After watching the 1960 corporate parody film Your Name Here, it will start to dawn on you that the corporate cliche’s of yesteryear are still alive and well in the modern world. It was created for trade shows by The Calvin Company, a Missouri-based educational and industrial film production company.
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For nearly half a century The Calvin Company was the largest and most successful film producer of its type in the United States. The Calvin Company’s “Golden Age” lasted roughly a decade, from the late 1940s until the late 1950s. At the time, the business of making films for businesses and schools was booming, and Calvin was the country’s leading producer in that field, regularly making movies for all of the biggest Fortune 500 companies, and often winning festival awards and prizes for these efforts as well. After World War II, the Calvin staff ballooned from one hundred to two hundred, and then eventually to nearly three hundred full-time workers.
The company did not hire freelancers, and kept a permanent staff. There were always about four or five directors on staff, and the same rotating number of writers, cameramen, editors, and sound technicians. This made it possible for at least four movies to be in production at once. All film production was supervised by Frank Barhydt, a former Kansas City radio and newspaper writer who went to work for the firm as a director during the war due to his interest in documentary films.
