The Moving Image

Praises be to Newton Minow. . . . He’s our best press agent and I feel as if I should send him a weekly check.

DAVID WOLPER, 1961 [End Page 22]

A December 7, 1962, Time magazine article assigned the title “Mr. Documentary” to David Wolper, the thirty-four-year-old film distributor turned documentary producer. The piece praised the variety and style of his well-crafted television documentaries and the reach and influence of Wolper Productions, a company that rivaled the documentary output of CBS and NBC. Wolper was, Time said,

the youngest, and often the most vigorous, of the three. His offices on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip have grown in the past 42 months from a five-man [bucket] shop to a 200-employee corporation with a bright white neo-Palladian façade and 40 cutting rooms—some of which are already crammed with the 8,000,000 ft. of film that Wolper is condensing into The Making of the President: 1960, a two-part version of Teddy White’s admiring chronicle of the luck of John F. Kennedy.¹

The article connected Wolper to a place, a process of filmmaking, and a product. Social reformers, major newspapers and the trade press, and the presidential administration [End Page 23] shared Time’s enthusiasm for Wolper Productions. The studio stood out within a media environment often disparaged for churning out films and television shows aimed simply to amuse a mass audience; yet, despite the high visibility of Wolper Productions during this period, the organization remains largely absent from histories of post–World War II documentary and the American film and broadcasting industries. Scholars consider the studio to be too commercially ambitious and historically minded for the New York–and Boston-based artisanal direct cinema of Robert Drew, the Maysles brothers, and D. A. Pennebaker. At the same time, Wolper Productions’s focus on documentary and its independent status fall outside investigations of both Hollywood television serials and theatrically released fiction features.² Analyzing the formation and early years of Wolper Productions reveals how Los Angeles became a vibrant center for nonfiction media at the dawn of the new decade and how the cinematic packaging of the recent and more distant past inflected the American political culture of the present. Wolper was not only a prominent figure in the city but his studio also played a crucial role in the cultural Cold War offensive of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier.

Wolper Productions drew on archival footage from studio vaults, government agencies, and stock footage companies and utilized the labor of industry technicians, celebrities, and intellectuals to create emotionally charged biographical portraits and accounts of events that bridged the divide between entertainment and public affairs programming. In the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s, the documentaries of Wolper Productions helped shape the historical consciousness of the nation by articulating many of the ideals and values underlying American claims to liberal reform at home and geopolitical power abroad.