Wheelan-Loper Film Company

The first Texas film company on record was mainly a distributor. On July 18, 1908, John D. Wheelan incorporated the J. D. Wheelan Film Company, later the Wheelan-Loper Film Company, with offices in Dallas and San Antonio. According to the Handbook of Texas, it is the earliest documentable company established in Texas to make and distribute motion pictures, counting only companies that incorporated with the Texas secretary of state.

Wheelan had a position few Texans could match. He was the exclusive Texas representative of the Motion Picture Patents Company, the 'monopolistic' trust organized around Thomas Edison's patents, as the Handbook describes it. He later represented the trust's distribution arm, the General Film Company, and the Mutual Film Corporation of Texas. His company existed mainly to move other companies' films, domestic and foreign, to Texas theaters. Its charter, however, showed an interest in making pictures too. Part of its capital stock was listed as equipment and supplies, including cameras, lighting apparatus and reels of unexposed film.

The company appeared just as films were becoming a business in Texas. The Handbook dates the state's first Kinetoscope parlor to 1894 in Austin and the probable first projected film to an 1897 Vitascope show at the Dallas Opera House. Two years after Wheelan incorporated, Gaston Méliès's Star Film Company set up the first studio in Texas outside San Antonio. The Texas Archive of the Moving Image counts the Wheelan-Loper company, founded in 1908 in Dallas and San Antonio, among the early businesses behind Dallas's later reputation for commercial and industrial film work.

By the middle of the 1910s, according to the Handbook, film production in the United States had settled in Hollywood and the New York area. The Wheelan-Loper Film Company stopped doing business after the 1910s. It lingered on paper for decades and was declared inactive and dissolved on May 19, 1950.