Media Burn picks

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  [Veeck: A Man For Any Season raw #42]

  1985-04-08 / Chicago Collection, Eclectic Sports Collection

  Raw footage for the documentary Veeck: A Man For Any Season. This tape continues an interview with Bill Veeck at home. The tape begins in the middle of him discussing what it is like to be disfigured. He describes various public health perceptions about leprosy and cancer. Later, he talks about his “ongoing love affair” with the English language and quotes Rudyard Kipling’s “The Wolf.” The end of the tape is footage of glass mobiles hanging inside and in Veeck’s backyard. Read on →

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  [Wrigley Field B-roll]

  [1985?] / Chicago Collection, Eclectic Sports Collection

  Footage inside Wrigley Field shot for the documentary Veeck: A Man For Any Season. Read on →

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  The Search and the Gift

  2011 / Chicago Collection

  A documentary about one family’s search for a kidney transplant and the gift they received from a generous friend. Read on →

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  A Conversation with Studs Terkel and Andrew Patner

  2004-06-04 / Chicago Collection, Studs Terkel

  00:00 Titles. Andrew Patner introduces some known and little-known facts about Studs Terkel, as they sit in a lecture hall at the University of Chicago in front of an Alumni Association audience in 2004. “Studs has had a… complex relationship with the University of Chicago.” “Mixed, mixed.” 01:22 Studs relates the story of how he got the nickname “Studs.” The story takes several diversions, as Studs talks about being in a play called “Waiting for Lefty” and his law school Read on →

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  Where We Live: The Changing Face of Climate Activism

  2011 / Political Documentaries

  This 9-minute film documents one of the fastest-growing and most effective forces combating climate change: organized grassroots movements. Centering around efforts to overturn California’s historic global warming legislation, the film highlights how community organizations and networks throughout the state played a crucial role in mobilizing the vote in immigrant and low income communities to defeat Proposition 23, making the case that equity-based and community-driven solutions are essential in bringing about the deeper restructuring of societies to confront the climate crisis. Read on →

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  It’s a Living: The Unemployment Line

  1976 / Chicago Collection

  Part of the “It’s a Living” series created by Videopolis based on Studs Terkel’s book Working, which focuses on workers in Chicago. This tape is the record of a single hour at the state unemployment compensation office in Logan Square on the city’s northwest side. People in the line talk about what it’s like to be out of work as they deal with bureaucratic entanglements of their cases. As the program progresses, a family finally receives the check they needed to survive–after eight attempts. Read on →

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  It’s a Living: Paper Wagon

  1976 / Chicago Collection

  Part of the It’s a Living series created by Videopolis based on Studs Terkel’s book Working, which focuses on workers in Chicago. This tape unfolds practically in real-time in the bowels of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway Station. It features discussion and interaction with the workers on newspaper delivery trucks and railway workers wheeling wagons to commuter trains. Read on →

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  Studs’ Place: Jimmy Romano is Home – The Living City

  [1951? and 1953] / Chicago Collection, Studs Terkel

  Studs’ Place (1951?) produced by Charlie Andrews. This episode is called “Jimmy Romano Is Home.” A neighborhood kid comes back from college on the East Coast and suffers embarrassment over his working class roots. Eventually he realizes the people in his neighborhood have more talent than he thought. Features musical performances by Chet Roble and Win Stracke. Followed by “The Living City” (1953). Instructional film dealing with urban problems such as how are existing slums to be eliminated, how to deal with congestion, etc. “How did our cities get this way?” “I was in bombed out cities in Europe in the war. And then I came back to Chicago to this.” We need to tear down the slums, and build up new affordable housing. Studs Terkel narrates. Read on →

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