Allen Holubar
(08/03/1888 - 11/20/1923)

Born in San Francisco's Castro District, Allen Joseph Holubar was the 1st of 5 children of Constantin Josef Holubar & Margaret Allen.

Despite parental pressures to be a machinist, Allen worked his way up from sweeping floors to acting, starting at the Alcazar & Alhambra Theatres in SF. Allen was evidently a prominent dramatic actor, known widely across the US in the period 1908 - 1912. However, in the words of a SF newspaper at the time, "he forsook legitimate drama for the moving picture screen" in 1913.

After starring in several landmark films, he began directing and was one of Carl Laemmle's first directors at Universal Studios. Later, differing from Laemmle, he founded his own production company, Allen Holubar Productions, in 1917.

As an up and coming producer, he was famous for being the first to coordinate a movie shoot (Hurricane's Gal (1922)) using radio. In the words of a local paper, "Mr. Holubar has successfully performed the unprecedented task of using the wireless waves to direct the movements of an airship, a destroyer and a schooner, maneuvering all of these within his camera's range as he supervised these activities from a hydroplane far above."

He died of post-op complications from gall stone surgery at the height of his career in 1923. His wife, Dorothy Phillips did not act again until the mid-1960s, when she played an old woman in "Cat Ballou", starring Lee Marvin and Jane Fonda.

Available Films

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916) - as an actor

The Heart of Humanity (1918)