Otto F. Breitkreutz (April 16, 1866 – December 25, 1928), universally known as Big Otto, was an American circus man and film producer during the early 20th century. He was called Big Otto because he weighed somewhere between and was "big in heart and policy." Biography He came to fame with Big Otto's Trained Wild Animals, a circus that exhibited around the Midwest and the east coast of the U.S., including at Eau Claire's Annual Agricultural Street Fair and Carnival in 1904, Chicago's White City Amusement Park in 1906, and Tennessee's Appalachian Exposition in 1910. In 1908 Big Otto's Circus wintered in Chicago and among the staffmembers was a Little Otto, more formally named Gust Breitkreutz. Big Otto's Animals eventually became the Big Otto Combined Shows, wherein the wild animals but one part of a larger traveling carnival, along with a Ferris wheel, Turner's World Wonder, Mets the Scientific Wonder, and Millie Christine the Carolina Twin, a "double woman" with four arms and four legs. For the Appalachian Exposition at Knoxville in 1910, Big Otto traveled with 100 animals in 21 wagons, 30 employees, and a press agent. According to one report, due to his failure to pay a debt, Breitkruetz's animal collection was transferred to ownership of film producer William Selig; Big Otto's wild animals became the core of the Selig Zoo. According to an interview with William Selig published in 1928, "I chanced to meet Al Ringling on the street; he told me of an itinerant showman named Big Otto, who had a small menagerie in Milwaukee. The next day I traveled to Milwaukee and engaged the outfit to come to Chicago." They began making animal films in Chicago, including The Lion Tamer (1909), which may have featured Big Otto in the title role. Meanwhile a "White City [amusement park] had failed at Jacksonville, Florida." Selig bought that land and the Big Otto/Selig combined menagerie filmed several movies there during the winter of 1911–12. Selig eventually purchased all of Big Otto's animals and hired Breitkreutz to manage Selig's Wild Animal Farm in Santa Monica. (A new zoo director was installed in 1915 when the operation moved to the site near Los Angeles' Eastlake Park.) In 1912 a reviewer of Selig Polyscope's film Kings of the Forest made a point to connect the success of Selig's animal movies to Breitkreutz's skill as a trainer: In 1913, Breitkreutz directed at