Origin of The Company
Joseph Arthur Rank was a devout member of the Methodist Church and the son of a millionaire flour miller. On the first day of the week he was a Sunday School teacher and he discovered that if he screened religious films instead of lecturing his class, he got a positive response.
His idea spread to other classes held by other churches and in 1933, this motivated J. Arthur Rank to form a Religious Film Society to distribute the films that he wanted to show to other Sunday Schools.
Following distribution, J. Arthur Rank then decided to go into the business of producing religious films. Mastership was his first religious film production. It was a twenty minutes film made at Merton Park Studios at a cost of £2,700. Mastership was never shown commercially, because it was merely intended as a form of evangelism and shown within other churches. Rank was pleased with the results and other films went into production in Elstree at the better equipped Rock Studios, which were later renamed British National.
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