Associated Screen News of Canada (ASN) was a Montreal-based film production company. It was the largest private film production company in Canada from the mid-1920s to the 1950s.
Background The first-ever sponsored film, the precursor of both the documentary and the television commercial, was created in 1898 by the Canadian farm equipment manufacturer Massey Harris, which wanted to show its reaper-binder at work on Ontario farms. By 1900, Massey Harris founder Hart Massey was running clips of the Second Boer War at his theatre, Toronto's Massey Hall, to raise funds for the Canadian Patriotic Fund.
These films came from the English producer Charles Urban, whose company, the Warwick Trading Company, produced and/or distributed three-quarters of the films exhibited in Britain at that time. In 1900, to encourage tourism and immigration, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) hired Urban to shoot films in Canada and distribute them in Britain. In 1903, Urban left Warwick to found the Charles Urban Trading Company which, beginning in 1903, was a major distributor of Canadian films in Britain, including those made by the CPR. As early as 1891, the CPR had been producing films to attract British and American tourists and encourage rail travel in western Canada. These films were so successful that, to this day, when many non-Canadians think of Canada, they think of the Rocky Mountains, Banff and Lake Louise; in 2019, Banff National Park attracted 4.2 million international visitors.
Also in 1903, Urban began making his own propaganda films in Canada. He sent three British cinematographers to Canada, and formed the Bioscope Company of Canada specifically to produce films for the CPR. (Nova Scotia's Canadian Bioscope Company was not related to Urban's firm.) In 1903 and 1904, Bioscope made the 35-film series Living Canada, re-released in 1906 as Wonders of Canada. He would continue to make CPR films until 1917, all while remaining based in London.
In 1909, Urban began commercializing the Kinemacolor process through the Natural Color Kinematograph Company. Several independent companies were formed around to exploit the Kinemacolor patent, the most notable being the Kinemacolor Company of America. However, the Kinemacolor process fell into obscurity after Urban lost the Kinemacolor patent in a 1915 lawsuit. In 1917, when the US entered World War I, he joined William Kissam Vanderbilt's company, Official Government Pictures (OGP), which had the contract to distribute propaganda films in America. In 1919, Urban agreed to buy William Randolph Hearst's film studio in Irvington, New York and suggested to CPR president Edward Wentworth Beatty that they partner to establish Associated Screen News, New York, which would produce and sell newsreel stories. Also that year, Urban and OGP's president George McLeod Baynes bought The Selznick News and established a newsreel service called Kinograms.
Formation of Associated Screen News Meanwhile, in 1918, the Canadian Government established a film production division whose purpose was to promote international interest in Canada's growing industrial strength and abundance of natural resources; the main goal was to attract investment and immigration.
In 1916, the United States Bureau for Commercial Economics asked the Canadian government for films detailing natural resources and hydro development possibilities in Canada—it wished to circulate these films to potential American investors. The Canadian government asked the Water Powers Branch of the Department of the Interior to produce these films. This was because its head draftsman, Bernard Norrish, was working on developing new techniques in photographic analysis. In this capacity, Norrish had visited the Essanay Film Company in Chicago. Norrish contracted Essanay to make these new films and, in 1916 and 1917, six films were produced—five on hydro-electric power, one on wheat harvesting. Initially, Norrish was meant to oversee production, but he was an aggressive perfectionist and ended up writing, directing and editing them. His superiors were so impressed, they transferred him to the Department of Trade and Commerce which, in 1918, established the Exhibits and Publicity Bureau (to be re-named the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau). It was the world's first government film production operation and Norrish was its director.
In June 1920, Charles Urban announced the formation of Associated Screen News, New York Ltd. and of its wholly owned subsidiary, Associated Screen News of Canada. The formation of the new company was financed by a private share offering in both the United States and Canada.
In July 1920, Associated Screen News (ASN) was incorporated by the Canadian Pacific Railway, which invested $250,000.00 in the company. However, while it is widely assumed that CPR owned the company, in his 1961 paper Motion Pictures in Canada : A Brief History of the Development of Canadian Film, Guy L. Coté notes that this investment bought the CPR only a 50% interest in ASN, and refers to "American interests" as its founders. Given Urban's announcement and the fact that its formation was his idea, that Norrish's first act at ASN was to produce the Kinograms Series, that Urban was based in the U.S. with an American company, and was in business with the likes of Vanderbilt and Hearst, it is reasonable to assume that the "private share offering" was closely held, and that the "American interests" referred to by Coté were Urban and his associates.
Regardless of who its investors were, the CPR was the majority shareholder of Associated Screen News Canada. Its president was the CPR's chief engineer, Colonel John Stoughton Dennis; Beatty persuaded Bernard Norrish to leave the government bureau and become its General Manager. Norrish brought one person with him from Ottawa to Montreal, the cinematographer John M. Alexander who, usually uncredited, handled production and directed most of ASN's early films.
Urban had over-stepped; much of his expected cash flow disappeared when Beatty insisted that all CPR films be made in Canada. In 1924, Associated Screen News, New York Ltd. failed. All of its shares were transferred to the CPR. Beatty closed the New York operation and named Bernard Norrish President of Associated Screen News of Canada.
1920s In the short time that he was head of the government bureau in Ottawa, Norrish created an efficient laboratory, production studio and distribution system. He and Alexander did the same thing with ASN. By 1923, Norrish had secured a contract to supply a Canadian section to Pathé News, and had distribution deals with Universal Pictures, Gaumont-British News, Gaumont-British Weekly, Pictorial Life, the Canadian Travel Film Library, Empire-Universal Films, Educational Films Corp. of America, and Urban's two distribution companies, Kinogram News and The Selznick News. These newsreels were projected in 4,000+ theatres in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, Australia and South America.
In 1926, Associated Screen News, which had been operating out of an old decommissioned Baptist church, built new facilities in Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood; over the front door, oddly, was a frieze of an Indian chief in headdress. This facility included the $150,000.00 Associated Screen News Laboratory. That was an enormous sum at the time, but it quickly paid for itself. Previously, foreign distributors had to print their own films and ship them to Canada. In 1925, the Canadian government slapped a tariff on the importation of films–six cents a foot. ASN could now print their films, meaning that distributors only had to pay the tax once. By 1929, the lab was processing 22 million feet of film a year, for most American and British distributors, and film printing soon accounted for one third of the company's profits. Even more lucrative was the provision of intertitles, explanatory texts added to silent films to explain passages of time or important dialogue. Norrish and Alexander were able to create bi-lingual inter-titles and splice these into American features. Associated Screen News became the first firm in North America to provide this service which, for many years, was a large source of its revenue.
Demand for films was soaring, but not for American films. America's late entry into the First World War, and its subsequent claims of glory, were seen as offensive and Canadians were openly resentful of films depicting American heroism in the war. There were riots in theatres that showed such films; in some places, images of the American flag were banned. Canadians wanted Canadian and British films. ASN's newsreel and film production increased rapidly and the company employed cinematographers from coast to coast, including Banff-based Byron Harmon, who shot most of the Rocky Mountain footage, and Roy Tash in Vancouver. Tash, who was known as "Mr. Newspictures of Canada" and became famous when he was the first to film the Dionne Quintuplets, went to work for ASN in 1925 and stayed for 25 years; it was Tash who filmed most of the Canadian news stories. By 1927, ASN had 60 employees; by 1930, 100+ employees.
In addition to immediately beginning with the production of newsreels, Norrish and Alexander created the Kinograms series, silent travelogues about routes served by the CPR's trains, ferries or ships. They added sponsored films, documentaries and general-interest films, and Norrish was careful to support the CPR; if a politician or celebrity was in a film, that film was shot in a CPR hotel, or the person was seen on a CPR train, or wharf, or ship. ASN's art department produced post cards and booklets for sale in CPR's numerous hotels, and ASN operated the hotel kiosks. In 1925, Alexander was sent, with a full staff, on Canadian Pacific cruises to the West Indies and South America where, for a fee, they filmed passengers in exotic locations and processed the films in on-board darkrooms.
ASN's main mandate was to produce CPR films. But there was more to these films than making the CPR look good. In the late 1890s, hand in hand with the Canadian government, the CPR had created its own Colonization and Immigration Department, which sold land, through loans it provided, to immigrants who bought farms in western Canada. In the 1890s, it began producing films to show to potential British immigrants; the 1898 film Ten Years in Manitoba, by James Freer shows rich prairie soil and a happy family in an attractive house. One purpose of the films produced by ASN through the 1920s was to show the opportunity provided by Canada’s wilderness, and to absolutely not show the hardships suffered by those who settled the Canadian prairies.
While central European immigrants easily adjusted to difficult life in the west, British immigrants were mainly city dwellers who had been drawn in by the CPR films. In 1923, settlers revolted against the CPR because life in Canada had been misrepresented—they had not been told about the Canadian winters (for many years, the CPR would not allow images of snow in its films). The business of farming had overwhelmed them. They were unable to repay their debt; in 1922, 316 farms were abandoned. The CPR responded by writing off interest and dropped the price of land to as little as $10 an acre; when the Great Depression hit, land was offered for as little as $5 an acre.