Film Heritage
The focus on filmmaking in the Kansas City area more or less began in 1931 when University of Kansas advertising graduate F.O. Calvin founded the Calvin Company in Kansas City. Calvin, an industrial and educational film production company, grew from a small business located in a one-room office to becoming the largest industrial film producer and 16 mm lab in the world during the 1950s and 1960s. Calvin was throughout its life a technical innovator and creative force within the nontheatrical film industry, an early developer of 16 mm release printing and sound-on-film technology, and a prolific producer, winning several hundred film festival awards, until it ceased operations in the early 1980s. In total, by that time, Calvin had produced about 3,000 mostly short films. Calvin made promotional and advertising films for some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the country, including DuPont, Goodyear Tire, Caterpillar, and General Mills. Calvin's impressively large studio and office headquarters was located at the corner of Truman and Troost roads in Kansas City and many of the company's productions were filmed in and around Kansas City, showing street scenes, local landmarks and activities. However, a great deal of filming was done on-location in other parts of the country or the world, especially in government and educational travelogue film projects.
In addition, local actors and actresses (particularly those with experience in community theater productions, local radio and television) were used by Calvin as actors in their films, and many aspiring, talented young film students and filmmakers from the Kansas City area were employed by Calvin as directors, writers, cameramen, editors, sound operators, etc., etc. Among these local filmmakers were Robert Altman, who was born and raised in Kansas City and who got his first filmmaking experience as a film director at the Calvin Company during the early 1950s. Altman directed about 60 to 65 25-to-30-minute industrial films for the company over a period of five or six years. After leaving the company, Altman produced, wrote, and directed his first feature film, a juvenile delinquency melodrama titled The Delinquents on-location in Kansas City in 1955, using local talent and crews (with the exception of lead actor and Hollywood performer Tom Laughlin, the future "Billy Jack"). It was this film that not only introduced Altman to Hollywood and positioned his foot firmly in Hollywood's door, and grossed $1,000 for distributor United Artists, that also opened people's minds up to possibilities of feature filmmaking in Kansas City. Following The Delinquents, local movie theater exhibitor Elmer Rhoden Jr. produced another film about juvenile delinquency, The Cool and the Crazy in 1958, using mostly local talent and crews once again. The film, with its rabid anti-marijuana message and over-the-top performance by Hollywood lead actor Scott Marlowe has attracted quite a cult following over the past few decades.
That first rapid tide of locally-produced feature films ebbed for a while through the 1960s, although in nearby Lawrence, Kansas, industrial filmmaker Herk Harvey produced and directed the cult classic horror film Carnival of Souls. Harvey was a film director for Centron Corporation, a Lawrence-based industrial and educational film production company. In 1967, Hollywood director Richard Brooks directed a feature film about the murder of the Kansas Clutter family, titled In Cold Blood, and filmed most of it in and around Kansas City and the surrounding farmland, where the murder actually took place. This was another chance where the local acting talent, usually confined to industrial films, got to appear in feature films. Brooks and crew were very pleased by the outstanding acting talent to be found in Kansas City, and cast several locals in supporting speaking parts. In the early 1970s, Raquel Welch breezed in through Kansas City to shoot exterior scenes for her exploitation film Kansas City Bomber, and afterwards Kansas City became a center for the production of independent B films and melodramas. Los Angeles producer-director Lamar Card shot the low-budget 1976 movie The Student Body, a "wild youth" film similar to The Delinquents and The Cool and the Crazy, using local talent and city streets as setting for a wild drag race through downtown Kansas City. Hollywood actors and directors involved in film production in Kansas City during the 1970s included Pam Grier, Fred Williamson, Warren Stevens, and Linda Lovelace, and productions filmed in and around Kansas City during the time period included Bird Lives, Mrs. Bridge, Bucktown, and Linda Lovelace for President.
Read more about this topic: Film In Kansas City
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