Associated Screen News (ASN)

During the 1910s and 1920s, newsreels contained a disproportionately large amount of American content, influencing Canadians' minds and their focus on Canadian politics. It wasn’t until the 1930s that Nova Scotia and Ontario became the first provinces in Canada to establish a minimum Canadian content requirement in newsreels screened in local theatres. This legislation was responsible for the financial and expanding growth and success of Associated Screen News (ASN) of Canada and Canadian Fox Movietone. The latter would become one of the most innovative and groundbreaking studios of its time.

Enter Charles Urban, a German-American producer and distributor who was one of the most significant figures in British cinema before the First World War. Urban can best be described as a robust man, with a shiftly grin, resembling what you would naturally picture a non nonsense cigar smoking 1920s producer to appear as.

Urban was fixated on Canada as America's next new market in the film industry. He proposed a partnership with the CPR to develop a stable film production company, which led to the establishment of Associated Screen News of Canada Ltd. in February 1920, with the CPR as the primary financial contributor. 

The Associated Screen News studio was based in Montreal and was initially controlled by American interests. Following a massive Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) investment, ASN quickly became the largest private Canadian production company. Bernard E. Norrish, former head of the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, ran the company for several decades.

The Canadian Pacific’s financial backing allowed Associated Screen News to acquire critical resources and assemble a large team. The CPR saw this company as a significant investment, as it had ties to the USA and would allow for better distribution of Canadian films in America. Which in turn meant more money and more press. The main office was in the Albee building behind the Imperial Cinema, founded in 1913.  The company eventually moved out and constructed its own building in the mid-1920s, which still stands at the corner of Décarie and de Maisonneuve West boulevards. It contained the company’s studio, workshops, laboratory, and offices. With the end of the Great War, the CPR and the Federal government would direct attention to the development of the Canadian West with the assistance of ASN.

ASN employed eight camera operators equipped with Bell & Howell 2709 cameras, the same models most Hollywood studios used then. When the film industry switched to sound at the turn of the 1930s, more than a hundred people worked in Associated Screen News’ Montreal offices.

ASN initially produced travelogues and industrial shorts, but many of its profits came from its laboratories, which numerous out-of-country companies used. This was the first example of Canada becoming a post-production powerhouse by outsourcing its laboratories and labor. Almost all major Hollywood studios had their release prints made at ASN from 1921 until the “talkies” era. 

The team led by Norrish would go on to produce countless films through the decades for the Canadian Pacific and sponsored films for various Canadian businesses, newsreel segments, and short theatrical film series. In 1931, Associated Screen News successfully jumped into pictures with sound, expanded its building, and built the most advanced film studio in the country. British director Michael Powell would film scenes for 49th Parallel, a fiction feature film co-written by his collaborator Emeric Pressburger at the studio in 1941.

ASN also had a subsidiary, Benograph, which sold film projectors and non-theatrical film rentals. Most ASN equipment and films used the 16mm format, but several Associated Screen News productions were also printed on 35mm safety stock for non-theatrical screenings. 

One of the most critical players in ASN would be John Murray Gibbon, a Scottish-Canadian writer, cultural promoter, and Advertising Agent for the CPR. Gibbon would work closely with the Montreal location and encourage the foreign press to come to Canada for company promotions. Gibbon organized the Canadian Pacific Railway Festivals, a series of folk and crafts festivals sponsored by the CPR, with Sir Ernest MacMillan, a Canadian orchestral conductor, composer, organist, and Canada's only "Musical Knight."

Gibbon was also responsible for relations between the CPR and the French-language media. These achievements led to him overseeing the entire Associated Screen News Canada company and its eventual acquisition by the CPR. ASN achieved what other film companies could not at the time: consistent investments and funding—all thanks to the Canadian Pacific Railway.

Associated Screen News also created a bilingual intertitles department in 1923. This department would take silent films from America and re-edit them for French-Canadian audiences. Associated Screen News became the first film company in North America to provide this service, and in the process, it found it highly profitable.

The quality and talent of its personnel contributed to ASN's success. Canadian Pacific chose Bernard Norrish as a leader because he was one of the few Canadians with a deep knowledge of world cinema, stemming from his previous role at the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau.

Norrish built a team of talented technicians. The most prominent member of the team was Terry Ramsaye, who worked with Charlie Chaplin at the Mutual Film Corporation in the 1910s and published one of the first histories of cinema in the early 1920s. Ramsaye is credited with editing the subtitles for several Associated Screen News productions. 

Ramsaye would depart ASN in the late 1920s. Norrish would then hire Gordon Sparling in 1931. Sparling was 30 at the time and had nearly a decade of experience in cinema, having previously made films for the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau and the Canadian Forestry Association and then spent time in Paramount’s New York studios at the turn of the 1930s. 

Sparling brought a new standard of quality into the mundane subjects he was assigned. One of his films, Rhapsody in Two Languages(1934), was a travelogue meant to entice American viewers to come and sample Montreal’s nightlife. It became an extraordinary film with unexpectedly elevated cinematography, editing, and soundtrack. Sparling’s work significantly increased the company’s image that Associated Screen News’s productions would enter theatres in the USA and Canada. Sparling’s films were some of the only films in which Canadians could see accurate images of themselves on movie screens. 

Standout directors such as the likes of Gordon Sparling would also partner with both the CGMPB and ASN. Sparling was among the only creative filmmakers in the Canadian commercial film industry in the 1930s. He directed early Canadian films such as The Tidy House (La Maison en ordre) in 1936 and The Kinsmen in 1938. Sparling was also one of the first filmmakers to pressure ASN to build a sound studio so the company could enter the talkie market. He continued working with the studio until the production department was closed in 1957,  four years after Ben Norrish’s retirement and the sale of the Canadian Pacific Railway majority stake to Paul Nathanson, son of the founder of Famous Players Canadian and Odeon Theatres of Canada. The arrival of television in the early 1950s enabled French-speaking Quebeckers to watch original French-language programming without going to the cinema, and this change in theatrical distribution also contributed to the collapse of ASN. Associated Screen News would then be acquired by Du-Art in 1958.

During the decades following the end of Associated Screen News, the studios and lab built by the company during the 1920s and 30s were used by Bellevue Pathé to dub numerous films and television shows.

Associated Screen News’ legacy would be forgotten mainly during the following decades. Library and Archives Canada preserves some material documenting the company's history donated by Bellevue-Pathé and Astral Média. However, the collection is small, and no complete company filmography has been compiled. 

Of course, this was before the popular era of film preservation, and in later years, the disregard for ASN’s legacy would bother some of the remaining crew and filmmakers who were still alive. One of these people was director Gordon Sparling.

In a letter dated October 28th, 1982, addressed to film collector and former police officer Jean-Bélanger, director Gordon Sparling expressed his concern regarding the lack of willingness to preserve Canadian film heritage 25 years after the closure of Associated Screen News: “It was only a couple of decades ago since nobody seemed to give a damn about preserving our motion picture history. For a long time, I was one of the few small voices crying in a large wilderness. You were one of the pioneers who not only said ‘save our old pictures’ but did something about it.” 

At the time, Bélanger held Canada's most extensive private film collection. While most film collectors of the era were only interested in fiction and feature films, Bélanger had amassed thousands of government-sponsored, industrial, and commercial films, travelogues, newsreels, amateur films, home movies, and professional short films produced for exhibition in the home. Many titles produced by Associated Screen News were among the reels salvaged by Bélanger. In a choice of dumb luck, personal perseverance, or pure chance, Bélanger single-handedly saved what would have been a forgotten era of Canadian history. Part of this collection would be salvaged as some of the few remaining fonds of ASN that exist today.