Tom Daly (filmmaker)

Thomas Cullen Daly OC (April 25, 1918 – September 18, 2011) was a Canadian film producer, film editor and film director, who was the head of Studio B at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).
During his 44-year career, Daly produced, edited and/or directed 315 films.
His remarkable awards roster includes eight BAFTA awards, eight Venice Film Festival awards, seven Cannes Film Festival awards and ten Oscar nominations. On April 27, 2000, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Thomas Cullen Daly was the second of three children born to Katherine Cullen Daly and Richard Arthur Daly. His was a prominent family; his mother was a Forest Hill socialite and his father was a stockbroker and founder of R.A. Daly and Company. Tom attended Upper Canada College and then University College, Toronto. There, he sat on the school's Art Committee and, as a member of the College Literary and Athletic Society, acted in and directed plays and musicals, and won first prize for a poem called Musician's Lament. He was also his class president and, in a 1938 address, advised fellow students to “not attempt too much...it is better to do one thing, or a few things, well.”
Daly graduated in 1940 and sought to go into the field of information, or anti-propaganda communication. A year earlier, the Canadian government had created the National Film Board of Canada, which was a perfect fit for Daly's aspirations. He asked his Upper Canada College principal, the very highly regarded Terence MacDermot, for a letter of reference. MacDermot wrote directly to NFB Commissioner John Grierson, telling him that Daly was “A first-rate classical scholar...clever and quick above the average, with a ready pen and refreshing personality....Remember he can create with his pen, and his flair is dramatic. If you can find a place for a possible soldier in that (information) field, I think you would be repaid by his dog-like devotion and talents.” Daly did not see this letter until his retirement party in 1984. But he was hired and, in the fall of 1940, moved to Ottawa.
Daly was passionate about assisting in the NFB's war effort. Grierson was taken with his intellect and bookish manner and hired him as a production assistant, jokingly calling him "the best butler in the business", an expression which would serve as the title for film scholar D.B. Jones's decades later book on Daly, The Best Butler in the Business: Tom Daly of the National Film Board of Canada. Daly learned the art of film editing from filmmaker Stuart Legg; while he is not credited until 1943, it is likely that Daly worked on some of Legg's 1940-1942 films.
As head of the NFB's Unit B, Daly was involved in, or responsible for, numerous milestones and achievements in both documentary and animation film art, including Cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema productions. He was also heavily involved in the multi-projector cinematic presentation In the Labyrinth, which eventually led to the development of IMAX. Daly was persuaded to put aside his studio responsibilities for a year and a half to edit In the Labyrinth.
Daly also produced such works as Colin Low's Corral, Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor’s Lonely Boy, Koenig and Low's City of Gold, Kroitor and Low's Universe, Arthur Lipsett’s Very Nice, Very Nice, Robin Spry's One Man, and Gerald Potterton’s animated short My Financial Career. Daly also served as executive producer on Candid Eye, a 14-part cinema-vérité series made between 1958 and 1961.
Daly ran a mixed-discipline studio that included many of the most talented Canadian film-makers of the time, including an animation group with Norman McLaren, Don Arioli, and Robert Verrall; a documentary team including Roman Kroitor and Terence Macartney-Filgate. Both Colin Low and Wolf Koenig worked at various times in both areas.
In 1980, Daly received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2000.
He died on September 18, 2011, after a lengthy illness, at the Chateau Westmount residence in Westmount, Quebec.
All for the National Film Board of Canada
Who Will Teach Your Child? (1948)
Science at Your Service (1949)
Family Circles (1949)
Teeth Are to Keep (1949)
Feelings of Depression (1950)
A Friend at the Door (1950)
Family Tree (1950)
Royal Journey (1951)
The Longhouse People (1951)
Caribou Hunters (1951)
Breakdown (1951)
Canada's Awakening North (1951)
Pen Point Percussion (1951)
Fighting Forest Fires with Hand Tools (1951)
The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952)
Lismer (1952)
Age of the Beaver (1952)
Varley (1953)
Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway Switchman (1953)
Corral (1954)
Physical Regions of Canada (1954)
Riches of the Earth (1954)
One Little Indian (1954)
A Thousand Million Years (1954)
The Homeless Ones (1954)
Iron from the North (1955)
The Jolifou Inn (1955)
To Serve the Mind (1955)
Gold (1955)
City of Gold (1957)
Canadian Profile (1957)
Blood and Fire (1958)
The Changing Forest (1958)
The Living Stone (1958)
City Out of Time (1959)
Fishermen (1959)
Radiation (1959)
The Back-Breaking Leaf (1959)
Pangnirtung (1959)
The Cars in Your Life (1960)
Circle of the Sun (1960)
Universe (1960)
A is for Architecture (1960)
Microscopic Fungi (1960)
Life in the Woodlot (1960)
Roughnecks: The Story of Oil Drillers (1960)
Lonely Boy (1961)
Cattle Ranch (1961)
Do You Know the Milky Way? (1961)
Very Nice, Very Nice (1961)
The Days of Whiskey Gap (1961)
Runner (1962)
My Financial Career (1962)
The Joy of Winter (1962)
Kindergarten (1962)
The Living Machine (1962)
The Climates of North America (1962)
21-87 (1963)
Pipers and A’ (1963)
The Great Toy Robbery (1963)
Sky (1963)
A Christmas Fantasy (1963)
I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (1963)
Christmas Cracker (1963)
Legault's Place (1964)
The Edge of the Barrens (1964)
Nobody Waved Goodbye (1964)
Above the Horizon (1964)
Free Fall (1964)
Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak (1964)
Jet Pilot (1964)
The Hutterites (1964)
An Essay on Science (1964)
High Steel (1965)
Stravinsky (1965)
Island Observed (1966)
Helicopter Canada (1966)
The Forest (1966)
Poen (1967)
Danny and Nicky (1969)
Mrs. Ryan's Drama Class (1969)
Falling from Ladders (1969)
Untouched and Pure (1970)
Prologue (1970)
Half-Half-Three-Quarters-Full (1970)
Espolio (1970)
November (1970)
Legend (1970)
Pillar of Wisdom (1970)
Sad Song of Yellow Skin (1970)
This is a Photograph (1971)
Norman Jewison, Film Maker (1971)
Wet Earth and Warm People (1971)
The Mechanical Knee (1971)
The Sea (1971)
Pandora (1971)
The Sloane Affair (1972)
The Huntsman (1972)
Centaur (1972)
Accident (1973)
Coming Home (1973)
The Man Who Can't Stop (1973)
Action: The October Crisis of 1970 (1973)
Sananguagat: Inuit Masterworks (1974)
In Praise of Hands (1974)
Waiting for Fidel (1974)
Mr. Symbol Man (1974)
Descent (1975)
Musicanada (1975)
Blackwood (1976)
Los Canadienses (1976)
One Man (1977)
I'll Go Again (1977)
Travel Log (1978)
Meditation in Motion (1978)
An Easy Pill to Swallow (1978)
The Last Days of Living (1980)
North China Commune (1980)
Standing Alone (1982)
Time for Caring (1982)