Hollywood for Automakers:

Jam Handy & The Rise of Detroit’s
Industrial Film Industry

Joseph E. Mills & Sons, The Jam Handy Building (1919) East Grand Boulevard, Detroit, MI

[Thread]

Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy (1886-1983) was a filmmaker, inventor, entrepreneur, and in his youth, a competitive swimmer. He won a bronze at the 1904 Olympics and is credited with introducing strokes like the Australian Crawl to the American public.

After being expelled from University of Michigan for a satirical cartoon of a professor, he got a job with his hometown paper the @chicagotribune. He worked in advertising, where he became fascinated with the potential of new mediums for promoting and explaining products.

Handy left the Tribune to work making worker training slides for National Cash Register. During WWI he was hired by the US Army to produce tutorial slides for operating new military equipment. This led him to finally start his own film studio: The Jam Handy Organization

Jam Handy started out subcontracting promotional films for larger ad agencies. But by the 1930’s business was booming and he decided to move his studio to Detroit to be closer to its biggest client—General Motors.

Jam Handy purchased the shining white Gothic-Deco temple from the Maranatha Baptist Tabernacle, a few blocks east of GM’s massive new headquarters in New Center. From 1936-1940 he produced a series of legendary films, including the drama film “Master Hands” for Chevrolet.

Yes, there are GIF versions of Jam Handy filmstrips explaining how different parts of the automobile work:

The building was a completely self-contained film studio, complete with a recording space for the Jam Handy Orchestra. In addition to corporate films, its animation studio produced the first animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and was a pioneer in stop-motion animation.

Which leads me to the strangest part of the Jam Handy oeuvre...

From 1936-38 Jam Handy produced a series of animated films for Chevrolet following the adventures a gnome named Nicky Nome. The plots featured Chevy cars saving Nicky and other characters from some evil villain.

GIF from the Jam Handy for Chevrolet film “A Coach for Cinderella”

Most of Jam Handy’s Chevrolet fantasy films are on YouTube. This is the film One Bad Knight (1937) which has some pretty cool early animation:

Jam Handy Organization produced over 25,000 films at their Grand Boulevard studio between 1935 and 1969, when the company was sold to NYC-based Teletape. After sitting abandoned for many years, the building was rehabbed and is now used as an event and performance space.