AustLit

Entrepreneur, film exhibitor, producer.

The son of William Francis and Angeline Thring, little is known of Frank Thring's early life other than that he initially started out as a bootmaker, before attempting a career as a magician sometime around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1904, he married Grace Wight in Gawler, South Australia, listing bootmaker as his trade on the marriage certificate. As with many other touring variety showmen of the era, Thring began screening films as part of the evening's entertainment, and eventually moved into film exhibition as a full-time career. His first venture in the field is believed to have been in 1911, when he started the Biograph Pictures Co in Tasmania. He later moved to Melbourne to work as a projectionist for Kreitmayer's Waxworks. In 1915, Thring became part owner of Electric Theatres, which operated Melbourne's Paramount Theatre. Three years later, he took up a position as managing director of J. C. Williamson's Films, and by 1926 was managing director of Hoyts Theatres. Under Thring's direction, seven palatial Regent cinemas were built by the organisation.

In 1931, he sold his interests in Hoyts to the Fox Film Corporation and set about establishing his own company, Efftee Films. Between 1931 and 1936, Thring directed and produced eight feature films, along with nine shorts and a series about the Great Barrier Reef. The films were The Haunted Barn (1931); Diggers (1931, starring Pat Hanna); a remake of The Sentimental Bloke (1932); His Royal Highness (1932), Harmony Row (1933), and A Ticket in Tatts (1934), all three starring George Wallace; The Streets of London (1934); and Clara Gibbings (1934).

Determined to help build an Australian film tradition, Thring campaigned vigorously for the Australian government to apply a quota system to protect the local film industry from being inundated by foreign product. He also set up his own theatrical operations, Efftee Players, at the Garrick Theatre, Melbourne. One of his goals at this time was to increase the chances of world-wide distribution by first producing material on the stage. His idea was that if a show succeeded with a live audience, he would then adapt it into a cinematic version. Arguably his greatest theatrical endeavour was the Varney Monk / T. Stuart Gurr musical Collits' Inn (1933). Two other successes were his 1934 production of the Dudley Glass / Adrian Ross romantic musical The Beloved Vagabond (first staged in London in 1927) and Varney Monk's The Cedar Tree (1934). Although Efftee Films undertook screen tests for the lead roles in a proposed cinematic version of Collits' Inn, and began negotiations with British entrepreneur Charles B. Cochrane, Thring's death from cancer in 1936 saw his plans for the venture shelved. He was survived by a daughter from his first marriage, his second wife Olive (nee Kreitmayer), and their son, the actor Frank Thring Jnr.