Look/Listen

Guggenheim Productions Inc/Erich Roland 2001

Charles Guggenheim in the last year of his life, filming "Berga: Soldiers of Another War." The documentary was shortlisted for an Academy Award in 2003.

“It’s presumptuous to think you leave a legacy at all. You do what you can do. You feel blessed if other people think it’s worthwhile.”—Charles Guggenheim

Twenty pallets, 532 boxes, 10 or 20 cans of film in each. Final prints, pre-production, out-takes, trims, interviews, and background footage, spanning the decades from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. Most of it brittle enough to need cleaning and replasticizing. Some of it so fragile and vulnerable, it needs to be frozen immediately.

Klara Foeller, curator of moving image and sound collections at the Missouri History Museum, has years of work ahead with the new Charles Guggenheim Collection. “It’s one of the best organized and most extensive collections we’ve received,” she says, “and it will be the most important one I work on.”

There’s an undercurrent of elation in her voice; the museum never dared presume it would receive this trove. Guggenheim came to St. Louis around 1952 to start KETC public television—then got fired by the board of the new St. Louis Educational Television Commission. He and his team had been trundling big, clunky cameras and equipment all over the city, preparing intelligent programs on the arts, science, history, and social issues. The Ford Foundation had offered a matching grant to cities launching public television stations, Arthur “Cubby” Baer had given a huge chunk of change, and a Mothers March for Channel 9 had brought in more than $100,000. For a while, it looked like St. Louis might launch the first public-broadcasting station in the country. Then the gush slowed to a trickle. Houston set the record instead, and tension built between Guggenheim, who had a clear, uncompromising vision of what public television should do, and the board members, who were feeling their way. Abruptly, they severed the relationship.

“He had tears in his eyes,” his former assistant, Kitty Drescher, recalled years later—on camera, when KETC was filming a tribute to the man it had fired. He’d wound up staying in St. Louis for 14 years, making films about civic issues, desegregation, politics, architecture, and the arts. Then he and his wife—Marion Streett Guggenheim, who was from an established, six- or seven-generation St. Louis family—moved to D.C., where he lived until his death of pancreatic cancer in 2002.


“I think you’re trying to make films, if you can, that tell stories that transcend time...”—C.G.

Guggenheim set out to be a farmer, not a filmmaker. Several colleges refused him admittance because he couldn’t spell, and he wound up in the ag school at the University of Iowa. He wasn’t, he soon realized, very good at animal husbandry. He landed a job with an independent TV producer in New York, working as a writer. And he learned how to make movies by working on Fearless Fosdick, a children’s show that filmed marionettes enacting a comic strip parody of Dick Tracy.

Now the dyslexia that had made school a misery began working in his favor. He fell in love with the world of ideas his old textbooks had blurred into nonsense, and his curiosity and fluid, unconventional way of thinking gave him a distinctive approach to filmmaking.

In 1955, when St. Louis was trying to avert catastrophe with the largest bond issue in its history, Guggenheim made "The Big Issue," explaining how problems of poverty, congestion, disease, traffic, garbage, and flooding could be resolved. The doc created lively public discussion and was considered one of the most effective measures of  public education in the drive. At election time, the bond bill was divided into 23 specific proposalsl—and every one of them passed.

Guggenheim directed and produced a series of films in collaboration with Laclede Gas (12 films on the history of St. Louis), Fleishman Hillard, Civic Progress, and Mayor Raymond Tucker. He created some of the first political messages for TV, but they were gritty, substantive, issue-based messages that aimed to reveal a candidate’s position, not slickly packaged quick stabs at an opponent’s character.

In 1956, he received his first Academy Award nomination, for “A City Decides.” The documentary short captured the intense convictions, the excitement and confusion and implacable hatred that swirled as St. Louis took steps to desegregate its schools.

In 1967, he released “Monument to the Dream,” about the making of the Arch. For the first time, he used a considerable amount of footage shot with small, hand-held cameras. This lifted the heavy, static feel of his earlier work, until the documentary soared with the same grace as its subject. It won an XI Gold Mercury Award at the Venice Film Festival—the first time in the festival’s history that the award was given to an American.

Despite the accolades, he walked away somber and thoughtful. “I don’t think it could have happened today,” he remarked later. “No way. You tore down the history of the city, leveled it.” The Arch was designed in the era of urban renewal, when problems were razed and replaced with futuristic solutions. Guggenheim once thought of Pruett-Igoe housing project as another of those solutions. After St. Louis blew it up, he hung a photograph of the explosion in his office as a reminder.

Another, far different film he shot during the St. Louis years was The Fisherman and His Soul, based on a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. At the time, he announced that it had changed his entire approach to filmmaking. “He could have been selling,” his daughter, Grace Guggenheim, says with a chuckle. Fisherman was entirely Charles’ idea, an independent project he had to shop around. “He tried to make it look adventurous, when it was really very difficult,” she explains. The film was shot in a remote part of Brazil, with local actors who didn’t speak English and a crew that didn’t speak Portuguese. Film and equipment were expensive and almost impossible to obtain. There were romantic complications between male and female leads. Seven people got malaria, including Marion Guggenheim. Grace, a toddler, was with them, along with her little brother Jonathan, who wasn’t walking yet. The cameraman, worn down by all the snags and hardships, quit before the film was finished, and Charles photographed the last scene himself.

Three years earlier, in 1959, he’d shot another independent feature, The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery. He persuaded local cops to act their parts, and he paid Steve McQueen $400 a week to play the lead. Like Fisherman, the film was a mix of truth and art—“sort of what people are doing now,” Grace says, “this merging of documentary and feature films.”


“You can play the piano well in a house of ill repute, but you’re still playing in a house of ill repute.”—C.G.

In 1967, after making a series of films for the U.S. Information Agency and pioneering the political film for various candidates, many from St. Louis, Charles decided to move his family to D.C. Grace was 7; she remembers him sitting her down the kitchen of their house on Westgate Avenue and telling her they were leaving. She sobbed, thinking of all her friends in University City. He went to the refrigerator and took out the chocolate-chip ice cream.

He didn’t want to leave his friends, either—and as it turned out, he didn’t have to. “There was a loyal core in St. Louis,” Grace says. “Most of my parents’ friends in Washington,” like the Danforths and the Symingtons, “were from St. Louis.”

While in D.C., Charles made three commissioned presidential biographies—Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. He also made a great many short political films and ads, but he made them his way, as attempts to educate rather than manipulate. He knew how to use emotion in the service of an idea, but he drew the line at telling somebody else what to think.

He grew famous for his political work. Then, in the mid-1980s, he quit, announcing that American political campaigning was “sick,” oversimplified, too negative. The ads were paid for by unknown sponsors. The 30- and 60-second spots were too short to provide substance; instead, they were used to slander, infer, hit-and-run. And they had woven themselves inextricably into the political process.

That’s when he used his famous quote, about playing the piano in a house of ill repute. And that’s when he stopped playing. He returned to the themes he loved best: struggle, courage, freedom. In “The Making of Liberty,” you see through the eyes of the artisans and laborers who built the monument in 1886 and the artisans and laborers who restored it 100 years later. In “Island of Hope, Island of Tears,” you accompany the 18 million men, women, and children who came from the Old World to the New between 1890 and 1920, the single largest migration in human history. In “D-Day Remembered” (another Academy Award nominee, on which Grace collaborated), you hear directly from the men who planned and fought in the invasion.

Foeller, at the Missouri History Museum, calls Charles Guggenheim “the Ken Burns of his day.” Asked to compare the two men’s styles, Grace hesitates. “You have to give Ken Burns a lot of credit. One, he knew how to market. Charles lived a very quiet life, and most people don’t know who he is. A lot of people know who Ken Burns is. But Ken Burns creating animotion using photographs? Charles was doing that well before him!

“Charles’ type of filmmaking was for the theater,” she continues. “His films are experiential: You live inside them. He didn’t do series; each film was unique. Ken Burns does series. He has a format.”

Grace started working with her father in 1986, just as film technology changed radically. “When I started, film was still cut on a flatbed,” she marvels. “But nonlinear editing was coming in, so we could improve how sound was used, have multiple tracks. It made our films very sophisticated.”

Grace now runs her father’s firm, Guggenheim Productions, Inc., and heads Grace Guggenheim Productions LLC, which is creating, preserving, and distributing a collectors’ DVD series of his films. She also produces her own work: Her newest doc, The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby, opens in New York on September 23, right after her brother Davis Guggenheim's  From the Sky Down—a documentary on U2—opens the 2011 Toronto Film Festival. Davis has made three films in the past five years that rank within the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time (An Inconvenient Truth, It Might Get Loud, and Waiting for Superman).


“Unless you are telling a story that is compelling and reveals the human condition, it is very difficult to communicate effectively.” —C.G.

Giving the Guggenheim collection to the Missouri History Museum “just feel right,” Grace says, “since so much of his early work was produced in St. Louis.” She’s heard it said that because of her father, St. Louis might have had more films made about itself than any other city. He filmed documentaries about the Cardinals, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Arch, the city schools, housing… Not only did he get his first Academy Award nomination for a St. Louis documentary, but he was still living here when he received his first Oscar, for "Nine From Little Rock." He found quite a lot of talent here, including Robert Wykes, who composed music for his films for more than 20 years. His career making political television started here. His wife was born here, his closest friends were St. Louisans. And getting fired here was, he said later, one of the hardest and best things that ever happened to him, catapulting him into more independent, further-reaching work.

Grace is working with the museum staff to make sure the collection is as complete as possible. Working together, she and her father used to shoot about 30 hours for one hour of film, she says. “But we might get thousands of hours of stock footage, going through and picking out just what we wanted. Berga, we only shot location for less than two weeks, which is very efficient, but we spent a year and a half gathering background and interviewing people and pre-cutting those interviews.

“Charles would cut his picture first, then lock it and write his narration to the picture, which is very unusual,” she adds. “You have to have an inner tempo, and know what you are trying to say.”

Now much of his work is at the Missouri History Museum, going through painstaking triage.

“Every box is a surprise,” Foeller says happily. “Adlai Stevenson running for governor in 1974. Al Gore running for Tennessee’s senate in 1970. Political ads from the ’60s and ’70s that probably haven’t been seen since they were aired. And then of course there’s the whole world of stuff that didn’t make it into production. We will be looking carefully at outs—multiple takes, documentation, background—and trims.”

Charles focused consistently, especially in his later decades, on human suffering, struggle, injustice, resilience. His last film was his most personal. Berga: Soldiers of Another War tells the story of the men in his division in World War II who, because their names sounded Jewish, were sent to a German labor camp. Charles escaped their fate because he’d been hospitalized for an infection when they sailed for Europe. He was haunted by what happened the rest of his life.

At the end of Berga, one of the survivors says, “Ah, it’s no good to remember. But you have to remember because people, people forget what went on.”

With Charles’ work safely ensconced at the Missouri History Museum, there’s no longer any danger of forgetting what it meant.

The Missouri History Museum welcomes Grace Guggenheim on Saturday, September 17, at 10:30 a.m. She'll give the audience “An Insider’s View of Documentary Filmmaking,” and a film in the new collection will be screened. For information call 314-746-4599 or go to mohistory.org.