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ITEM 2 · THE INDUSTRIAL-FILM TEST — THE COMPANIES' FILMS BELONG TO THE COMPANIES' CITIES
The industrial film — the sponsored picture a great firm made about itself, its plants, its processes — is the checklist's subtlest test, because a town can be on film without any filmmaker ever choosing it; for Walkerton's anchor firms the test returns a negative with its reasoning printed. The town's one national tenant of the film era was Heinz — the salting station of Businesses's food course — and Heinz was among the great industrial-film sponsors of its age; but the Heinz picture record documents the company's Pittsburgh world and its flagship plants, and no Heinz film is documented as made at, or showing, the Walkerton station in the sponsored-film catalogues as searched. The town's other picture-age firms — the glass works, the bottling plant, the lumber and elevator trades — stand below the sponsored-film threshold entirely: firms of their size did not commission pictures, and none is documented as the subject of another sponsor's. The item closes DUG as a negative: Walkerton's factories worked in the decades when industry filmed itself, at the ends of other companies' camera lists, and no print reaches this ground.
Principal sources: the sponsored-film catalogues searched for the town's firms, November 2026; Businesses (the Heinz station; the picture-age firms).