Canadian Film Weekly (Jun 25, 1947)

Page scan 0007 from Canadian Film Weekly

Record Details:

Title:
Canadian Film Weekly
Date:
Jun 25, 1947
Volume:
Canadian Film Weekly (Jun 25, 1947)
Leaf #:
0007
Language:
English
Subjects:
Motion Pictures, Film Industry Trade Magazine",Canad
Collection:
Global Cinema, Canada, and Hollywood Studio System
Format:
periodicals
Contributor:
Media History Digital Library, Canadian Picture Pioneers, Paul Moore and Jessica Whitehead
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:

Canadian Film Weekly

  • Editor: Hye Bossin (1942-64)
  • Renamed Canadian Film & TV Bi-Weekly (1965-69, editor: Stan Helleur)
  • Renamed Candian Film Weekly(1970, editor: Ed Hocura)

Canadian Film Weekly (1942-70) was edited by Hye Bossin and published by Film Publications of Canada, Ltd., wholly owned by leading exhibitor, Nat Taylor. In the late 1930s, Taylor was head of the Independent Theatre Association and his Toronto-based chain, Twinex-Century (Twentieth Century), was the largest independent circuit in the country. In 1941, however, he negotiated for chain affiliation with upstart Canadian Odeon before leveraging a better deal and greater booking control with nationally-dominant Famous Players Canada, Ltd. No longer independent, he took ownership of the Independent Theatre Association’s semi-monthly magazine, The Canadian Motion Picture Exhibitor (1940-41), installed Hye Bossin as editor, and laid plans to relaunch in January 1942 under a new name, Canadian Film Weekly. This enduring key publication was no longer solely focused on independent exhibitors but instead covered the entire industry on a national scale–exhibition, distribution and production–with some attention given to studio news from New York and Hollywood.

Bossin was a vibrant writer with a canny way with words, admired in the industry in the United States as well as Canada. He was one of a large family who lived above their father’s secondhand shop in the Jewish “ward” downtown in Toronto. His older brother was a bookie with ties to the underground; his younger brother was a famous journalist, protégé of Walter Winchell, and Hollywood screenwriter. In contrast, Hye spent nearly two decades learning the publishing trade in a printers’ shop before trying a stint as a Hollywood publicist, then writing a column for the Toronto Star Weekly before taking Taylor’s offer to edit the Film Weekly. Bossin was central to the creation of the Canadian Film Archive, the Canadian Film Awards, and he wrote some of the first histories of early cinema in Canada, published in the first volumes of the annual Canadian Film Weekly Year Book (1951-70).

In 1957, the Film Weekly had incorporated the rival Canadian Moving Picture Digest (1917-57), and began dating its start to that paper’s earlier start as the Canadian Universal Bulletin (1915-18). Subsequent variants of the Canadian Film Weekly and its yearbooks always claimed their roots all the way back to 1915 and the origins of the film industry trade press in Canada. After Bossin died in 1964, the Weekly’s new editor, Stan Helleur, renamed the magazine Canadian Film & TV Bi-Weekly, scaling back the pace of publishing but adding a purview for television and broadcasting. The annual was renamed similarly, its subtitle amended to “Year Book of the Canadian Entertainment Industry.” An attempted renewal to weekly format in 1970, edited by Ed Hocura, was short-lived and Nat Taylor decided instead to relaunch under an entirely new title, Canadian Film Digest (1971-77) and Canadian Film Digest Yearbook (1971-86).

– Paul Moore, March 2024

Further Reading

  • Bossin, Hye. “Canada and the Film: The Story of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry.” In Canadian Film Weekly Year Book of the Canadian Motion Picture Industry, 21-41. Toronto: Film Publications of Canada, 1951.
  • Moore, Paul. “Chronicling a National History: Hye Bossin’s Canadian Film Weekly and Year Book.” In Eric Hoyt and Kelley Conway, eds., Global Movie Magazines. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2024.

Date Added:
August 14, 2025
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Page 8 CASH IN With DISTRIBUTED BY ~ \PEERLESS FILMS LIMITED Canadian FILM WEEKLY —— ‘Seeds of Destiny (Continued from Page 4) generation in Europe. Will they be our friends or our enemies? The time to determine that is now. Shall they be left vulnerable to leadership derived from warped minds? The problem must be faced now in schools and shelters—or faced 20 years from now, perhaps on the battlefields. Shall the children suffer because Society has right fully disinherited their fathers? No civilized country does that in its civil and domestic life. No group of united nations, victorious in a war, should permit such a condition to arise through omission. The danger is the same through neglect as it would be if depriving these children of their legacy of a good life was a premeditated policy. _ With disturbing directness this film nps away complacency, causes apathy to disappear and reaches deep into the heart. In the entire history of the motion picture there has been nothing like it, perhaps because in the history of the world there has been nothing like that pictured. It is fortunate that the cinema art, in the hands of such able and sympathetic craftsmen as Director David Miller and Writer Art Arthur, was able to rise to what was required of it to make plain the enormity of this tragedy visited upon innocent. children. For some reason the US War Department, in the face of protests from the press and relief organizations, refused *to release the film, non-theatrically and otherwise, and was induced only at the last minute to permit its entry in the Academy Awards. Since it relented “Seeds of Destiny” has rolled up an amazing record. In a May issue of the Hollywood Reporter Edith Gwynn wrote: . “Happy to report that after the great documentary film, ‘Seeds of Destiny,’ got that Academy Award the War Department was flooded with so many requests for com mercial showings all over the country that it finally had to announce it wasn’t in the film business. The picture is proving the most potent money-raiser in history for private relief organizations as well as government channels. Congress just voted $15,000,000 for the International Children’s Emergency Fund, which ‘Seeds’ helped create through showings before UN.” The US Senate raised the contribution of Congress to $40,000,000 since and the World Church Service Committee credits the film with having raised more than a million dollars for relief work to date. One.example of the use of the film is its showing at the University of South California continuously for five and a half hours by the World Student Service Fund while students saw it in shifts. In Canada the National Film Board has 25 prints of this 25-minute picture in circulation and these, exhibited before church and service groups by the Canadian branch of the Save the Children Fund and other organizations, have brought home the heartbreaking plight of the suffering children to many persons. Dr. Lotta Hitchmanova, who exhibited a print while on a lecture tour in Canada to raise funds for the Unitarian Service Committee, said “The public was completely stunned after seeing the film.” Of Canadian interest is the fact that Arthur, a screenwriter for the past 10 years who came to Hollywood from the New York newspaper field, was a reporter in Toronto, where his folks still live. The first chairman of the California branch of Americans for Democratic Action, he was in the thick of the campaign which sent Will Rogers, Jr., to Congress in 1942. Being a man with a universal conscience, he takes pride in his war service and in “Seeds of Destiny,” a notable contribution to the greater realization of the problem of Europe’s hapless children. June 25, 1947 Warner Newsreel Set For November The first issue of Warners’ Canadian newsreel will be exhibited in’ Dominion theatres early in November, it has been announced by Haskell Masters, genera] manager of the Canadian district, Masters made the news public in Toronto following the announcement in Hollywood by Harry M. Warner, president of the company, that the newsreel, postponed since 1942 because of of war shortages, will become a reality. , Warners will sell a new issue each week in Canada, although there will be two issues in the USA weekly. The newsreel will carry Canadian sequences and be edited in New York with an eye .to interest on this side of the border. James Allen, a member of the company’s studio executive staff since 1943 and at one time pub lic relations head for the Depart ment of Justice in Washington, will head the. newsreel organization. Headquarters will be in New York, with Warners’ Brooklyn lab turning out the prints. Distribution will be under Norman H. Moray, short subjects sales manager. At present Paramount, MGM, Universal and 20th CenturyFox distribute reels in Canada, the exception being RKO, its ‘offering being restricted to the USA. Big Budget Assigned Budget for Ingrid Bergman’s “Joan of Lorraine” is set at $6, 000,000. } 4 4 \ Se : A > ‘ Smaps, i L . ‘ Do { Ves ai ~—s.4 / THEATRE REQUIRE: MENTS CONTRACT SALES OFFICE he Se 4 “ep ba