Associated Screen News of Canada (ASN) was a Montreal-based film production company which, from the mid-1920s to the 1950s, was the largest private film production company in Canada.
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 1910, Urban resigned from his distribution company to focus on marketing Kinemacolor, a two-colour (red-green) additive filmmaking process which he tried, unsuccessfully, to patent. With two partners, he founded the London-based Kinemacolor Company of America, and began making Canadian films (Revues des Boy Scouts a Montreal, A Romance of the Canadian Wilds etc.). 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.