Shamrock Photoplay Corporation

Patrick Sylvester McGeeney had been a lawman, wrote Western novels and acted. On September 2, 1915, according to the Handbook of Texas, he organized the Lone Star Company in San Antonio and began producing films. The city already had some film history. Gaston Méliès's Star Film Company had worked on a ranch outside town in 1910 and 1911, and the Tilley brothers' Satex Film Company had started there before moving to Austin.

McGeeney's company was abandoned for a time, then reorganized in May 1917 as the Shamrock Photoplay Corporation. The Handbook says it made numerous feature films and serials, many of which were distributed nationally. It also earned money by leasing its production facilities to out-of-state companies that came to San Antonio to shoot on location. That was a growing business in the late 1910s. In spring 1918 Samuel Goldwyn filmed Heart of the Sunset in the San Antonio area, and in November 1923 the Fox Film Company shot exteriors for The Warrens of Virginia there. The Texas Film Commission's filmography credits Shamrock with Little Miss Bluebonnet, a short made in San Antonio in 1922.

Other studios opened briefly around San Antonio in the same years, including the Neal Hart Production Company in 1921 and 1922 and the Sunset Corporation, a studio and processing laboratory run by a New York-based company. None lasted. By the middle of the 1910s, the Handbook notes, the centers of American film production had settled in Hollywood and the New York-New Jersey area. That made it unlikely any studio would set up permanently in Texas. For decades afterward, the Texas film business consisted mostly of Hollywood and East Coast companies shooting on location in the state.

Shamrock Photoplay stopped production in early fall 1923, after eight years under its two names. The Handbook does not record its films' titles or why it closed.