In 1900, to encourage tourism and immigration, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) hired Urban to shoot films in Canada and distribute them in Britain.
As early as 1891, the CPR had been producing films to attract British and American tourists and encourage rail travel in western Canada.
[6] 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.
[7] Also that year, Urban and OGP's president George McLeod Baynes bought The Selznick News and established a newsreel service called Kinograms.
[8] 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.
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.
Beatty closed the New York operation and named Bernard Norrish President of Associated Screen News of Canada.
In the short time that he was head of the government bureau in Ottawa, Norrish created an efficient laboratory, production studio and distribution system.
[13] 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.
Even more lucrative was the provision of intertitles, explanatory texts added to silent films to explain passages of time or important dialogue.
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.
[16] 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.
Norrish agreed, with two conditions: that production costs would be covered by theatrical revenue, and that Sparling would also produce ASN's sponsored and industrial films.
[23] One reason for Norrish's ready acceptance of Sparling's budget was another tariff enacted by the Canadian government in 1931, on the importation of motion picture cameras and sound recorders.
Cote noted, however, that some of the films were interesting, particularly Grey Owl's Little Brother (1932), Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934), Acadian Spring Song (1935), Ballet of the Mermaids (1938), The Thousand Days (1942), Sitzmarks the Spot (1949) and The Roaring Game (1952).
By the late 1930s, ASN was able to add pre-recorded music, and dub films for release to French, German, Danish and Spanish audiences.
ASN's CPR films were sponsored films, but its client list also included the major Canadian corporations of the day, including Eaton's, General Motors, Massey-Harris, the Canadian Wheat Board, Ford Motor Company, Bell Canada, all provincial governments and most Crown corporations.
Many of these films were industrial and simply recorded the operation of a piece of machinery; a cameraman would be dispatched to shoot the product in action.
One example of this is Beautyrest,[30] a 1931 film he made for the Simmons Bedding Company, in which he used heavy tinting and toning to turn the process of mattress manufacturing into a sort of fairy tale.
[34] With Grierson as commissioner of the NFB and Norrish as president of Associated Screen News, the Canadian industry had two very smart, very efficient men leading two extremely well-funded production companies.
Beatty was the last in a line of railroad tycoons who single-handedly controlled his empire and he relished his position as chairman of his film company's board.
Nathanson who, as part of a distribution deal involving the 1924 share transfer of Associated Screen News, New York, became one of ASN's larger shareholders, offered to buy ASN—he had been expelled from Famous Players and, with heavy investment from The Rank Organisation, had founded Odeon Cinemas.
When land next to the ASN lab became available, Norrish bought it so The Benograph Company could manufacture Bell & Howell filmmaking equipment.
[35] In 1944, Norrish opened a sales office in Toronto, and purchased the Vancouver photographic services company Dunne and Rundle.
This employed what he would call his "rhapsodic technique" which, through clever editing, was the juxtaposition of images and sounds to evoke activity and the passage of time.
Mather, who knew little about the film industry and how to run a production company, named William Singleton ASN's new president.
In April 1954, the new ASN president was named: Nathanson's business partner, Maxwell Cummings, a real estate investor who owned apartment buildings and shopping malls in Montreal.
Briskin was officially Cummings' executive assistant, but he was a New York producer who had just been with Music Corporation of America, or was possibly still in the employ of MCA.