Frank Barhydt(I)
- Producer
- Additional Crew
Frank Barhydt Sr. was born in Minnesota around 1915. He was reared in
journalism, and by 1936 was working as a continuity writer-director and
later a publicity director for WHB Broadcasting Co. in Kansas City,
Missouri. Barhydt Sr.'s colleagues during these years included Kansas
City newspaper and radio people such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley,
John Cameron Swayze, and Howard K. Smith, who later became big network
news names. In 1942, Barhydt Sr.'s son, Frank Jr., was born. That same
year, Frank Sr. gave up his promising career in broadcasting and
journalism to devote himself to work at the Calvin Company of Kansas
City, then one of the leading producers of industrial and educational
short films in America. There, Frank Sr. was seduced by the steady
income for twenty-nine years. He was beguiled by a business "where, for
the first time, you could see what you'd done and keep looking at it."
In 1947, after five years, Frank Sr. was promoted to a position as
"head of production," meaning he was in charge of coordinating all
productions and crews as well as clients as the studio's operation had
grown large enough for this to be required. By 1972, Frank Sr. had
supervised the making of several hundred nuts-and-bolts films, although
there were some exceptions --- for instance, in the early 1960s, Frank
Sr. directed a series of short comedy films on the subject of the
industrial film business (such as "Your Name Here") for the
entertainment of the attendees of the Calvin Workshops, annual events
held in Kansas City by Calvin for the training of other industrial
filmmakers. The best years at Calvin had been in the 1950s, when the
filmmakers were all young and enthusiastic, and when there was a
feeling that this small-pond filmmaking might lead to something bigger
and better. Indeed, back in those days, Frank Sr. had helped director
Robert Altman, an early Calvin employee, learn the ABCs of filmmaking.
Altman later made a feature film, "The Delinquents," in Kansas City,
and went on to become one of Hollywood's most important filmmakers.
Calvin's business had declined since the 1960s. By 1972, when Frank Sr.
retired, the company was no longer at the top, far from its heyday, and
it went out of business several years later. However, Barhydt's son,
Frank Jr., went on to have great success in Hollywood screenwriting and
news reporting. After taking after his father and studying journalism
at the University of Kansas during the 1960s, Frank Jr. reported for
the Kansas City Star and joined the Associated Press and then moved to
Hollywood in the 1971 and for eight years wrote for a health magazine.
This experience led him to write the screenplay for Robert Altman's
film "Health". Altman and Frank Jr. got along well as collaborators,
and also worked on "Quintet" (1979), "Tanner '88" (1988), "The Player"
(1992), "Short Cuts" (1993), and "Kansas City" (1996). Both Frank
Barhydt Sr. (now 91 years old) and Frank Barhydt Jr. (now 64) live in
the Kansas City area today.