After graduation, Anderson moved to Regina and got a $10.00 a week job at CHWC radio, working as an announcer, copywriter and DJ.
In 1938, he was sent back to Ottawa, where he became the CRCO program director and, along with Lorne Greene and Allan McFee, part of the CBC's announcing team.
[2] In 1943, Anderson was assigned to produce a series of talks by John Grierson, who had just become the head of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).
In the course of making the military films, Anderson met Brock Chisholm, a psychiatrist who was, at the time, Director General of Medical Services for the Canadian Army.
This piqued Anderson's interest in psychiatry; at the time, people didn't talk about mental health and he saw the need and opportunity.
Anderson recalled that, when his film The Feeling of Rejection[5] was shown at the 1947 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New York, “there was absolute bedlam….
[12] The film heartened Alfred R. Lindesmith, an Indiana University sociology professor who advocated the medical treatment of drug addiction.
[13] Drug Addict outraged Harry J. Anslinger, the ‘moral enforcer’ who was head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) from 1930 to 1962.
The early 20th-century mass migration of minorities to northern U.S. cities, and the emergence of an illicit narcotics market, had created public anxiety and suspicion directed at immigrants and people of color.
He attempted to intimidate the Indiana University, he formally called Lindesmith a ‘drug addict’, a ‘crackpot’ and a ‘communist’.
Anslinger knew of the potential political hazards which Drug Addict could engender if the public was presented with such a rebuttal, particularly one produced with the assistance of a government as credible as Canada's, and its national police force.
[17] While the two men wrote competing New York Times editorials, Anslinger falsely claimed that the film had been banned under the Motion Picture Association code.
The Women's Christian Temperance Union pressured Lindesmith to stop his campaign; Anslinger tried to involve J. Edgar Hoover.
But Indiana University had stood behind Lindesmith; eventually, after years of being harassed themselves, physicians and lawyers sided with him.
At the time, he was building Valley View Centre in Moose Jaw, a sprawling, 3,000-bed facility for the mentally disabled.
With a crew of nine, including cameraman Osmond Borradaile who came out of retirement to make the film, Anderson used the hospital's doctors, staff and patients, explaining “I prefer to work with real people.
It doesn’t always work, but when it does it is dynamite.” [21] To the amazement of officials at Health and Welfare Canada, the patients who participated began to show improvement.
Anderson returned to Ottawa, where he found that the Canadian government was in the process of moving the NFB head office to Montreal, and making other organizational changes.
It was made for television, but it was strong enough to be used in the training of nurses and doctors and related disciplines and was internationally distributed.
He had earlier been hired by Geigy Pharmaceuticals to make the films The Faces Of Depression and Emotional Factors In General Practice.
[26] In 1976, Anderson closed down his production company to retire, but political advisor Thomas Van Dusen hired him to work on Parliament Hill.