An eye on history: Regional film pioneer Snyder turned his love for the cinema
into a career
By Gerry Gilmour
The Forum - 06/26/1999

Bill Snyder dims the lights, draws shut the drapes and cues the VCR with his remote control.

Flickering images on the TV screen - recorded on 8mm film and since transferred to videotape - carry him back to downtown Fargo, in the spring of 1938.

"Historic stuff," Snyder says as he settles into his easy chair. The 83-year-old Fargo man is the father of Bill Snyder Films, the longest-running film business in North Dakota.

Snyder and his camera were at curbside and atop buildings the evening of April 7, 1938, as more than 1,000 North Dakota State University students - led by the Gold Star Band and nine ROTC units - marched on Broadway.

They were protesting because the North Central Association of Colleges that day had removed NDSU from its list of accredited colleges, citing Gov. Bill Langer's purge of college president John Shepperd and a number of senior
administrators and faculty members.

The short newsreel ends happily. Footage filmed a year later shows students surrounding a train, welcoming new college president Frank Eversull - recently appointed by the new citizen-controlled Board of Higher Education - as he
returned from Chicago, having successfully restored NDSU's academic standing.

A lot of film

These are the first of countless frames Snyder and company captured through the years. By the time Snyder retired, in 1983, the company had produced more than 800 industrial motion pictures and television commercials.

Lee Massey, president of Media Productions, which acquired Snyder's business in 1994 from Meyer Broadcasting, began working with Snyder in 1966. He says Snyder was a true pioneer in the film industry.

"Bill is one of those rare individuals who was able to incorporate a great deal of technical expertise and creativeness, and still have a great deal of fun," Massey says. "That's something I've always admired. I think we all learned a lot from Bill."

Massey is consolidating his film and production departments in new quarters on South University Drive.

As part of the move, he's donating Snyder's extensive film collection to the North Dakota State Historical Society.

Those hundreds of reels this summer will be shipped to the Heritage Center in Bismarck. There, they will be cataloged and preserved for posterity. The collection includes three films from 35mm footage that had been made from 1916-1920 by Frithjof Holmboe Productions of Bismarck, which was believed to be the state's first movie maker, and two restored silent movie comedies produced in Casselton in 1922 by North Dakota native Angela Gibson. "I've felt - and I still do feel - a great deal of responsibility to the legacy that Bill Snyder Films is," Massey says. "I want to maintain the respect that Bill had for the industry."

Early attraction

Snyder's business was one born of a love affair with film. As a boy Snyder, plunked down his nickels to see early cinema releases at The Fargo, The Garrick, The State and The Roxy theaters in downtown Fargo. As a man, his interest in film took him to Los Angeles, where he went to work for Technicolor in the film laboratory. Two years later - with an appreciation for the art of professional film making and a brand new 8mm home movie camera - he returned to Fargo to attend NDSU.

The march on Broadway is just one of the events he recorded. "I talked Casey Finnegan, the athletic director, into letting me film the football games for team study," Snyder says. "That fed my sports movie bug, but I had to go to war in 1942 with the U.S. Army Signal Corps."

While in the Pacific theater, he studied cinematography books and decided to make industrial movie making his career.

"I thought it would be a great adjunct to business merchandising," Snyder says. Immediately upon returning from active duty, in January 1946, he ordered a professional 16mm camera.

Paul Abrahamson, marketing manager for a large grain elevator company and later the first administrator for the North Dakota Wheat Commission, hired Snyder for his first job. The company wanted to introduce selective weed control chemicals to Midwestern agriculture.

"In the film we sprayed half a flax field with the test chemical weed-killer, and then let the field grow," Snyder recalls. "The sprayed half turned blue with flowers; the other half yellow with wild mustard blooms. It made spectacular pictures."

He put Bill Snyder Films on hold in 1947 and 1948 to join the Gatti-Hallicrafters African Expedition as a motion picture cameraman and ham radio operator. When he returned, he joined Arch Oboler, a famous radio play writer, working on projects in Africa and Hollywood.

Snyder returned to Fargo again in 1949. He sold audio visual products and made films on the side, including one for the Erskine (Minn.) Snow Plow Co. As a Signal Corps reservist, he was called back to active duty during the Korean War.

Snyder joined radio station WDAY in 1952. "They hired me as a 'motion picture man' in anticipation of bringing television to the Red River Valley," he says. For the next six years he shot and edited feature and spot news pieces for
WDAY-TV. He also became a regular stringer for Walt Disney Productions of Burbank, Calif. Walt Disney was producing the Mickey Mouse Club show for ABC-TV. The show included 15-minute "Mickey Mouse Club Newsreel" segments three times a week.

Snyder covered a five-state area, filming light-hearted features for the program. "I liked it because there wasn't any blood and guts," Snyder says. He's especially proud of two of his Walt Disney films.

The first features the Linton (N.D.) Junior Firefighters. "These junior and high school lads have spent many hours learning from adult firemen," the narrator notes, as the film shows boys draped in oversized fire jackets dousing a staged
oil fire in a field and then being summoned downtown to 'save' a young boy from the Linton Café, which is engulfed in smoke.

The second features then 12-year-old Carol Lee Neville, "Champion HorseTrainer." Snyder followed the girl and her family for a summer, from their farm near Cannon Falls, Minn., to shows throughout the Midwest. The film culminates
with Neville's first-place showing at the Minnesota State Fair.

Starting the business

Snyder took a sabbatical from WDAY in 1956 to work with Flint Advertising on a promotional film for the Greater North Dakota Association. That half-hour documentary film led to a contract with the Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association (GTA) of St. Paul for the production of agricultural films and television commercials.

The moonlighting soon turned into a full-fledged business. Snyder in 1958, along with WDAY art director Norman Selberg, an accomplished artist and cartoonist, left WDAY to form Bill Snyder Films. John McDonough, a talented film
editor and music specialist fresh out of the army and the University of Southern California film school, joined the firm in 1959.

They worked mostly in black and white, as color TV wasn't yet possible. Their shop included an animation stand, for full cel animation, a complete 16mm sound recording, mixing and equalization studio.

You might remember some of their early work: animated commercials for King Leo's (home of the 15-cent hamburger); Metropolitan Savings and Loan; Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota; Northwestern Savings and Loan; and Gate
City Savings and Loan (with its familiar jingle, "You're Saving for Better Way of Life").

A half-hour documentary for the North Dakota Wheat Commission, documenting durum wheat production and its use in pasta products, turned out to be a break-through film for the business. The film, shown during public service times
on hundreds of Midwest TV stations, was a prize winner in many film festivals. It also led to a contract with the Farm Credit Administration.

"The films we were awarded took us all over the United States to film farm cooperatives and their part in national agriculture," Snyder says.

One of the company's strongest overall marketing efforts was for the budding Melroe Co. of Gwinner, N.D., Snyder says.
"Our first film for them was about the Harroweeder, a farm tillage tool. We introduced the first model with a 10-minute film that was run on television stations in a five-state area around the factory, as an info-mercial sales film," Snyder says.

The results were astounding; Melroe's entire year's production was rapidly sold as a result of the TV showings. Melroe also hired Bill Snyder Films for a piece demonstrating the operation of the company's new three-wheeled "turkey barn cleaner."

"The film worked magic," Snyder says. "Then, some months later, Sylvan Melroe called to say the company had a new model of the 'turkey barn cleaner,' only now it had four wheels.

"We quickly produced a 10-minute film, sent it to the laboratory for release printing, but before we had the first print, the sales manager had a salesman pick up that print from the lab and start using it."

The campaign was a success. The first showing of a film about the now famous Melroe Bobcat triggered the sale of 100 units to a national fertilizer company. "Our cameras went from one day in a barn filming the milking of cows to the
next day in a surgery suite putting ear and brain surgery on film," Snyder says. A medical film they made with Dr. Duane Nagel and Dr. Lee Christoferson was chosen as the best medical educational film of the year. An hour-long TV film of
life at the Anne Carlsen School in Jamestown - and a shorter version for service clubs - was successful in raising funds for the school for the handicapped.

Notable work

Among the most famous Bill Snyder Films is "Cry of the Marsh," an educational ecology film produced with Agassiz Junior High School science teacher Bob Hartkopf.

Shot on a farm near Appleton, Minn., the film detailed how man was taking over the marshlands of America for roads, farms and housing developments, and in doing so, driving out the wildlife.

Scenes show earth-moving machines filling in a marsh, a bulldozer chasing and a prairie file sweeping across a nest of baby birds. Later, when the film was released, they received hundreds of letters from school kids demanding to know why they stood by and let the tiny ducklings burn up.

Actually, the ducklings were dead pheasant chicks obtained from a hatchery and stored in a deep freeze until they were used in the scene.

"Cry of the Marsh," won first place in nearly every educational film festival it was entered.

Toward the end of Snyder's VCR tape is footage his firm shot for the state of North Dakota's Department of Tourism's "Go North to Dakota" campaign. There's a scene shot from a bluff, of a boat slicing through still waters below the Four Bears Bridge on Lake Sakakawea. Of American Indians dancing at a powwow. Of four sunset-silhouetted cowboys on horseback staring from a

Badlands bluff.

Snyder has seen these images countless times, but still can't stop himself from chuckling as he watches a hapless high school cowpoke trying valiantly but in vain to wrestle an oversized steer to the ground in a roping event at a Fort
Yates rodeo. Says he nearly ran out of film on that one. "It was a fun business," Snyder says as he opens the drapes. "We never got rich, but we did have fun."