Local film company, celebrating 90 years, had storied past

On North Nevada Avenue, a block north of Fillmore Street, a humble collection of old warehouses and Quonset huts houses a trucking company, a mini-storage and auto repair and paint shops.

Once upon a time, those buildings housed one of the biggest movie studios in the world. And the biggest animation studio — bigger than Disney. There was a giant advertising firm, more powerful in its field than any New York agency. Even, for a short time, those buildings housed the country’s largest aircraft manufacturer.
All of them were part of Alexander Industries, better remembered as the Alexander Film Co.

Alexander was the dominant national player in film advertising. It was the biggest employer in the city. And today, Alexander is nearly forgotten.

But it’s not gone.

Although decades, and many owners, removed from its heyday in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, Alexander Film is still in existence. Now headquartered in a small office on North Academy Boulevard, the Alexander Film Co. this month is marking its 90th birthday with an open house Friday and Saturday.

“It’s difficult to stay in business for a long time,” said John Kunze, the current owner of Alexander Film. “Just think in the last 10 years how much this industry has changed. You’ve got to figure out where it’s headed and change to survive.

“Look at Alexander, in the 1940s to 1950s, it was huge. And then by the 1960s, it was over.”

Alexander Film’s story is a classic American tale of a company’s rise and fall. Today, its star has faded, but Alexander enjoyed a glorious run.

In 1919, brothers J. Don and Don M. Alexander founded an electrical company in Spokane, Wash. J. Don was the salesman and the entrepreneur, Don M. the engineer. Right from the start, the brothers saw the commercial possibilities for the nascent film industry. As boys, they created advertising messages for clients and projected them onto bedsheets.

That grew into a business selling and filming advertisements that would air in theaters before the feature film started — just like the theater advertisements you see today. And, in the 1920s, it became a very, very big business.

“You couldn’t go to a movie anywhere in the country in the ‘30s and ‘40s without seeing an Alexander Film Co. logo,” said Steve Antonuccio, the former head of the Pikes Peak Library District’s television channel, who has researched Alexander Film’s history. “You look at television advertising today, Alexander Film created the format. They were the originator.”

The Alexander brothers moved to Englewood in 1923, then to Colorado Springs in 1928, eventually occupying 26 acres of land to house the film company, the aircraft manufacturing business and a mining company.
By the time Alexander Film arrived in the Springs, theater advertising was booming. In a 1925 manual for the company’s sales force, J. Don Alexander wrote that “the future of motion pictures as a medium for publicity has been growing in popularity by leaps and bounds.”

Alexander Film would create commercials or “art trailers” for local and national companies, then pay theaters to insert them before feature films. Overseeing this far-flung client base in the 1920s required a mobile sales force, so the Alexander brothers developed their own airplane, the Eaglerock, to deliver trailers around the country. The Eaglerock was such a hit that Charles Lindbergh purportedly wanted one for his famous transatlantic flight in 1927 — but Alexander was too backlogged to provide the plane.

The aircraft business faltered during the Great Depression, but the film side of the company kept growing. By the 1950s, a sign outside the company’s headquarters building on North Nevada read “Home — The  World’s Largest Theatre-TV Film Ad Studios.” A sign on the company doors read “Alexander Film Company — All Over the USA.”

More than 650 employees worked at the company, which had offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Although Alexander Film’s revenue came from commercials, everything that went into those ads was done in-house. The company had its own film lab and soundstages and art and music departments, all along North Nevada.

Alexander produced only one Hollywood-style feature film — a 1961 thriller called “Anatomy of a Psycho” that starred Ronnie Burns, son of George Burns and Gracie Allen, and shot in and around Colorado Springs. The film is still remembered today — albeit for being awful.

“It came out when ‘Psycho’ and ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ were big, so they combined the two titles,” Antonuccio said. “It’s a horrible film. It’s campy.”

The company’s advertising, however, was first-rate and its clients were the nation’s biggest companies — Budweiser, Chevrolet, 7-Up.

“Nowadays, most people there in the city don’t have a clue that was ever done there,” said Chris Papin, whose father, Ralph Papin, was a director with Alexander Film from the late 1950’s until the late 1960’s. “(My father) used to go back to Colorado Springs from time to time and he would tell people what he used to do and they would say, ‘What?’”

The brothers were larger-than-life. J. Don knew every employee’s name and used to pose next to a full-size cutout of himself in the entrance to the administration building. Don M. would walk through the buildings with two German Shepherds, Rocky and Ricky, descendents of Rin Tin Tin.

“He never said, ‘Hello,’ he just grunted at you,” said Arnie Blair, who worked for the company for 37 years. “You’d say, ‘Good morning, D.M.’ He’d say, ‘Mmmm.’”

Alexander didn’t pay as well as the Hollywood studios, but the brothers provided medical care and perks like parties and a softball field where a K-Mart now stands.

“It was like a big family,” said Sebastian Speranza, who worked in the sound department in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

And it was a creative place, with directors, cinematographers, editors, animators and musicians from all over the country pulled together in Colorado Springs. But it couldn’t last.

After J. Don Alexander died in 1955, Don. M continued to run the company, but was slow to recognize the possibilities of television advertising.

“His statement was, ‘Television is a fad, it’s never going to last,’” Blair said.

“They had everything to be one of the best TV production companies in the country... and they fought it,” Blair said.

By the early 1960’s, Don M. retired and the company did move into TV advertising, but it had missed its chance. Antonuccio said the company’s finest moment came in 1964 with a pioneering Chevy ad in which a helicopter lifted a car and a model onto the 400-foot tall Castleton Tower near Moab, Utah. It set the standard for every car-improbably-perched-on-a-rock advertisement since.

“It was an amazing commercial,” Antonuccio said. “It was huge for that time.”

But that was the last bang before a long decline. In 1967, the company stopped producing film and contented itself with being a film processing lab for Hollywood studios and reproducing film for companies. Ralph Papin was in charge of shutting down the production side of the business.

“I hated to leave like that,” he said. “I loved that place.”

The stately headquarters building was torn down to build a bank. KKTV/Channel 11 bought the soundstages and converted them into a TV station, where it still resides. The Alexander Film Company shrank from hundreds of employees to a few dozen, then just a handful. In 1987, it left North Nevada and its old property was fenced off and used for years as a training ground by the Colorado Springs police department.

Speranza visited the site in 1998 and found old film and equipment still strewn about. The area has since been renovated, but reminders of its history are scarce. Some of the last can be seen at Tile Traders, inside what was once Alexander’s Service Building, where there are several old cameras and a diorama from the 1950s showing the company’s buildings.

“When we came down (to the basement), it was filled with pallets and film canisters,” said Tim Black, owner of Tile Traders of buying the building 12 years ago. “You couldn’t even walk in here.”

The wonder of Alexander Film is not what it has lost, but that the company continues at all. It’s passed through several owners in the past 20 years until Kunze bought it four years ago. Now headquartered on North Academy in an unusual concrete dome that looks like a UFO, there are still a few desks and shelves left over from the company’s heyday.

What was once a goliath in the film business today specializes in transferring film and video tapes into digital formats. From hundreds of employees in the 1950s, the company now has four.

Copying decades-old movies might seem like a dead-end as people switch to digital cameras, but Kunze said it’s a surprisingly healthy business.

“You would say, ‘That’s got to be over with, doesn’t it?’ but it’s still growing,” he said. “How much VHS tape is out there? It’s just sitting in boxes and closets and attics.”

And there are some who remember Alexander former glory.

“That name is worth a lot,” Kunze said. “We get people who walk in every day who were actors or worked for the company.”

In a final twist, Alexander Film may yet have a future in the film production business: Kunze said he sees real growth for the company in creating streaming video for company Web sites.

“Everywhere you go, there’s video,” Kunze said. “There’s a lack of people to produce content, especially good content.”

DETAILS

The Alexander Film Co., at 1414 N. Academy Blvd., is marking the company’s 90th birthday with an open house 8:30a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and will be showing old Alexander films in the lobby. Alexander staff can also speak about the company to groups. 531-6311 or www.alexanderfilm.com

The Pikes Peak Library District has a large section devoted to the Alexander Film Company, including photographs, correspondence and many of the company’s commercials and documentaries. You can find Alexander Film Company promotional films on the library’s YouTube page (go to youtube.com and search for “pikespeaklibrary” or find a link at library.ppld.org ).

Tile Traders occupies the former Services Building for the Alexander Film Company at 3104 N. Nevada Ave., and has several Alexander movie projectors and cameras on display, plus a diorama showing the company’s layout in the 1950’s. 630-0645 or tiletraderscs.com

You can see Alexander Film’s classic 1964 Chevrolet ad here.

An Alexander Eaglerock bi-plane hangs over Concourse B at the Denver International Airport and another is on display at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver — 1-303-360-5360 or wingsmuseum.org