The career of S. C. Campbell in aviation films

In 1923 First World War veteran Sterling Campbell left Toronto to seek a new Life in California. After spending a financially successful year in San Diego selling bootlegged gin to the Navy and living from racetrack winnings at Caliente, Campbell arrived in Hollywood hoping to find work in the expanding motion picture business.;After serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the war he returned to Hollywood for two years before coming back to his native Canada. In 1946 he directed the early Canadian feature film Bush Pilot. When his efforts towards building up the Canadian feature film industry failed he did some work in television as a Producer on the successful series Cannonball. After touring some Canadian universities and colleges lecturing on his career and making guest appearances in television and radio he quietly retired.;In 1975 a young university student named Richard Irvine met Sterling Campbell. He felt Campbell had made a contribution to the production of aviation films in the United States and Canada. He decided to assemble all available evidence to document Campbell's career. Preliminary research indicated virtually nothing had been published about Campbell and that he was almost unknown in Canada where he had been born.;The author investigated primary and secondary research sources such as films, books, archive documents etc. and conducted many hours of interviews with Campbell himself and some of his contemporaries in the motion picture business. The resulting thesis attempts to structure and interpret the various data relating to Campbell's career in aviation films. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).;Campbell worked on the first Academy Award winning film, Wings, in 1926 and then on such air epics as Hell's Angels, The Dawn Patrol and numerous others before his Hollywood career paused with the advent of the Second World War.