Calvin Company
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The Calvin Company was a Kansas City, Missouri-based educational and industrial film production company that for nearly half a century was the largest film producer of its type in the world.
The Calvin Company was founded in Kansas City in 1931 by F.O. Calvin and Betty Calvin, a young married couple who had recently received degrees in advertising from the University of Kansas. The two had questioned why all films were being made in the 35-millimeter format, and realized that the new 16 mm film format, previously only used mostly for home movies, offered numerous possibilities and could be used as an effective teaching and promotional tool in films for businesses, known as "industrial films."
F.O. Calvin recruited his former KU fraternity brothers, Lloyd Thompson and Larry Sherwood, and the Calvins and Thompson and Sherwood raised the capital and began work on selling the Calvin concept and actually producing the films. They started out in a one-room office in the old Business Men's Assurance building in downtown Kansas City. They fixed up other people's bad, amateurish films so they were serviceable and also made their own movies from scratch---short, inexpensive ones in the studio as well as long, big-budget ones on location in other time zones. They actually had to work rather hard at trying to sell mostly local and regional area businesses on the idea of 16 mm business films, but pretty soon they had a number of clients on their list. Calvin took good advantage of Kansas City's proximity to locations, industry, and commerce, and within a few years, Fortune 500 companies became clients, including Du Pont, Goodyear, Caterpillar, General Mills, Southwestern Bell, Monsanto, John Deere, International Harvester, Gulf Oil, and Westinghouse, accounts that would stay with Calvin for three decades. In 1935, Calvin produced its first sound film. In 1938, Calvin produced the first industrial film in full sound and full color. The Calvin Company's productions suddenly began to win awards, prizes, and accolades at film and trade festivals, somewhat of a habit that Calvin had which lasted them through the next forty-five years. Many early Calvin productions were filmed in and around Kansas City, showing street scenes, local landmarks and activities. Many of Calvin's films also seem to possess great cultural or historical significance, based upon their titles and sponsors, and when Calvin crews began to be dispatched to locations around the globe to bring back images for geography and travel films, the historical significance of the footage captured was increased.
By this time, the Calvins, Thompson, and Sherwood had added a great deal of personnel and had to move into a more suitable headquarters behind Union Station in downtown Kansas City. Calvin now boasted an excellent processing laboratory and began processing films for other, smaller producers, such as universities. In 1940, F.O. Calvin and former KU classmate William G. Wilson formed a subsidiary, the Movie-Mite Corporation, which quickly gained national prominence through a magazine award for the use of plastics. Movie-Mite manufactured the first-ever desk-sized motion picture projector, and hundreds of thousands of Movie-Mite projectors were sold during the 1940s. World War II had a big part in this. The war proved a gold mine for the Calvin company. Calvin began turning out dozens of training and instructional films for the United States Navy, including films and F.O. Calvin served as a dollar-a-year man for the Navy in Washington, D.C. where he advised on the running of a filmmaking system similar to Calvin's. The Navy even wanted Calvin to move his operations to D.C., but ultimately the Calvin personnel remained in Kansas City. The war also brought many talented young fimmakers and film students from the area to Calvin, and the company was forced to find a new headquarters. In 1943, the Calvin Company bought a building east of downtown Kansas City built by Robert Altman's grandfather, and converted the old movie theater on the first floor into a huge sound stage, the largest west of the Mississippi River, 80 by 120 feet with a 30-foot ceiling, and the rest into offices, projection and screening rooms, and editing and processing laboratories.
In 1947, due to the fact that a lot of film equipment was around that hadn't been readily available before the war, a great deal of younger, newer industrial and educational film producers came into the nontheatrical film industry. F.O. Calvin sensed this as an industry problem, and had the Calvin Company sponsor a "Calvin Workshop" in Kansas City, held to orient, educate, and improve the work of nontheatrical film producers. Calvin and his associates would explain their workable procedures and give advice on how to use the 16 mm medium. This became an annual event, held for three days every spring in Kansas City for over thirty years, attracting over 450 producers and technicians from all over the country. Often special films would be produced by and for attendees of the Calvin Workshops, and several of these, including the 1960 comedy classic "Your Name Here," have recently found devoted cult followings. Often intentionally amusing, these films document the culture and consciousness of this industry, about which little has been written.
By the early 1950s, the business of making films more businesses was booming, and Calvin Company, with a regular staff of 400, was the largest industrial film producer and 16 mm film lab in the world. "Calvin turns out 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," reported one contemporary local newspaper. Calvin was also an important venue for the Kansas City arts, employing local acting talent from local radio and television programs and civic theater presentations. Some of these Kansas City actors later went on to have successful careers in Hollywood, including character actors Owen Bush (a former Kansas City TV announcer) and Al Christy (an ex-Kansas City insurance man) and radio broadcaster turned actor Dick Peabody. Calvin could also employ former local bigwigs such as Harry Truman and Walter Cronkite to make special guest appearances in films, as well as Hollywood actors and actresses like William Frawley and John Carradine. As already pointed out, Calvin was "home" to every film student and filmmaker in the Kansas City area for more than forty years. Calvin served as training ground for some local filmmakers who went on to have successful careers in motion pictures in Hollywood, including feature film director Robert Altman, television directors Reza Badiyi and Richard Sarafian, writer James Bloodworth, artist Dan Fitzgerald, animator Richard Corben, and auteur John Altman. Some of these local film talents also made feature films in Kansas City using Calvin talent and crews, and so often the Calvin Company is partially credited for some features, including Robert Altman's debut The Delinquents and another delinquency film, titled The Cool and the Crazy.
Calvin's pioneering continued. In 1951, they were the first firm to be licensed by Eastman Kodak to process Kodak color film and became one of the largest users of 16 mm Kodak color film stock in the world. In the mid-1950s, Calvin pioneered the use of 8 mm film, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Calvin also pioneered the use of films in the classroom. They joined forces with the University of Kansas City (now UMKC) to produce a series of educational films for elementary, junior high, high school, and college classrooms, covering a wide variety of subjects in the public school curriculum. Actually the Calvin Company often associated with universities to produce its educational films, and in the 1960s produced a series on biology well utilized across the country.
It was too good to last, and it didn't. The Calvin organization came under new management in the 1960s and business began to decline thereafter. The production staff was cut drastically. Longtime accounts drifted away. Calvin attempted to expand and combat the slow period by purchasing the whole massive building that they had started in with a one-room office back in 1931, but the whole situation worsened when projectors were traded in for VCRs. 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 in the early 1980s the company officially dissolved. In 1991, the old Altman-built Calvin headquarters fell to the wrecking ball.
Recently, industrial film archivist Rick Prelinger moved most of the Calvin Company's surviving film prints from an underground storage facility in Kansas City to the Library of Congress, where about 3,000 Calvin films now are shelved.
