Calvin Company
Encyclopedia
The Calvin Company was a Kansas City, Missouri
-based educational and industrial film production company that for nearly half a century was the largest and most successful film producer of its type in the United States.
, who studied journalism
and advertising
at the University of Kansas
in the late 1920s. In 1928, F. O. was called upon to sketch a briefly used version of the KU mascot, the Jayhawk
. 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 16 mm movie camera to make little advertising films for its clients. This was an almost unheard-of practice, as the 16 mm film format was at the time reserved mostly for home movies, though it was convenient and inexpensive and just perfect for educational and business films. F. O. Calvin was determined to invest in the future of 16 mm.
The agency did not survive the Great Depression
, but in 1931 F. O. and his wife Betty went into business for themselves, founding the Calvin Company, originally an advertising agency that just happened to specialize in 16 mm 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 16 mm was right for them, and then actually 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 16 mm film processing laboratory---the finest in the nation at the time---that Calvin used for its own productions, as well as for providing processing services to smaller 16 mm 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 16 mm 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 16 mm filmmaking and processing methods, and in 1938 they produced the first business film in full sound and full color.
World War II
proved a gold mine for the Calvin Company. At a time when the U.S. government had shut down all nonmilitary, non-Hollywood movie production, the Calvin Company 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 and Troost, 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, 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 16 mm film equipment on the market, and while this signaled that the Calvin Company's initial goal of popularizing 16 mm 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 16 mm 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.
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. Unlike other companies that made industrial films, at Calvin a union was voted out several times because the people were fundamentally satisfied. There was profit-sharing, access to top management, and encouragement of initiative. The company was also extraordinarily busy. 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). The Calvin Company also continued its pioneering in film technology. 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 8 mm 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. These local thespians and personalities---who also dominated Kansas City's civic theater presentations, radio waves, and TV channels---welcomed the Calvin Company films as a fun and interesting way to pursue their hobby and earn a bit of extra money along the way, and they became familiar faces in Calvin productions over the years. Their names 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 prolific 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
.
The Calvin Company also occasionally brought professional actors and actresses from Hollywood to do special roles or narration in their films. William Frawley
, John Carradine
, Jane Darwell, Morey Amsterdam
, Arte Johnson
, Judy Carne
, James Whitmore
, and E.G. Marshall all starred in Calvin offerings. Calvin could also sometimes call on former local bigwigs such as Harry Truman, Walter Cronkite
, Thomas Hart Benton
, and John Cameron Swayze
to turn in appearances.
The Calvin Company was an important part of the Kansas City film community for decades. Calvin provided interesting opportunities to aspiring young filmmakers from the area who would not or could not go to Hollywood, and was "home" to every film student and filmmaker in the area for more than forty years. Calvin served as training ground for such feature film and television directors as Robert Altman
, Richard 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
. 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.
, Pittsburgh
and Detroit were sold. Finally, there was just the Calvin studios in Kansas City, where it had all begun, and around 1978 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 Truman and Troost fell to the wrecking ball
to make way for a large virtual school project.
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 now await accession and cataloging. Several of the Calvin Company's films, including the cult classic "The Your Name Here Story" (a satire of commonly used industrial film formats 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.
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...
-based educational and industrial film production company that for nearly half a century was the largest and most successful film producer of its type in the United States.
Origins
The Calvin Company was born, lived, and died in Kansas City. It was the child of Forrest ("F. O.") Calvin, a kid from Pleasanton, KansasPleasanton, Kansas
Pleasanton is a city in Linn County, Kansas, United States. The population was 1,387 at the 2000 census. Named for General Alfred Pleasonton, the city was founded in 1869.-Geography:Pleasanton is located at ....
, who studied journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
and advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
at the University of Kansas
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
in the late 1920s. In 1928, F. O. was called upon to sketch a briefly used version of the KU mascot, the Jayhawk
Jayhawk
For the origin of the term, see JayhawkerJayhawk may also refer to:-Vehicles:*HH-60 Jayhawk, US Coast Guard medium range recovery helicopter *T-1A Jayhawk, twin-engine jet trainer used by the US Air Force...
. 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 16 mm movie camera to make little advertising films for its clients. This was an almost unheard-of practice, as the 16 mm film format was at the time reserved mostly for home movies, though it was convenient and inexpensive and just perfect for educational and business films. F. O. Calvin was determined to invest in the future of 16 mm.
The agency did not survive the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, but in 1931 F. O. and his wife Betty went into business for themselves, founding the Calvin Company, originally an advertising agency that just happened to specialize in 16 mm business movies. They started out in a one-room office in the Business Men Assurance Building, across the street from Union Station
Union Station (Kansas City, Missouri)
Union Station Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri, is one of many union stations in the United States.-History:Around the turn of the 20th century, the Kansas City Terminal Railway, a company controlled by the *12 railroads serving Kansas City, decided that a new location was needed for the train...
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 16 mm was right for them, and then actually 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
Topeka, Kansas
Topeka |Kansa]]: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...
, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce
Chamber of commerce
A chamber of commerce is a form of business network, e.g., a local organization of businesses whose goal is to further the interests of businesses. Business owners in towns and cities form these local societies to advocate on behalf of the business community...
, Western Auto
Western Auto
Western Auto Supply Company was a specialty retail chain of stores that supplied automobile parts and accessories. It operated approximately 1200 stores across the United States. It was started in 1909 in Kansas City, Missouri, by George Pepperdine, who later founded Pepperdine University...
, 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 16 mm film processing laboratory---the finest in the nation at the time---that Calvin used for its own productions, as well as for providing processing services to smaller 16 mm 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
Fortune 500
The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks the top 500 U.S. closely held and public corporations as ranked by their gross revenue after adjustments made by Fortune to exclude the impact of excise taxes companies collect. The list includes publicly and...
companies began to take a chance on 16 mm and hired the Calvin Company to produce sales training and promotional movies for them. DuPont
DuPont
E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company , commonly referred to as DuPont, is an American chemical company that was founded in July 1802 as a gunpowder mill by Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. DuPont was the world's third largest chemical company based on market capitalization and ninth based on revenue in 2009...
, Goodyear
Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company
The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was founded in 1898 by Frank Seiberling. Goodyear manufactures tires for automobiles, commercial trucks, light trucks, SUVs, race cars, airplanes, farm equipment and heavy earth-mover machinery....
, Caterpillar Tractor Company, General Mills
General Mills
General Mills, Inc. is an American Fortune 500 corporation, primarily concerned with food products, which is headquartered in Golden Valley, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. The company markets many well-known brands, such as Betty Crocker, Yoplait, Colombo, Totinos, Jeno's, Pillsbury, Green...
, Southwestern Bell
Southwestern Bell
Southwestern Bell Telephone Company is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T. It does business as AT&T Southwest and other d/b/a names in its operating region.The company is currently headquartered in Dallas, Texas at One AT&T Plaza.-History:...
, 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
McGraw-Hill
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, education, publishing, broadcasting, and business services...
, Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
, 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 16 mm filmmaking and processing methods, and in 1938 they 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 16 mm 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
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
proved a gold mine for the Calvin Company. At a time when the U.S. government had shut down all nonmilitary, non-Hollywood movie production, the Calvin Company prospered by making dozens of safety and training films for the Navy
Navy
A navy is the branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake- or ocean-borne combat operations and related functions...
and Air Force
Air force
An air force, also known in some countries as an air army, is in the broadest sense, the national military organization that primarily conducts aerial warfare. More specifically, it is the branch of a nation's armed services that is responsible for aerial warfare as distinct from an army, navy or...
, 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.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, 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 and Troost, 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, the largest between New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
. 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
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, 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 16 mm film equipment on the market, and while this signaled that the Calvin Company's initial goal of popularizing 16 mm 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 16 mm filmmaking procedures would be explained and demonstrated. Anybody in the non-theatrical film industry in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
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
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
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 ballooned 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. During these years, the Calvin Company was a happy and freewheeling place for its employees, who often got on like the proverbial "big, happy family." There were annual ChristmasChristmas
Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...
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. Unlike other companies that made industrial films, at Calvin a union was voted out several times because the people were fundamentally satisfied. There was profit-sharing, access to top management, and encouragement of initiative. The company was also extraordinarily busy. 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). The Calvin Company also continued its pioneering in film technology. In 1951 they were the first outside firm to be licensed by Eastman Kodak
Eastman Kodak
Eastman Kodak Company is a multinational imaging and photographic equipment, materials and services company headquarted in Rochester, New York, United States. It was founded by George Eastman in 1892....
to process its color film, and in the early 1950s Calvin was the first professional movie company to utilize the 8 mm 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
McGraw-Hill
The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Rockefeller Center in New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial, education, publishing, broadcasting, and business services...
.
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
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
and television
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
announcing. These local thespians and personalities---who also dominated Kansas City's civic theater presentations, radio waves, and TV channels---welcomed the Calvin Company films as a fun and interesting way to pursue their hobby and earn a bit of extra money along the way, and they became familiar faces in Calvin productions over the years. Their names included Art Ellison, Shelby Storck
Shelby Storck
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...
, 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
Al Christy
Albert Christopher Ladesich , better known as Al Christy, was an American actor, advertising executive, and radio and television announcer....
, and Sid Cutright. A few of these went on to prolific 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
In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood is a 1966 book by Truman Capote.In Cold Blood may also refer to:* In Cold Blood , a 1967 film and 1996 miniseries, both based on the book* In Cold Blood...
, Paper Moon
Paper Moon (film)
Paper Moon is a 1973 American comedy film directed by Peter Bogdanovich and released by Paramount Pictures. The screenplay was adapted from the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, and the film was shot in black-and-white. The film is set during the Great Depression in the U.S. states of Kansas and...
, The Day After
The Day After
The Day After is a 1983 American television movie which aired on November 20, 1983, on the ABC television network. It was seen by more than 100 million people during its initial broadcast....
, and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge
Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is a 1990 Merchant Ivory film based on the novels by Evan S. Connell of the same name. It is directed by James Ivory, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and produced by Ismail Merchant.-Plot:...
.
The Calvin Company also occasionally brought professional actors and actresses from Hollywood to do special roles or narration in their films. William Frawley
William Frawley
William Clement "Bill" Frawley was an American stage entertainer, screen and television actor. Although Frawley acted in over 100 films, he achieved his greatest fame playing landlord Fred Mertz for the situation comedy I Love Lucy.-Early life:William was born to Michael A. Frawley and Mary E....
, John Carradine
John Carradine
John Carradine was an American actor, best known for his roles in horror films and Westerns as well as Shakespearean theater. A member of Cecil B DeMille's stock company and later John Ford's company, he was one of the most prolific character actors in Hollywood history...
, Jane Darwell, Morey Amsterdam
Morey Amsterdam
Morey Amsterdam was an American television actor and comedian, best known for the role of Buddy Sorrell on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the early 1960s.-Early life:...
, Arte Johnson
Arte Johnson
Arthur Stanton Eric "Arte" Johnson is an American comic actor. Johnson was a regular on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. His best-remembered "character" was that of a German soldier with the catchphrase: "Verrrry interesting, but...['stupid', 'not very funny', and other variations]".-Early life:Johnson...
, Judy Carne
Judy Carne
Judy Carne is an English actress best remembered for the phrase "Sock it to me!" on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.-Career:...
, James Whitmore
James Whitmore
James Allen Whitmore, Jr. was an American film and stage actor.-Early life:Born in White Plains, New York, to Florence Belle and James Allen Whitmore, Sr., a park commission official, Whitmore attended Amherst Central High School in Snyder, New York, before graduating from The Choate School in...
, and E.G. Marshall all starred in Calvin offerings. Calvin could also sometimes call on former local bigwigs such as Harry Truman, Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite
Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years . During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll...
, Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton (painter)
Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of life in the United States...
, and John Cameron Swayze
John Cameron Swayze
John Cameron Swayze was a popular news commentator and game show panelist in the United States during the 1950s.- Early life :...
to turn in appearances.
The Calvin Company was an important part of the Kansas City film community for decades. Calvin provided interesting opportunities to aspiring young filmmakers from the area who would not or could not go to Hollywood, and was "home" to every film student and filmmaker in the area for more than forty years. Calvin served as training ground for such feature film and television directors as Robert Altman
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
, Richard 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
Tom Laughlin
Tom Laughlin is an American actor, director, screenwriter, author, educator and political activist. Laughlin is best known for his series of Billy Jack films. He has been married to Delores Taylor since 1954. Taylor has also co-produced and acted in all four of the Billy Jack films...
. 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
The Cool and the Crazy
The Cool and the Crazy is a 1958 motion picture that was distributed by American-International Pictures. The producer of the film, Elmer Rhoden Jr., was president of the Kansas City, Missouri-based Commonwealth Theaters chain, a prominent chain of motion picture theaters with stretched through...
, 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 16 mm film format which it had originally pioneered forty years earlier, and the idea of shifting to video was soon abandoned. Satellite studios in LouisvilleLouisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...
, Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
and Detroit were sold. Finally, there was just the Calvin studios in Kansas City, where it had all begun, and around 1978 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
Halloween
Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...
of 1982. In 1991, the old seven-story Calvin headquarters at Truman and Troost fell to the wrecking ball
Wrecking ball
A wrecking ball is a heavy steel ball, usually hung from a crane, that is used for demolishing large buildings. It was most common during the 1950s and 1960s. Several wrecking companies claim to have invented the wrecking ball...
to make way for a large virtual school project.
Legacy
In 2002, industrial film archivist Rick PrelingerRick Prelinger
Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker, and 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.Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make...
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
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the research library of the United States Congress, de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and...
, where about 3,000 Calvin films now await accession and cataloging. Several of the Calvin Company's films, including the cult classic "The Your Name Here Story" (a satire of commonly used industrial film formats produced for showing at one of the Calvin Workshop seminars), are available for free viewing and downloading from the Prelinger Archives
Prelinger Archives
The Prelinger Archives is a collection of films relating to U.S. cultural history, the evolution of the American landscape, everyday life and social history...
. 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
Robert Altman
Robert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
), 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.
Actual Industrial Films
- The Bright Young Newcomer (1958)
- Coffee Break (1958)
- Freeze-In (1969 - Starring Arte JohnsonArte JohnsonArthur Stanton Eric "Arte" Johnson is an American comic actor. Johnson was a regular on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. His best-remembered "character" was that of a German soldier with the catchphrase: "Verrrry interesting, but...['stupid', 'not very funny', and other variations]".-Early life:Johnson...
and Judy CarneJudy CarneJudy Carne is an English actress best remembered for the phrase "Sock it to me!" on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.-Career:...
) - The Grapevine (1958)
- Hidden Grievance (1959)
- The Magic Bond {Part 1} (1955 - Directed by Robert AltmanRobert AltmanRobert Bernard Altman was an American film director and screenwriter known for making films that are highly naturalistic, but with a stylized perspective. In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized his body of work with an Academy Honorary Award.His films MASH , McCabe and...
) - The Magic Bond {Part 2}
- Murder on the Screen (1958)
- Promotion Bypass (1958)
- The RCA 16 mm Sound Projector (1958)
- Tornado (1956)
- The Trouble With Women (1959)
- Wood for War (1942)
Industrial Film Self-Parodies
- #Bfl O {ggGX = STwWcfl x 2s4 (1963)
- Check...and Let Me Know (1962)
- How Much? (1963)
- Overs and Outs (1964)
- The Vicious Circle, or What Are We Trying to Do?(1964)
- The Your Name Here Story (1960)
Calvin Company Outtake and Stock Footage Reels
- Reel 1 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 2 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 3 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 4 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 5 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 6 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 7 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 8 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 9 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 10 (1940s-1960s)
- Reel 11 (1940s-1960s)
External links
- Calvin Company (Internet Movie Database)
- Internet Archive Forum on the Calvin Company