-second movie directed by William Selig and set in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood. It features three characters:
Baker
Thief (or Tramp)
Dog
There is also a man behind the fence (at far R) who's either enjoying or perhaps co-directing the scenario.
The gist of the short film, which you can watch above, is this:
A woman sets down a pie on a chair to cool it. When she leaves, a man tries to steal the pie. In the process, a white dog latches onto the man's backside. As the dog and tramp tussle, the baker returns, chasing away the latter with her broom.
A Closer Look: What The Tramp and the Dog Reveals About Early Filmmaking in Chicago
After multiple viewings, here are three things I noticed in The Tramp and the Dog:
Tramp pretends to eat the pie before taking it
Baker looks at the camera
The dog-Tramp fight moves out of frame
What seems obvious now—that a character needn’t mime eating, look back for direction, or shift the primary action outside the frame (even if said action was unplanned)—was not yet standard practice in 1896 [1]. At the time, filmmakers and performers were still negotiating the basic grammar of cinema.
Such "mistakes" are endearing (and fun to seek out)—because they capture people, in this case Chicagoans, in real time, learning how to create silent moving pictures.
If you're interested in exploring these kinds of stories, check out my public talks on Chicago film history, where we look at how early onscreen experiments continue to shape the way we understand movies today.
UPDATE (Jan. 29, 2026): The Tramp and the Dog is now part of the National Film Registry, underscoring its importance in early American cinema.
Want to walk through Chicago’s cinematic past?
Beyond the screen, Chicago’s streets are filled with hidden movie history. From the sites of early silent studios to modern filming locations, join us for a Chicago walking tour or book a movie talk for your group today—including this one on Rogers Park movie theaters.
Notes:
[1] William Selig, who directed The Tramp and the Dog, was interviewed in the February 1920 edition of Photoplay. In the interview, Selig says the last beat of the movie—"the fence [breaking] under the weight of the tramp"—was not part of the scripted scenario but the action "gave [the film] a concluding punch." Whether planned or not, Selig did not shift the camera to follow the action, as a filmmaker would do in a few years' time. Indeed, he and the actors were still learning the basics of cinematic storytelling.
Sources
Photoplay. Photoplay Magazine Publishing Company, Chicago, Feb. 1920.
“Selig Polyscope’s The Tramp and the Dog (1896) Joins the 2025 National Film Registry.” Selig Film News, 29 Jan. 2026.
Selzer, Adam, and Michael Glover Smith. Flickering Empire: How Chicago Invented the U.S. Film Industry. Columbia University Press, 2018.
Dig Deeper into Silent Movies
From loudspeakers outside theaters to live music accompaniments inside, along with audience participation and occasional dialogue, the silent film era was anything but quiet.
Learn more in the video below, "Were Silent Movies Truly Silent."
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