Saturday, August 30, 2014

Your Name Here

Off and on during the 1950s, the Calvin Company employed a young director named Robert Altman who had ambitions to leave them and become a Hollywood filmmaker. He was directing TV episodics in LA at the time "Your Name Here" may have been produced, but the people who did it certainly seem to have felt his wry influence back in Kansas City.

The Calvin Workshop, probably the leading industrial film producer in the nation back in the 40s and 50s, occasionally produced satiric in-house parodies, which would be featured at company get-togethers. Nothing racy, mind you, just a little something to wink at the viewer and say "Ridiculous-- isn't it?"

Of course, since the production of these gems invariably used the same production staff, cast and crew involved in the company's other projects, the effect of viewing one is delightfully... surreal.

"Your Name Here" is a somewhat loopy take on the budgetary pressures that were always present when dealing with industrial clients, which the company proposes to eliminate through the development of an "all-purpose" [read: generic] business film. The scary part is, the finished product is just good enough that someone might have taken them up on it!

Remember-- "You are about to witness history in the making!!"

https://archive.org/details/ViciousC1964 = Vicious Circle, or What Are We Trying to Do?, The (ca. 1964)

http://www.prelinger.com/ = The Prelinger Archives