Jamieson Film Company

Hugh V. Jamieson Sr. grew up in Burlingame, Kansas, where a traveling motion picture caught his interest at age eight. In college in 1910 he and friends borrowed $300 to run a makeshift movie theater. He then sold Edison home projectors to schools and toured Midwestern towns with a $75 Williamson camera, filming townspeople, developing the film in hotel bathtubs, and screening it in the same towns. He arrived in Dallas on Christmas Eve 1915. The next spring he teamed up with a sign company to sell businesses short film ads for theater screens, and that became the Jamieson Film Company. It soon moved from a spot by the railroad tracks to a studio on Bryan Street downtown.

Jamieson took some of the first aerial motion pictures in Dallas, from a homemade airplane over Southern Methodist University. In the 1920s he shot newsreels, selling his first, about sugar smuggling in Laredo, to International News and Pathé. The Texas Archive of the Moving Image says the company covered news for Universal, Pathé, Paramount and RKO. It also made one-reel films on the Urschel kidnapping and on Bonnie and Clyde, the latter with lawman Ted Hinton playing himself. Jamieson patented a film developer in 1930. He was the first independent producer to buy his own sound equipment, and in 1937 he made a film for Texas Gulf Sulphur that was the first 16mm industrial shot in Kodachrome.

In the 1950s his sons took over: Bruce ran the business, and Hugh Jr. carried on the engineering. The studio made commercials for clients such as Mrs. Baird's Bread and Imperial Sugar, along with military training films, industrial films and television programs, all with its own lab, animators, editors and camera crews. After President Kennedy's assassination, it made the first copies of Abraham Zapruder's film. TAMI calls the company a training ground for many in the Texas film industry. Bill Stokes, for one, started there and opened his own Dallas company in 1965. When Jamieson turned 50 in 1967, it was described as the oldest commercial film company still in continuous operation. That same year it formed an Equipment Division to sell the processing machines it had designed.

The decline came fast. Advertising Age reported that staff began leaving in the late 1960s. In 1968 the family sold the company to Meisel Photochrome of Dallas, and it never showed another profit. In May 1973 Meisel sold it to Kreonite of Wichita, Kansas, which wanted the manufacturing business. That September the production division's assets went to Motion Picture Laboratory in Dallas. 'We just sold some chairs, typewriters and cameras,' Bruce Jamieson told employees on Labor Day. Fifty-six years of production ended, though the Equipment Division kept selling Jamieson processors in 31 countries.