Satex Film Company

Paul W. Tilley and his brother Wesley Hope Tilley were among the first people to make movies in Texas as a business. Wesley, born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1885, had studied music in St. Louis. The Handbook of Texas has two entries that tell their story with slightly different dates. Its general history of the Texas film industry says the brothers started the Satex Film Company in San Antonio in 1910, moved it to Austin in 1911, and stopped production in July 1913. Its biography of Wesley Tilley says the brothers were making silent films in Houston in 1910, formed Satex in San Antonio in 1911, and moved to Austin in 1913.

In San Antonio the Tilleys made one-reel silent films. They showed them at night on a screen set up in front of the Alamo. The Handbook says the venture was successful enough that the brothers expanded. In Austin they reestablished the company with $25,000 in assets and added a finishing plant to process motion-picture film. The biography calls Satex the only company manufacturing silent films south of St. Louis at the time. It also says Satex was the first film company in the United States to make three-reel movies, a claim that rests on that single reference. The industry history says Satex produced several features and shorts, some of them released nationally.

Both entries agree on the ending. Despite six films made and released nationally, the company folded in 1913 because of financial difficulties. The Satex story was one of several short-lived attempts to make films in Texas in the 1910s. In the same years Gaston Méliès's Star Film Company worked in San Antonio before leaving for California, and later companies such as the Lone Star Company and Shamrock Photoplay came and went. By the middle of the decade, production had concentrated in Hollywood and New York.

Wesley Tilley went back to music. He toured Germany for two years with the Hagenbeck Circus band, returned to Austin to teach, and taught code and radio for the Army Air Corps in Austin during World War I. He led the Ben Hur Shrine band for 38 years, served as secretary-treasurer of Austin's musicians' union local from 1943 to 1964, and died in Austin in 1972.