Crawley Films Building

Hintonburg and Ottawa’s Cinematic Foundation: A Pathway to a Canadian Film Industry

When Budge Crawley got his first camera in 1927, a Stewart-Warner, it was an expensive novelty object featured in advertisements but not often a family purchase. The idea of making films in Ottawa was unlikely, if not even far-fetched, the stuff of dreams because filmmaking was reserved for Hollywood. As Barbara Wade Rose writes in Budge: What Happened to Canada’s King of Film, “Movies were considered made by Americans in Hollywood, California. Not something made in Canada."[1]

However, before Budge Crawley received his camera and fell in love with filmmaking, for Canadians, movies were viewed in church or town hall basements in most communities.[2] There were a few movie theatres in larger cities like Montreal starting in 1907, but Ottawa's residents already had a keen fascination with movies in 1896, when on July 21, the city's West End Park saw Ottawans enjoying Canada's first public exhibition of movies. By 1939, Ottawa had a dozen movie theatres, and people paid 35ȼ to see films.[3] This interest in viewing movies continued to grow. In the 1930s, Hintonburg welcomed two movie theatres: the Victoria at Wellington and Huron and the Nola Theatre, across from the St. Francois D’Assise Church. In 1947, Hintonburg saw the Elmdale Theatre open with 894 seats, but in 1948, the Nola closed.

For more on cinema in Ottawa in 1896, see https://canadianfilm.ca/2017/04/18/cinema-in-ottawa/

The enthusiasm for films in the city's West End prefigured Crawley Films Limited's decision to make Hintonburg and 19 Fairmont Avenue their headquarter. Within such a cinematic and cultural atmosphere, Crawley Films moved into the St. Mathias old church hall in 1946, which evolved into a new transformed building in 1955 and as James A. Forrester writes, "By 1969, Crawley Films had completed 1800 motion pictures, 600 TV commercials, 100 slide shows and garnered 180 national and international film awards. The company was North America's busiest commercial producer of educational and documentary films – second in the world."[4] Crawley Films Limited even won the 1975 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for its film The Man Who Skied Down Everest.
On the cultural front, from its beginnings in 1946 in Hintonburg on Fairmont Avenue, Crawley Films Limited produced substantially and trained many Canadian talents, thereby contributing greatly to the development of the Canadian film industry.
 
 
[1] Barbara Wade Rose, 33.
[2] Barbara Wade Rose, 33, 43.
[3] Barbara Wade Rose, 43.
[4] Forrester, The Crawley Era, 24 (or 3 online)




 

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