Although his name is no longer widely recognized, Gordon Sparling has long been touted as one of the true pioneers of Canadian filmmaking. He is credited with making about 200 films over 40 years, working as director, scriptwriter, editor and producer. A person of enormous talent and commitment, Sparling was virtually the only creative filmmaker in the Canadian commercial film industry during the 1930s. He created and produced the Canadian Cameo series of theatrical short films in 1932, the first major Canadian films with sound.
After graduating from the University of Toronto, where he had been involved with amateur theatre, he joined the Ontario Motion Picture Bureau in 1924. During 1927 and 1928, he worked as assistant director on the notorious Carry On Sergeant! (1928), and then, spent almost a year with the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau in Ottawa. Frustrated with the inertia at the Bureau, he accepted an offer to move to New York to work at Paramount's Astoria Studios.
The contributions of Sparling and Associated Screen News (ASN) to film in Canada are sometimes overlooked — or perhaps, overshadowed — by the NFB, but they were a major force in the Canadian film scene of the 1930s. When Sparling returned to Canada in 1931, he was asked to make an industry-sponsored film for ASN in Montreal. B.E. Norrish, the head of ASN, asked him to undertake the organization of a production department. Sparling accepted on the condition that he could produce a series of theatrical shorts. Norrish agreed, and thus, Sparling launched the Canadian Cameo series. Most of the films ran 10 minutes and covered a variety of subjects, including music, First Peoples, sports, drama and history. The writing was intelligent and humorous (for its day); and they were inexpensive to shoot, permitting Sparling to produce them in abundance — 85 films between 1932 and 1954.
By 1935, despite the Depression, the new production unit, operating as Associated Screen Studios, was successful enough to permit ASN to build Canada's first modern, fully equipped sound studio. Sparling experimented with various filmmaking processes, including film speed, pre-recorded music, and editing and print techniques, including “the rhapsodic technique,” which he developed in Rhapsody in Two Languages (1934). In the 1930s, he also made a number of dramatized documentaries (The Breadwinner, 1932; House in Order, 1936) in the manner of his earlier film Spare Time, 1927.
During WWII, Sparling spent three years in London as head of the Canadian Army Film and Photo Unit, where he supervised production of propaganda and training films — and 106 issues of the Canadian Army newsreel. He returned to ASN in 1946 and remained there until the production department closed in 1957. After working freelance for about a year, he joined the NFB in 1958 and was assigned to the production of Royal River (1958), a film about the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.
Sparling retired in 1966, but remained active, researching and writing the history of Canadian film. In 1974, he was interviewed for the NFB film Dreamland: A History of Early Canadian Movies 1895–1939, an anthology of early Canadian movies. Not long before Gordon Sparling’s death in 1994, filmmaker Michael Ostroff completed a short documentary about Sparling’s work, Speaking of Movies. In the epitome of understatement, Sparling described his career, "I tried to do the best I could. I didn't waste time on regrets, but tried to do better the next time."