Film Weekly year book of the Canadian motion picture industry (1951)

SURVEY CANADA now has 14,000,000 pop¬ ulation, of whom half are of British descent, one-third of French origin and the rest of other European strains. Sixty per cent of the people live in cities and towns. Canadians have an average four-member family income of about $3,500 a year. Three out of five families have automobiles, five out of seven homes have telephones, and 19 out of 20 homes have radios. Canada is a country of great dis¬ tances, and is larger than Europe. It takes 20 hours to cross from the Atlan¬ tic coast to the Pacific by air. Since 1939 Canada’s gross national product — the sum total of all new goods and services produced — has doubled in volume and tripled in value. Canada is the United States’ best customer, and in 1950 her USA imports amounted to more than $2,000,000,000. In the Canadian Shield, extending from northern Quebec around Hudson Bay to the Yukon, are ample reserves of gold, copper, lead, zinc, titanium, asbestos, iron, coal and uranium. Canada ranks among the first half-dozen coun¬ tries in commercial agricultural produc¬ tion, fisheries, metal mining and manu¬ facturing. BUSINESS STRUCTURE 'J'O THOSE distributors of motion pictures on an international scale who maintain their own offices in Can¬ ada, we are regional. Those who own and operate Canadian exchanges with franchises for Hollywood product con¬ sider us national. Six USA film com¬ panies have their own offices in the six distribution territories of Canada, which to each is part of a sales region that includes areas in both countries. One English company, J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors (Canada) Ltd., has its own exchange system, through which it also releases the product of MonogramAllied Artists and Eagle Lion-Classics, both USA companies, under arrange¬ ment. Canada’s two leading exhibition com¬ panies have their final authority outside our borders. The leading circuit, Famous Players Canadian Corporation Ltd., is a subsidiary of Paramount International Films Inc., New York, NY, which is part of Paramount Pictures Corpora¬ tion, while Odeon Theatres (Canada) Ltd., is part of the film and theatre empire controlled by J. Arthur Rank and his associates from London. Two Canadian-owned circuits each operate a single theatre in the USA, while one Canadian with theatre and film interests, Paul Nathanson, controls a regional USA circuit of theatres. Canadian motion picture production, which is elaborated on elsewhere in this issue, has relatively little status theatri¬ cally. ECONOMIC STRUCTURE CANADA, WHICH IS a piece of the ^ USA film industry’s domestic mar¬ ket, is traditionally a four-and-a-half per cent territory. That is, it returns that share of Hollywood’s earnings in both countries. However, it is freely conceded that Canada now returns con¬ siderably more than it used to and that the percentage figure for some compa¬ nies is much higher. In the field of theatre operation Can¬ ada is heavily dominated by circuits. Of Canada’s 1,860-or-so 35 mm. theatres in 1950, Famous Players and its associates operated 401 in 133 communities, while those of Odeon and its affiliates num¬ bered 115. The other important circuits and some smaller ones are in partner¬ ship with one of the top two. The greater portion of Canada's theatre dol¬ lar is handled by these two groups. The Dominion Bureau of Statistics says that 45