The story
Establishment
Stuart F. Doyle and Ken G. Hall were the major figures involved in the establishment of Cinesound in 1931. Stuart Doyle was the Managing Director of Greater Union Theatres, which stemmed from Australasian Films, and it was his desire to encourage an Australian film industry that provided the impetus for Cinesound to develop. Doyle appointed his then personal assistant, Ken Hall, to the position of General Manager of Cinesound, and also put him in charge as supervisor of production. In this role, Ken Hall directed all but one of the seventeen films that Cinesound produced and also handled the business affairs of the company. Hall continued to lead Cinesound until 1956.
By 1934, Cinesound had three film studios in Australia, the original location at Bondi Junction and Rushcutters Bay in New South Wales and St. Kilda, Victoria.
The Centennial Roller Skating Rink was purchased by Australasian Films/Union Theatres at 65 Ebley Street Bondi Junction in 1925 and began making silent films. The income from the rink was still required to subsidise the film making so the site was used by skaters at night and for filmmaking by day. The Bondi Junction location was known as Studio no. 1 with an additional two studios located in Rushcutters Bay and St. Kilda.
Both Doyle and Hall were very committed to the notion of showmanship, which encompassed ideas relating to the type of entertainment the public would want to enjoy, and how to effectively publicise that entertainment to the masses. The publicity campaign for The Squatter's Daughter, and its star Jocelyn Howarth, was particularly imbued with this concept. They were also interested in creating a star system along Hollywood lines promoting the idea that Cinesound was a "little Hollywood". It was this dedication to showmanship that led to all but one of Cinesound's feature films making a profit from the first release, and all of the films eventually at least broke even. In 1939 Hall said that the budgets of Cinesound films were usually between £10,000 and £20,000, and estimated that his first fourteen films had earned £350,000 at the box office.
Corporate history
In 1933 Doyle announced he hoped to make 16 films at their various studios over the next 18 months. This never happened although the success of On Our Selection (1932) and The Squatter's Daughter (1933), along with the proposed introduction of quotas for Australian films in the mid-1930s, saw Cinesound become bullish about expansion. They increased the size of their studio to make Strike Me Lucky (1934), and announced a series of future productions, including Grandad Rudd and an adaptation of the novel Robbery Under Arms, as well as several films produced in Queensland over the next two years, one set in the cattle industry, another in the cane fields and a third on the Great Barrier Reef. It was proposed Cinesound would make 12 movies a year in the first year of the quota: four "super productions", four "quota specials", and four independent Cinesound productions. There was also talk of establishing a studio in Melbourne at St Kilda.
In 1936 they announced they would make six films a year, with one unit devoted to shooting outdoor movies.
In the end the quotas did not prove effective enough to support such a program, although Cinesound kept making movies until 1940.
Profitability
In February 1939 a company was registered, Cinesound Features Pty. Ltd., a subsidiary of Cinesound Productions Pty. Ltd, to produce the feature productions of the parent company. The directors of the new company were the same as Cinesound Productions: Norman Rydge, Edwin Geach, and John Goulston.
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1940s
Cinesound Productions produced feature films until the Second World War, when it was considered that feature films were too great a financial risk to undertake. Cinesound then concentrated on producing the Cinesound Review, a newsreel that they had been generating to exhibit alongside their feature films.
After the war, the British businessman J. Arthur Rank bought a controlling interest in Greater Union, and used the theatre chain primarily to exhibit British films, including those from the Rank Organisation, whilst discouraging local feature production. Hence Cinesound never regained its place as a major local film producer, and Australian film production was almost non-existent for the next two decades.
In 1940 the Australian Government decided to channel news footage to the public through the existing newsreel companies, Cinesound and Movietone. In the same year Cinesound abandoned feature production for the duration of the war. By this stage it was estimated Cinesound films had earned £400,000 at the box office.
In 1942 Cinesound provided the operational base for the film unit of the US Signal Corps to prepare newsreels for viewing to American troops in the South West Pacific theatre of the war.
In 1946 arrangements were made with the commercial film distribution companies to distribute selected Commonwealth Film Unit productions in Australian cinemas on a commercial basis. Similar arrangements existed for the release of general sponsored documentaries produced by Movietone and Cinesound.
Other Australian producers were almost totally deprived of access to commercial cinema screens.
Despite the success of Ken G Hall's last feature, Smithy (1946), which was backed by Columbia Pictures as a means of repatriating frozen currency held in Australia due to wartime restrictions, Greater Union Theatres decided not to resume post-war production through Cinesound.
From Wikipedia’s article on Cinesound Productions, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3