Movies: Studs Terkel

Buck Weaver and Hap Felsch are young idealistic players on the Chicago White Sox, a pennant-winning team owned by Charles Comiskey - a penny-pinching, hands-on manager who underpays his players and treats them with disdain. And when gamblers and hus...

The Big One is an investigative documentary from director Michael Moore who goes around the country asking why big American corporations produce their product abroad where labor is cheaper while so many Americans are unemployed, losing their jobs, an...

The story of Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight boxing champion....

On May 8th, 1945, writer, director Norman Corwin broadcast ON A NOTE OF TRIUMPH, an unforgettable homage to the end of war in Europe. This film shines a light on a lost work of genius, and examines it's haunting resonance to today's current events....

During World War II, hard-luck farmer Colvis Nevels leaves his rural Kentucky home to take a factory job in bustling Detroit. Reluctantly accompanying Colvis is his long-suffering wife, Gertie, a talented woodcarver set in her traditional ways. When ...

This musical adaptation of the Studs Terkel book examines the average worker's viewpoint--showing that he or she is anything but average. Based on a series of interviews with real working people--construction workers, waitresses, firemen, secretaries...

An in-depth feature length documentary of one of America's greatest and least understood authors, Nelson Algren. This never before told compelling life story reveals a unique literary voice through rare interviews, archival footage and the gritty noi...

This 90 minute, 3-act documentary details the rise & fall of Maxwell Street, Chicago's great outdoor market, the birthplace of the electric blues and where "the only color that mattered was green"....

Algren will spotlight the hard-knock life and authentic creative legacy of one of the most underrated writers of the twentieth century, Nelson Algren. Algren's brutally honest portrayal of the American underclass and his hard-nosed lifestyle became h...

Documentary narrated by Paul Winfield, this documentary follows the course of Mahalia Jackson's extraordinary life - from her humble beginnings as a sickly child singing in New Orleans churches to her breakthrough with Columbia Records and her ascend...

When twenty-six-year-olds Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn quit their Hollywood jobs, packed up a borrowed car and hit the road, it was with the deeply felt conviction that somewhere, shrouded in the din of talk shows and tabloid headlines, they'd disc...

A PBS documentary on the life and work of writer Raymond Carver. It features interviews with his family and friends, and provides an insightful look at his short stories and poems....

Quearborn & Perversion: An Early History of Lesbian & Gay Chicago (2009, 109 min) is a documentary on LGBTQ life in Chicago from 1934 to 1974. Moving from the speakeasys and Henry Gerber’s founding of the Society for Human Rights in the 1930s, to the...

This documentary features acclaimed Chicagoan broadcaster and Pulitzer Prize winner Studs Terkel talking about the value of oral history and the voice of ordinary working Americans....

This documentary examines the experiences of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, using interviews with survivors more than 50 years later. First, the film sets the context with the rise of Fascism. Then, in 1936, Spain's military revolts against the elected...

For over 60 years, Studs Terkel elevated the voices and experiences of everyday Americans through his skillful interviews on radio, in books and on TV. This documentary takes a fond and illuminating look back at one of America's most influential auth...

In the grip of the Great Depression, unemployed men and women joined an unlikely WPA program to document America in guidebooks and interviews. With the Federal Writers' Project, the government pitted young, untested talents against the problems of ev...

The world-famous Greyhound bus is almost as old as the Wild West. It is a symbol of North America, of progress, and of nostalgia. Reporter Stud Terkel travelled 2,000 miles across the United States by Greyhound. From Seattle to Chicago, he observes ...

Documentary about the blacklisted folk group The Weavers, and the events leading up to their triumphant return to Carnegie Hall....

Harley Cokeliss's Chicago Blues filmed in 1972 was a remarkable film; remarkable in that it was not just a competent documentary but a film crafted with care by professionals with a love and understanding of music and a respect for its history and ar...