The Jam Handy is an event space in the North End neighborhood of Detroit with a unique history.

This Gothic-Revival structure is an iconic building, utilized as a film production sound stage from the 1930s through the 1960s by a company called the Jam Handy Organization, which specialized in industrial films, filmstrips, and other AV aids. The company, established in the early 1920s by Olympic Swimmer Jamison Handy, is historically significant to both American history and film history due to its role in developing the filmstrip medium and creating industrial films and training films for General Motors and the United States Armed Forces. Today the building is one of the only remaining relics of the Jam Handy Organization and Detroit’s once ambitious film industry, the largest to be located outside of Hollywood and New York City during the 1930s and into the 1960s. Hundreds of people including several very talented forgotten filmmakers like Rockwell Barnes, Frank Goldman, Gordon Avil, J. Cullen Landis and Pierre Mols, and musical director Samuel Benavie, worked in the building.

All of the company’s films applied Jamison Handy’s philosophies on the presentation of educational media which emphasized that learning should be a pleasure and not a pain in the head. We like that philosophy too.

Jam Handy Films featured high production values and were loaded with enthusiasm. The motion picture productions were well polished and often featured beautiful cinematography, a range of visual effects, cartoon animation, detailed technical animation, stop motion animation, triumphant and animated musical scores, narration that talked to the viewer, etc.  In addition to making films, the company also specialized in creating A/V training devices, such as aerial gunnery trainers during World War II for the military, an early video game type device that used 16mm film to train airplane gunners in shooting down enemy aircraft.

Most famously, and much to the delight of Morgan, the original animation of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was made at the Jam Handy.