Outtakes & Bloopers: “Overs and Outs” ~ 1964 Calvin Workshop; Industrial Filmmaker Comedy
Comedy Miscellany playlist:
Motion Picture Production, Processes, History… playlist:
more at
“Overs and Outs: An Inconsequential Collection of Miscellaneous Trivia and Cutting Room Culls All Relating Loosely to Films and Other Areas of The Communications Racket.” Industrial film bloopers.
also see:
“Your Name Here”
“Check . . . And Let Me Know”
Reupload of a previously uploaded film with improved video & sound.
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Sponsored film, or ephemeral film, as defined by film archivist Rick Prelinger, is a film made by a particular sponsor for a specific purpose other than as a work of art: the films were designed to serve a specific pragmatic purpose for a limited time. Many sponsored/ephemeral films are also orphan works since they lack copyright owners or active custodians to guarantee their long-term preservation.
The genre is composed of advertising films, educational films, industrial videos, training films, social guidance films, and government-produced films…
Prelinger estimates that the form includes perhaps 400,000 films and, as such, is the largest genre of films, but that one-third to one-half of the films have been lost to neglect…
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…
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, Kansas, 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… 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…
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…
The Calvin Company’s “Golden Age” lasted roughly a decade, from the late 1940s until the late 1950s… 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…
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 Louisville, 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…
