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.
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Calvin Company branched out into the educational film field, producing pioneering classroom films that were distributed through companies such as McGraw-Hill, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the US Office of Education to public schools throughout the country.
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The Calvin Company became known as an innovative and creative force in the non-theatrical movie industry.
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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 US Department of Agriculture.
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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.
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The Calvin Company building 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.
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At its peak, the Calvin Company Workshop attracted some 450 producers and technicians from the US and Canada each year.
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At the time, the business of making films for businesses and schools was booming, and Calvin Company 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.
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Calvin Company did not hire freelancers, and kept a permanent staff.
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Calvin Company occasionally brought professional actors and actresses from Hollywood to do special roles or narration in their films.
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Calvin Company provided opportunities to aspiring young filmmakers from the area who would not or could not go to Hollywood.
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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.
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Leonard Keck, a longtime Calvin executive, took over presidential duties and the company's name was changed to Calvin Productions.
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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.
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Several of the Calvin Company's films, including the cult classic The Your Name Here Story, are available for free viewing and downloading from the Prelinger Archives.
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However, the reels contain footage from many different Calvin Company productions dating from around 1940 to the early 1960s.
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