Jam Handy sales films

[canadian_ssl78]

I just came across a few of these films for 1968 model Chevrolets. Camaro , Corvette etc..Is anyone familiar with them? Will I need a certain type of proector to view these?
Thanks

[Mr70]

I am Familair with them.
I have collected each month from Sept.1965-January 1973.
These films came with the Communication Kits and were sent out each month to the dealership by the Zone office.I think they started producing these in the 1940's up to the Dec.1972,then they went to a movie diskete.
It was a 16" X 11" X 2" slide box filled with pamphlets,brochures,etc. & 35mm filmstrips.They informed the Salesmen about everything from what was New & upcoming,customer satisfaction,How to sell & listen,promotions,model line development,etc.
All are very interesting to be sure.
Jam Handy was the Company that produced these for Chevrolet,& others.
You need a 35mm Filmstrip projector to show those films,& look for one with a turntable on the back of it,or use a distant turntable.There is no sound on the filmstrips,but there was a 33&1/3 or 45 record that accompanied each film.When the record narrator,(Hardsil Wilson),finishes,you advance the frame after the BEEP.
There was also a Viewer Box they made to watch these on in the dealership,but I have one & it is really not as good as the trustworthy Projector & screen setup.

[70 copo]

Jam Handy also did short films that did the round up of special promotional events. Of note were the Chevrolet Indy 500 wrap up films which were sometimes shown on local TV. I recall Seeing these as a child in the late 60's as the post game/sporting event "shorts" that were used as programming fillers, usually on Saturday or Sunday in the Afternoons.

Phil

[Mr70]

You're right Phil.
Those were usually 16mm talking movies,and very unique in their own right.
I have a few,one is a 1970 film called,"Faces Of Conflict",hosted by Evil Knievel.It looks to have been for Network air.

[Nova Research Project]

canadian_ssl78;

I have been somewhat successful in scanning individual frames of the 1968 Nova version. I am looking to do that for any of the Nova films. Eventually I plan on playing the record to the computer to make a slide show.

Greg

[exportcorvette]

[ QUOTE ]
I just came across a few of these films for 1968 model Chevrolets. Camaro , Corvette etc..Is anyone familiar with them? Will I need a certain type of proector to view these?
Thanks

[/ QUOTE ]

Here is some information I found on Mr Jam Handy, owner of the film company. Pretty interesting. I have one canister of a film of the 1956-57 Corvette. Info:The Jam Handy Organization (JHO) (Detroit, Mich. plus satellite production
and sales offices located in other cities) was founded by Henry Jamison
"Jam" Handy (1886-1983) in 1917, and pursued film production activities
until 1968, when it was sold to Teletape Industries and operated briefly
under the name Teletape Detroit. I believe that it evolved out of an
earlier operation located in Chicago known as Newspapers Film Corporation.
Beginning in the 1970s, JHO recommenced production under its own name,
completing a limited number of films until dissolving in the early 1980s.


Jam Handy was the son of Moses P. Handy, a Chicago newspaper
editor and promoter of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.
Jam's father permitted him to take a year off from school to spend
his time at the Exposition, and I suspect that Jam's worldview was
heavily influenced by what he saw. One could argue that his
intertwined vision of technology, social progress and the
development of a broad consumer market was consistent with the
message of the Fair.


Handy attended the Uinversity of Michigan and became quite a
controversial figure. The story is well told in two articles to
which links are provided above.


Early in life, Jam Handy became acquainted with noted
industrialists and business figures, including Thomas A. Edison
and John H. Patterson, founder of National Cash Register. In the
1910s, Handy became conscious of persistent communication gaps
between worker and employer and between corporations and the
public. This was a time of great struggles between management and
labor, and widespread public suspicion of corporations and their
doings. Handy committed himself to bridging these gaps through
visual media. Beginning this process by producing filmstrips
(known then as slidefilms), he soon expanded into motion picture
production, traveling to revolutionary Mexico to shoot his first
film, an encounter with Pancho Villa sponsored by the Chicago
Tribune.


Patterson, Handy's intellectual mentor, was a strong believer in
visual education. Patterson had assembled a library of tens of
thousands of lantern slides, picturing transactions,
relationships, and industrial processes. By combining these
slides into sequences, he created specialized (and idiosyncratic)
narratives that anticipated still image sequences as embodied in
slidefilms. Handy built upon Patterson's theories and created
oblique and often distanced image sequences designed to affect and
convince viewers' minds in ways that conventional sales or
training pitches could not. Although Handy is little known today,
his contributions to the development of public relations and
commercial speech are immense.


The Jam Handy Organization located itself in Detroit, home of the
automobile industry and many other major manufacturers, and a
strategic location for an industrial film producer as almost all
significant American industry was located within a 400-mile
radius. JHO quickly began producing films for major corporations
such as General Motors, RCA and duPont. Important early titles
represented in our collection include Sand on the Slippery
Sidewalks of Sales (for Frigidaire Division of General Motors,
1926), and General Motors Around the World (for General Motors
Export Corporation, 1927). Most JHO films produced prior to the
early 1930s apparently have not survived, but we have extensive
holdings beginning in 1933.


The Direct Selling Series (produced for the Chevrolet Division of
General Motors, 1935-41) epitomizes Handy's distinctive style and
approach. These sponsored films contain no explicit advertising,
although almost all cars they show happen to be Chevrolets. They
present scientific and technological concepts and innovations in a
highly accessible manner, often with enthusiastically bombastic
newsreel-type narration. One could compare these films to
"infomercials" today, except that they promote the corporation
itself rather than its specific products; this kind of advertising
is known as "institutional advertising." Examples include Magic
in the Air (1941, remade 1949 and 1955), on the promise of early
television; Precisely So (1937), on precision gauging and
measurement; Spot News (1937), on the transmission of photographs
by wire; How You See It (1937), an elegant explanation of
persistence of vision in motion pictures; and Conquering Roads
(1938), picturing new highway design prototypes.


Also in this series are several key films picturing workers, labor
processes, work life and community life during the Depression.
Master Hands (for Chevrolet, 1936), believed to be unique to our
collection, presents the process of automobile manufacturing as a
Wagnerian elemental drama, and is an excellent example of
"capitalist realism," using the representational techniques of the
Soviet cinema to promote free-enterprise activities. From Dawn to
Sunset (for Chevrolet, 1937), a portrait of a day in the life of a
composite General Motors worker, shows factories, streetscapes and
daily life in twelve cities where Chevrolet had plants, and
represents a complex and antagonistic response to the birth of the
United Auto Workers and the union's recent victory in General
Motors plants.


The Direct Mass Selling series also includes a number of
Technicolor cartoons, including A Coach for Cinderella (1936),
reputed to be the first sponsored film produced in three-strip
Technicolor; and four others, all faintly promoting Chevrolet
motor vehicles. Other films in the series contain fascinating
examples of stop-motion animation, still unattributed but
resembling the European work of Oskar Fischinger.


The Handy studio employed 550 workers at the outbreak of World War
II, when it shifted over almost completely to producing training
materials for the war effort. During that period it produced an
estimated total of 7000 films. Afterwards, Handy produced
numerous films promoting goods, services and points of view
emanating from major industrial corporations. Since it includes
so many films produced by America's largest and most influential
corporations, the JHO collection constitutes a particularly
privileged (and often tendentious) view of these themes.

In addition to its breadth and richness, the JHO collection
reflects the idiosyncrasies of its primary creative influence, Jam
Handy himself. The films are quite unlike the products of other
production companies, at times reflecting a persistent
nineteenth-century sensibility, even well into the atomic age.
They frequently employ Brechtian alienation or estrangement
techniques, which often appear quite out of place in a
business-oriented setting.


Handy himself was an unusual figure. He lived to the age of 96,
avoided doctors whenever necessary (he was for many years a
Christian Scientist, and towards the end of his life a
Swedenborgian); for many years had neither a fixed abode on land
(though he lived on a boat for awhile) nor an office to call his
own; he tailored his suits without pockets so as not to succumb to
the temptation of putting hands in pockets while speaking in
public; he fitted out the lobby of his Detroit studio with
photographs of and quotes from those he considered great thinkers,
month by month depending on their birthdays. His life and work
are crying out for a book-length study -- I'd like to write it one
day but not until I get the rest of the films digitized and up on
the site.
--

Rick Prelinger

[William]

Supercar Trivia: One of the Jam Handy films has a ZL1 in it.

[camarojoe]

[ QUOTE ]
Supercar Trivia: One of the Jam Handy films has a ZL1 in it.

[/ QUOTE ]

May 1971... Communication kit is entitled "Enthusiasm Builds a Stronger Team" Filmstrip within the kit is called "used Car Professionalism." Car can be seen on frame 5, sitting on the lot at Hauser Chevrolet in Bethlehem, PA. What do I win?

[William]

vintage race car photos!

[YENKO DEUCE REGISTRY]

Nice photo's William, just pulled a "HAUSER" emblem off of a car in a junkyard this past weekend!