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Topic: Robert Selig has passed away at 93, co-founded of ShoWest.
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Bill Gabel
Film God
Posts: 3873
From: Technicolor / Postworks NY, USA
Registered: Jan 2002
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posted 02-12-2004 05:58 PM
This was just reported in the Los Angeles Times on Feb 11, 2004.
Robert W. Selig, a motion picture distribution executive wh helped crete and then headed the annual ShoWest convention, which touts mainstream movies to theatre owners, has died. He was 93.
Selig, who retired only eight years ago, died Dec. 31 in Los Angeles of complications from a fall.
Now staged in Las Vegas, the ShoWest convention attracts about 12,000 theatre owners and other professionals from 40 nations.
In 1974, selig, along with Pacific Theatres head Jerome Forman and B.V. Sturdivant, huddled at Los Angeles International Airport to create a trade show where the people who made movies could discuss their wares with those who marketed them.
The first gathering, in San diego in 1975, attracted only 200 people. The event, for which Selig was chairman in its early years, has become the world's largest and most prominent exhibition trade convention. It is now co-sponsored by National Assn. of Theatre Owners, which Selig helped founf and on whose board he long served. When ShoWest presented Selig with the Sherrill C. Corwin Award for outstanding efforts in motion picture exhibition in 1989, Jack Valenti, President of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, lauded him as "a man who cares more about the well-being of our industry than he does his own personal advancement."
Selig also was President of the Theatre Assn. of California.
He began his career in Denver working with Fox Inter-Mountain Theatres and moved to Los Angeles in 1961 as executive vice president and general manager of National General Corp., then the third-largest theatre chain.
Selig's six-decade career spanned major changes , from single screen movie palaces to drive-in theatres and giant multiplexes designed tocompete with the onslaught of home video and DVD technology.
"No longer can movie theatres be comprised of a cracker box," he warned in 1981 in a speech to the Motion Picture and Television Controllers Assn. at the Bevely Wilshire Hotel. "The missing ingredients have been glamour, illusion and patron services. We have to crete multidimensional experiences that make moviegoing an event."
In Los Angeles, he was on the boards of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the Hollywood Redevelopment Committee, the Will Rogers Foundation and the Foundation of Motion Picture Pioneers. He was chairman of the United Way Campaign for the motion picture industry and in the 1970s co-founded and was chairman of USC's School of Theatre Management.
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![[Frown]](frown.gif)
I first met Mr. Selig almost twenty-five years ago, when I was a speaker at ShoWest with Kodak's Ken Mason, founder of the Inter-Society Committee for the Enhancement of Cinema Presentation. At the time, the Theatre Association of California was separate from NATO. Mr. Selig was a showman who fostered improvement of the theatre industry, and pioneered a trade show that has grown beyond all expectations.
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