Centron Corporation is a defunct industrial and educational film production company, that specialized in classroom and corporate 16mm films and VHS videocassettes. A slightly smaller company than its contemporaries such as Encyclopædia Britannica Films, Coronet Films and Learning Corporation of America, it was very successful from the late 1940s through the early 1990s, gaining added fame with the Academy Award-nominated Leo Beuerman in 1969.

Overview

Founded in 1947 in Lawrence, Kansas, by boyhood friends Arthur H. Wolf, a veteran of Calvin Films, another Kansas film company, and Russell A. Mosser of Boeing-Wichita. The name was chosen to incorporate the key words "central", given that the company was located in the center of the United States, and "electronic" in honor of the "electronic age of the future". Centron successfully competed with large companies on both coasts, and was widely known for its high quality films, coming in on time and under budget. The company kept afloat for decades making many technical instructions, cooking and sewing demonstrations, teacher aides and safety reels. It added some social guidance films in the 1950s to compete with Coronet Films, along with zoological and geographic topics that held stronger interest among school students. Harold "Herk" Harvey was a principal director at Centron. His 1962 feature Carnival of Souls was produced with several people associated with Centron. John Clifford, a Centron screenwriter, wrote the script for Carnival of Souls. One of his most popular educational series covered the land and people "south of the border", as the Middle America Regional Geography and La América del Sur series. Scripted by Peter Schnitzler and shot in many locations by cameraman Bob Rose, they were made under some political difficulties for that time. At one point, the series almost had to exclude Chile when government officials initially prevented film stock from leaving the country. One of Centon's most prolific scriptwriters was Margaret (Trudy) Carlile Travis, and Linda K. (Sam) Haskins also wrote and directed, two of the relatively few women working in the sponsored film industry. It was during this period that the company expanded its distribution of outside productions, including a number of National Film Board of Canada titles. The 1970s was a particularly golden age for nature documentaries, especially the Elementary Natural Science series of the team of Karl and Stephen Maslowski. In 1981, Wolf and Mosser sold Centron to the Coronet division of Esquire, Inc. Production carried on, mostly in Illinois, under the Coronet banner for a few years with Bob Kohl as primary head. In 1984, the Gulf and Western Industries conglomerate took over the mother company and, in a swift move, Kohl successfully purchased Centron from Gulf and moved production back to Lawrence, Kansas. After continuing through to the end of the 1980s, including a series of instructional films for Encyclopædia Britannica, Kohl sold the company facilities to the University of Kansas in 1991, with the library of films added to their archive by the time the company folded in 1994. Today, The Phoenix Learning Group has distribution rights to the Coronet library, including many of Centron.

Legacy

Centron won many awards for its films, the most famous being the Oscar nominated Leo Beuerman. This simple profile of a short handicapped man with his tractor in downtown Lawrence was produced on a budget of $12,000 and eventually became one of the most popular classroom films of all time, selling an impressive 2,300 prints. Some of their films were satirized on the cult TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, including Cheating, Why Study Industrial Arts? and What About Juvenile Delinquency?, each directed by Herk Harvey.

List of films

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