An American Family is an American television documentary filmed from May 30 through December 31, 1971, and first aired in the United States on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) from January 11, 1973, to March 29, 1973. 12 hour-long episodes aired Thursday nights at 9:00 p.m., edited down from about 300 hours of raw footage.
WTTW is a PBS member television station in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Owned by not-for-profit broadcasting entity Window to the World Communications, Inc., it is sister to commercial classical music radio station WFMT. The two stations share studios in the Renée Crown Public Media Center, located at 5400 North Saint Louis Avenue in the city's North Park neighborhood; its transmitter facility is atop the Willis Tower on South Wacker Drive in the Chicago Loop. WTTW also owns and operates The Chicago Production Center, a video production and editing facility that is operated alongside the three stations.
The Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award honors excellence in broadcast and digital journalism in the public service and is considered one of the most prestigious awards in journalism. The awards were established in 1942 and administered until 1967 by Washington and Lee University's O. W. Riegel, Curator and Head of the Department of Journalism and Communications. Since 1968 they have been administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, and are considered by some to be the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, another program administered by Columbia University.
Ann Reinking was an American dancer, actress, choreographer and singer. She worked extensively in musical theater, starring in Broadway productions such as Coco (1969), Over Here! (1974), Goodtime Charley (1975), Chicago (1977), Dancin' (1978), and Sweet Charity (1986).
Steve James is an American film producer and director of several documentaries, including Hoop Dreams (1994), Stevie (2002), and Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2016).
David Ira "Davy" Rothbart is a bestselling author, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, contributor to This American Life, and the editor/publisher of Found Magazine.
Cinema Verite is a 2011 HBO drama film directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. The film's main ensemble cast starred Diane Lane, Tim Robbins, James Gandolfini and Patrick Fugit. The film follows a fictionalized account of the production of An American Family, a 1973 PBS documentary television series that is said to be one of the earliest examples of the reality television genre. Principal photography was completed in Southern California. The film premiered on April 23, 2011.
Thea Flaum is an American television producer best known as the creator of Sneak Previews, the movie review show featuring Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. She is currently the president of the Hill Foundation for Families Living with Disabilities, a non-profit organization founded by Thea Flaum and her husband, Robert A. Hill.
Bill W. is a 2012 American biographical film directed by Dan Carracino and Kevin Hanlon, about William Griffith Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the first feature length documentary on Wilson.
Rocky Mountain Pictures is an American film distributor. It was created by Ron Rodgers and Randy Slaughter. It was headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. It specialized in distributing conservative films. In 2016, the company was sold and moved to Chicago. Its focus changed to black, Latino and Asian-made indie films.
Tod Lending is an American producer, director, writer and cinematographer. His work has aired on ABC, PBS, HBO, Al Jazeera English, CNN, A&E; has been screened theatrically and awarded at national and international festivals; and has been televised internationally in Europe and Asia. He is the president and founder of Nomadic Pictures, a documentary film production company based in Chicago, and the Executive Director of Ethno Pictures, a nonprofit film company that produces and distributes educational films.
George Kohut was a Ukrainian-born American camera operator and workers' rights activist.
Ky Dickens is a filmmaker, writer and director best known for her documentaries Zero Weeks, Sole Survivor, The City That Sold America and Fish out of Water.
On Beauty is a 2014 short documentary film, produced by Kartemquin Films. It follows the story of Rick Guidotti, a fashion photographer who in 1998 decided to quit the fashion industry to found a nonprofit based on promoting diversity and acceptance.
Ronn Pitts was an American filmmaker who gained prominence through documenting the civil rights movement in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s. Pitts was a native of Bronzeville, Chicago. He is most notable for having broken the color barrier in Chicago's film industry, becoming the first black filmmaker to be hired by the NFL, and the first black professor hired in the film department at Columbia College.
Wilding Picture Productions, Inc. was a major supplier of audio-visual communications services, involved primarily in the production and distribution of motion pictures, slidefilms, TV commercials, and business shows. It produced industrial films for many corporations on a wide range of subjects, from expounding proper use of the company's products to productivity. During World War II, it was the main supplier of war-related films for the United States Armed Forces.
Kelly Richmond Pope is a forensic accountant, professor at DePaul University and filmmaker who analyzes corporate crime. Her documentary on whistleblowers, “All the Queen’s Horses” won the HBO Spotlight Award for Best Documentary at its World Premiere in 2017 and the Golden Laurels Award at the 2018 Beloit International Film Festival.
Ashley Spires is a Canadian children's book author and illustrator. She is the creator of the Binky the Space Cat graphic novels series and the 2014 bestseller, The Most Magnificent Thing.
Jeremiah Hayes is a Canadian film director, writer and editor. He is most noted as co-director, co-writer and the editor of the film Reel Injun, for which he won the Gemini Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Program at the 25th Gemini Awards in 2010. Hayes is also recognized for his work editing Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, for which he won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Editing in a Documentary at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards in 2018. Reel Injun won a Peabody Award for Best Electronic Media in 2011 and Rumble won the Special Jury Award for Masterful Storytelling at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. In 2020, Rumble received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary. In 2021, Reel Injun is featured in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures core exhibition of the Stories of Cinema.
John Anderson is an Emmy award-winning and Grammy-nominated American documentary film director, producer, editor and writer whose primary subjects are rock, blues and folk musicians. Anderson often makes films about musicians he admires, such as Brian Wilson, the American singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded The Beach Boys. His interest in film-making began when he saw Richard Lester’s “A Hard Day's Night” at the age of 10. Some of Anderson's inspirations are the works of many filmmakers, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Murray Lerner and Jerry Lewis. He is an alumnus of Northwestern University School of Communication, where he studied Radio/TV/Film and Music Theory & Composition.
