Movie Maker
After Dartmouth and Tuck, CHARLES A. (CAP) PALMER '23 was a New England businessman till age 35 when, vacationing in California, he wrote a short story and sold it to Cosmopolitan.
That launched his writing career in fiction and non-fiction, books and magazines, radio and screen scripts. LostBoundaries won him a Cannes Film Festival Award. Now as founder and executive producer of Parthenon Pictures, Hollywood specialists in industrial and institutional films, he has literally papered his outer office wall with film awards, including the industrial film makers' version of an Oscar and the National Visual Presentation Association's three first-place awards for this year.
It's hard to resist pointing out that he began selling sewer pipes and worked his way up.
Palmer reversed the pattern of producing industrial films or documentaries as a beginner, then growing to theatrical films.
The man who wrote the script for Walt Disney's Lady and the Tramp is the same businessman who saw the need for first-rate industrial films. He assembled a group of Hollywood professionals to serve clients like American Oil, Ford Motor Company, and AT&T.
"While I've produced my share of P.R. operas and image epics," Cap says, "my personal leaning has always been toward work-pants pictures- worker training, person-to-person sales aides, the classroom teaching of abstracts and principles; films that do specific needed jobs and show tangible results."
A former co-worker says, "Cap Palmer as a writer is the great strength of his business. Parthenon is different because Cap looks for the story angle: Who are the people, what's their problem, how can it be solved?"
"When is a writer not a writer? In business films, if the man is any good - about 90 per cent of the time," Cap says.
"The right concept is the guts of any film - especially ours."
Admirers call him "an idea-a-minute man, prolific and versatile." Robert Allen '45, former Associate Secretary of the College who worked with him on the film Dartmouth Visited, says:
"Cap recognizes himself as a show business personality, but when he's dealing with Eastern businessmen he talks differently, dresses differently. They soon gather he's immensely bright. By the time they realize he is Show Biz it's no longer threatening."
Despite his stature in his field he is very considerate of someone learning the business, according to a Goddard College man who spent a work term with him.
Says Cap, "For every important thing I know about picture business I can show a matching piece of scar tissue."
