The Calvin Company was a Kansas City, Missouri-based advertising, educational and industrial film production company that for nearly half a century was one of the largest and most successful film producers of its type in the United States.
Forrest ("F. O.") Calvin from Pleasanton, Kansas studied journalism and advertising at the University of Kansas in the late 1920s. In 1928, F. O. drew a briefly-used version of the KU mascot, the Jayhawk.[1] After graduating from college, F. O. went to work for an advertising agency in Kansas City, doing direct mail advertising and commercial art and finding both rough-going. However, his tenure at that agency did lead to an interesting discovery. The ad agency was occasionally using a 16mm movie camera to make little advertising films for its clients. This was an almost unheard-of practice, as the 16mm film format was at the time reserved mostly for home movies, though it was convenient and inexpensive and perfect for educational and business films. F. O. Calvin was determined to invest in the future of 16mm.
The agency did not survive the Great Depression, but in 1931 F. O. and his wife Betty founded the Calvin Company, originally an advertising agency that specialized in 16mm business movies. They started out in a one-room office in the Business Men Assurance Building, across the street from Union Station in Kansas City. Betty Calvin managed the business side; F. O. Calvin was the salesman. In the early years, most of their time was divided between convincing prospective industrial clients that 16mm was right for them, and then producing the movies. Early on, the Calvins took advantage of Kansas City's proximity to locations, industry, and commerce, and their earliest clients were area-based businesses and organizations such as Kansas Flour Mills, the Security Benefit Association of Topeka, Kansas, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, Western Auto, and Kansas City Southern Railways.
In 1932, one of F. O.'s former college fraternity brothers, Lloyd Thompson (a photography enthusiast who was interested in film technology), joined the fledgling Calvin Company as vice-president. The next year, another of F. O. Calvin's old college buddies, Larry Sherwood, joined the company as executive producer and general sales manager. After a few years, the Calvin Company had done some decent business and amassed a regular staff of twenty persons. In 1936, they moved into their own studio and headquarters building in Kansas City. This facility also included a state-of-the-art 16mm film processing laboratory that Calvin used for its own productions, as well as for providing processing services to smaller 16mm producers with their own filmmaking capacity, such as universities. These services helped to spread and further the Calvin name throughout the non-theatrical film industry.
After a while, nationally known Fortune 500 companies began to take a chance on 16mm and hired the Calvin Company to produce sales training and promotional movies for them. DuPont, Goodyear, Caterpillar Tractor Company, General Mills, Southwestern Bell, and Westinghouse had all joined Calvin's client list by the end of the 1930s. These were accounts that would last for decades. Calvin also branched out into the educational film field, producing pioneering classroom films that were distributed through companies such as McGraw-Hill, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the U.S. Office of Education to public schools throughout the country. The Calvin Company also became known as an innovative and creative force in the non-theatrical movie industry. They pioneered many efficient 16mm filmmaking and processing methods, and in 1938 they claimed to have produced the first business film in full sound and full color.
The 1940s
In 1940, F. O. Calvin formed a subsidiary, the Movie-Mite Corporation, that manufactured 16mm motion picture projectors and other equipment. These included the first desk-sized movie projector. Tens of thousands of these "Movie-Mites" were sold through the 1940s.
World War II proved a gold mine for the Calvin Company, which prospered by making dozens of safety and training films for the Navy and Air Force, as well as numerous morale-boosting shorts sponsored by the likes of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Toward the end of the war, F. O. Calvin was a dollar-a-year-man for the Navy in Washington, D.C., advising on the running of a filmmaking system similar to the Calvin Company's. The Navy had wanted him to move the Calvin operations to Washington, but F. O. had resisted, wishing the setup to remain in Kansas City, a town he liked to work and live in. The work for the armed forces during the war established a good name and reputation for the Calvin Company, and the firm continued to produce films for the U.S. government for years afterward.
By the end of the war, the Calvin Company had experienced terrific growth. The company's regular staff had grown to sixty persons, and they had moved into their newest and biggest headquarters, a seven-story fireproof brick building at the corner of Truman Road and Troost Avenue, just east of downtown Kansas City. The New Center Building, as it was called, had been built in 1907 and had originally housed two large movie theaters on its first floor, and the Calvin Company converted them into two huge sound stages for film production, said to be the largest between New York and Los Angeles. The Calvin building also contained projection rooms, conference rooms, executive offices, offices for directors and writers, animation studios, printing and processing labs, and space for the Movie-Mite Corporation, which kept going strong until the early 1950s.
Following World War II, there was a tremendous boom in production of industrial and educational films in the U.S., and the Calvin Company was in line to be the leading producer in the field. There was also now a plethora of affordable new 16mm film equipment on the market, and while this signaled that the Calvin Company's initial goal of popularizing 16mm had been achieved, it also brought many inexperienced new producers into the field. In 1947, sensing this as an industry problem, F. O. Calvin decided to have his company organize a three-day seminar called the Calvin Workshop, held on the company's sound stages in Kansas City where workable 16mm filmmaking procedures would be explained and demonstrated. Anybody in the non-theatrical film industry in North America was invited to attend, and the event attracted over two hundred people. It was so successful that the Calvin Company decided to continue it, making it a celebrated annual event that was held every year until 1975. At its peak, the Calvin Workshop attracted some 450 producers and technicians from the U.S. and Canada each year.
The 1950s and "Golden Age"
The Calvin Company's "Golden Age" lasted roughly a decade, from the late 1940s until the late 1950s. At the time, the business of making films for businesses and schools was booming, and Calvin was the country's leading producer in that field, regularly making movies for all of the biggest Fortune 500 companies, and often winning festival awards and prizes for these efforts as well. After World War II, the Calvin staff grew from one hundred to two hundred, and then eventually to nearly three hundred full-time workers. The company did not hire freelancers, and kept a permanent staff. There were always about four or five directors on staff, and the same rotating number of writers, cameramen, editors, and sound technicians. This made it possible for at least four movies to be in production at once. All film production was supervised by Frank Barhydt, a former Kansas City radio and newspaper writer who went to work for the firm as a director during the war due to his interest in documentary films. There were annual Christmas parties and Fourth of July picnics, as well as a long-lived tradition on payday of employees visiting a nearby pub and betting their paychecks on shuffleboard bowling. At Calvin a union was voted out several times. There was profit-sharing, access to top management, and encouragement of initiative. During this time, they were turning out some 18 million feet of film a year ("or enough to make one 16-millimeter strip stretching from Key West to Seattle and part way back," as one contemporary local newspaper put it). In 1951 they were the first outside firm to be licensed by Eastman Kodak to process its color film, and in the early 1950s Calvin was the first professional movie company to utilize the 8mm film format. In the late 1950s, the Calvin Company made significant inroads in the educational film field, forming a subsidiary called University Films that often produced educational shorts in conjunction with universities and with publishing companies such as McGraw-Hill.
By the 1950s, Calvin was a brand name of merit trusted by Fortune 500 companies and film industry people throughout the country. Despite this, the firm was not particularly well known in Kansas City. However, it did serve as an important venue for the Kansas City arts, consistently employing many local actors and actresses, many of whom earned their main income in other fields such as radio and television announcing. They included Art Ellison, Shelby Storck, James Lantz, Bill Yearout, Murray Nolte, Twila Pollard, Henry Effertz, Bob Kerr, Keith Painton, Ken Heady, Leonard Belove, Stan Levitt, Harriet Levitt, Ralph Seeley, Harvey Levine, James Assad, Al Christy, and Sid Cutright. A few of these went on to careers as character actors and actresses in movies and TV, but most stayed in Kansas City and the only TV or movie roles they ever landed were ones in films and programs filmed on location in the area, such as In Cold Blood, Paper Moon, The Day After, and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.
Calvin provided opportunities to aspiring young filmmakers from the area who would not or could not go to Hollywood. Calvin served as training for feature film and television directors as Robert Altman, Richard C. Sarafian, and Reza Badiyi. Altman, a Kansas City native, got his start directing films with Calvin in the early 1950s and used many Calvin regulars as cast and crew on his independently produced first feature film, The Delinquents, shot in Kansas City in 1956 and starring Tom Laughlin.[2] This moderately successful teenage exploitation film, produced by area-based movie theater exhibitor Elmer Rhoden Jr., led to Altman's successful career in movies and television, and also led to a second feature film produced by Rhoden Jr. and concerned with troubled youth, The Cool and the Crazy, shot in Kansas City in 1958. This movie also featured many Calvin stalwarts in the cast and crew.
The 1960s and Closure
In 1959, the original four founders of the Calvin Company retired and, though they continued to serve on the firm's advisory board, the Calvin organization came under new management. Leonard Keck, a longtime Calvin executive, took over presidential duties and the company's name was changed to Calvin Productions. This change in management led to the departure of several longtime core production employees and a slow but steady decline in business during the 1960s. By 1968, the production staff had been cut drastically and several longtime accounts had drifted away. Keck attempted to combat the slow period and expand by renaming the company Calvin Communications and purchasing the first two floors of the building that the company had started out in with a one-room office back in 1931, but the whole situation worsened when projectors were traded in for VCRs. During the 1970s, Calvin briefly attempted to catch a part of the videotape market, but the company was more suited to the 16mm film format which it had originally pioneered forty years earlier, and the idea of shifting to video was soon abandoned. Satellite studios in Louisville, Pittsburgh and Detroit were sold. Finally, there was just the Calvin studios in Kansas City, where it had all begun, and around 1980 regular film production ceased. Only the Calvin film processing laboratory continued, losing more and more business and more and more money until finally it officially ceased operation on Halloween of 1982. In 1991, the old seven-story Calvin headquarters at 1105 Truman Road fell to the wrecking ball to make way for a large virtual school project.
Legacy
In 2002, industrial film archivist Rick Prelinger moved 150 of the Calvin Company's surviving film prints and approximately 25,000 cans of film master materials and unclaimed items from Calvin's laboratory from Kansas City to the Library of Congress, where about 3,000 Calvin films are, as of autumn 2019, being accessioned and catalogued. Several of the Calvin Company's films, including the cult classic The Your Name Here Story (a satire of commonly used industrial film formats and cliches produced for showing at one of the Calvin Workshop seminars), are available for free viewing and downloading from the Prelinger Archives. Also available for free viewing and downloading at Prelinger are eleven reels of outtakes and stock footage found in the Calvin Company's vaults, some of which derives from the production of The Your Name Here Story. However, the reels contain footage from many different Calvin productions dating from around 1940 to the early 1960s. The Calvin film Delegating Work (1959) can be purchased along with other Calvin films on office management problems such as The Bright Young Newcomer on the compilation videotape As the Office Turns through A/V Geeks. The award-winning safety film The Perfect Crime (1954) (directed by Robert Altman), as well as other films like The Color of Danger (1968) and Your School Safety Patrol (1958), can be purchased on videotape or DVD through Something Weird Video.
16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film ; other common film gauges include 8 mm and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical film-making, or for low-budget motion pictures. It also existed as a popular amateur or home movie-making format for several decades, alongside 8 mm film and later Super 8 film. Eastman Kodak released the first 16 mm "outfit" in 1923, consisting of a camera, projector, tripod, screen and splicer, for US$335. RCA-Victor introduced a 16 mm sound movie projector in 1932, and developed an optical sound-on-film 16 mm camera, released in 1935.
8 mm film is a motion picture film format in which the film strip is eight millimetres (0.31 in) wide. It exists in two main versions – the original standard 8 mm film, also known as regular 8 mm, and Super 8. Although both standard 8 mm and Super 8 are 8 mm wide, Super 8 has a larger image area because of its smaller and more widely spaced perforations.
Super 8 mm film is a motion-picture film format released in 1965 by Eastman Kodak as an improvement over the older "Double" or "Regular" 8 mm home movie format.
The Delinquents is a 1957 American drama film written, produced, and directed by Robert Altman. As the directorial debut of Altman, he filmed it in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri during the summer of 1956 on a $63,000 budget. It is not only the first film Altman directed, but also the first to star Tom Laughlin.
A short film is a film with a low running time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits". In the United States, short films were generally termed short subjects from the 1920s into the 1970s when confined to two 35 mm reels or less, and featurettes for a film of three or four reels. "Short" was an abbreviation for either term.
A movie projector is an opto-mechanical device for displaying motion picture film by projecting it onto a screen. Most of the optical and mechanical elements, except for the illumination and sound devices, are present in movie cameras. Modern movie projectors are specially built video projectors.
View-Master is the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding View-Master "reels", which are thin cardboard disks containing seven Stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film. It was originally manufactured and sold by Sawyer's.
Rick Prelinger is an American archivist, writer, and filmmaker. A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Prelinger is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation.
The filmstrip is a form of still image instructional media, once widely used by educators in primary and secondary schools (K–12) and for corporate presentations. It was largely made obsolete by the late 1980s by newer and increasingly lower-cost full-motion videocassettes and later on by DVDs. From the 1920s to the 1980s, filmstrips provided an easy and less expensive alternative to full motion educational films, requiring little storage space and being very quick to rewind for the next use. Filmstrips were durable and rarely needed splicing. They are still used in some areas.
Shelby William Storck was an American newscaster, actor, writer, journalist, public relations specialist, and motion picture and television producer-director. He was a radio actor on The Air Adventures of Jimmie Allen and other programs, and appeared in the feature films The Delinquents and The Cool and the Crazy.
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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to film:
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Albert Christopher Ladesich, better known as Al Christy, was an American actor, advertising executive, and radio and television announcer.
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The Centaur Film Company was an American motion picture production company founded in 1907 in Bayonne, New Jersey, by William and David Horsley. It was the first independent motion picture production company in the United States. In 1909 the company added a West Coast production unit, the Nestor Film Company, which established the first permanent film studio in Hollywood, California, in 1911. The company was absorbed by the Universal Film Manufacturing Company in 1912.
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Sawyer's, Inc. was an American manufacturer and retailer of slide projectors, scenic slides, View-Master reels and viewers, postcards, and related products, based in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1914 as a photo-finishing company, Sawyer's began producing and selling View-Masters in 1939, and that soon became its primary product. It later diversified into other photographic products, mostly related to film transparencies, and established manufacturing plants in Europe, Japan and India. By the early 1960s, Sawyer's was the nation's second-largest manufacturer of slide projectors, and by 1965 slide projectors had surpassed View-Master reels and equipment as a percentage of the company's annual sales. In 1951, the company moved from Portland proper to the unincorporated Progress area in Portland's southwestern suburbs. In 1966, Sawyer's was acquired by New York-based General Aniline & Film (GAF), and its product lines and facilities were taken over by GAF. It was a subsidiary company of GAF until 1968, when it became simply a division of that company, renamed the GAF Consumer Photo Division. For several years thereafter, GAF used "Sawyer's" as a brand name for its slide projectors.
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