Judy Crichton
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Judith "Judy" Feiner Crichton (November 25, 1929 – October 14, 2007) was an award-winning documentary producer and a pioneering woman in American television broadcasting.
A daughter of Ben and Edith Lansburg Feiner, as a teenager she assisted her father, a television producer, with the first television coverage of a presidential election in 1944. The fledgling network, WCBW-TV (a precursor of WCBS-TV), broadcast from Grand Central Terminal by coaxial cable. Crichton's job was to write the names of the states on a blackboard and record electoral college votes as they came in. Crichton continued her television career by working for DuMont Television Network in the late 1940s. She was a researcher, writer and associate producer of a game show called "What's the Story?", featuring Jimmy Cannon, Harriet Van Horne and Meyer Berger; the show provided clues about unidentified historical events which contestants would have to identify.
Women were not present at network news organizations as writers, directors or producers during the 1950s and 1960s, and Crichton began her producing career as a writer and producer for the Goodson-Todman game show, I've Got A Secret, from 1952 through 1968. At the same time, she wrote and produced a radio series for actress and consumer advocate Betty Furness called Dimensions of a Woman's World.
Crichton was the principal organizer and producer of New York City's city-wide events in celebration of the first Earth Day in April 1970. In 1971, Crichton produced (with Chester Feldman) a documentary of the making of the cast album of the Broadway musical Company; the result, Company: The Making of a Cast Album, was one of the first cinéma vérité documentaries broadcast on network television and an early example of the behind-the-scenes genre that would become a television staple.
In 1974, she became the first woman producer for the prestigious documentary unit, CBS Reports. She produced and wrote such award-winning documentaries as The CIA's Secret Army, The Battle for South Africa (the first American glimpse into training camps for the African National Congress), The American Way of Cancer, and The Nuclear Battlefield. As a producer, co-director and co-writer of "The Nuclear Battlefield" (1980), Crichton won three Emmy Awards.
Judy Crichton moved to ABC News in 1981 where she was a producer, writer and senior producer for ABC Close-up, the network news' documentary unit. She produced Fortress Israel, Oh Tell the World What Happened (about the massacres in the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps); and The Fire Unleashed. For Oh Tell the World What Happened, Crichton won a DuPont-Columbia Award. In 1982, she was the senior producer of Close-up’s three-hour biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt, for which she won a Christopher Award. In 1986 she led the first Western television journalism team to report from the People's Republic of Angola since the revolution there in 1975; these reports aired on Nightline and ABC World News Tonight.
Judy Crichton was the founding executive producer of the prize-winning PBS historical series, American Experience, from its inception in 1987 until the end of 1996. American Experience was the first network history series. During Crichton's tenure, the series, produced at WGBH in Boston, won the George Foster Peabody Award (six awards); the Alfred I duPont - Columbia Journalism Award (two awards); the Writers Guild Awards (five awards); the Organization of American Historians (five awards); and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Emmy Awards (seven awards). Under her leadership, "American Experience" produced documentaries such as The Donner Party, The Battle Over Citizen Kane, FDR, LBJ, Malcolm X: Make It Plain, and Coney Island.
Crichton authored America 1900 (published by Holt in 2000), which surveyed the pivotal historical experiences of that year in American history. She was co-writer with David Grubin for his PBS documentary based on the book.
Judy Crichton was one of the women in news profiled in the 2001 PBS documentary, She Says: Women in News. She recounted that "[T]he first wave of women in journalism were trying to push back those barnacles that had stuck to our brains since childhood that said we were the second sex, that we were inferior creatures, that men knew everything."
President Bill Clinton awarded Judy Crichton the National Humanities Medal in December 2000. On awarding the medal, President Clinton said, "In creating and producing the PBS series "The American Experience," she set a new standard for what television documentaries can be. With talent, passion and purpose, Judy Crichton has elevated a medium she loves and lifted all those who watch it."
In 1998, Crichton received the Evelyn F. Burkey Memorial Award from the Writers' Guild of America (East). The Burkey Award is presented annually to "one whose contributions have brought honor and dignity to writers everywhere". She was the fourth woman to receive the Burkey Award.
[edit] Personal life
Judy Feiner was married to the novelist Robert Crichton, who died in 1993. They had four children, including a daughter who is now deceased. Judy Crichton died in October 2007 while living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City.
[edit] Sources
- A Conversation with Judy Crichton ([1])
- Talking History with Judy Crichton, Ken Burns, GBH magazine, October 1990
