Emmy award-winner to visit

The executive producer of seminal television documentary, “The Selling of the Pentagon” will visit the university, his alma mater, Oct. 3-5.

Perry Wolff’s documentary, which aired on CBS in 1971, examined the use of taxpayer-funded public relations efforts on behalf of the military. The program led to the codification of journalistic standards that are still in effect in newsrooms everywhere in the country. The documentary prompted a congressional subpoena that was voted down when CBS refused to turn over the outtakes.

A producer, director and writer for some 40 years, Wolff has been honored with 15 Emmy Awards, 14 Peabodys, a Humanitas Prize, and numerous Writers’ Guild, DuPont and Polk awards. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Radio and Television, and the American Museum of Natural History all have presented retrospectives of his work.

“Picasso once said, ‘I don’t create. I find things.’ I too have stumbled into many interesting fields, mostly by chance,” Wolff says.

His reference to the artist is not by chance: in 1981 his retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art, “Pablo Picasso: Once in a Lifetime,” won an Emmy. His newest documentary, “Becoming Van Gogh,” was nominated for an Oscar and will be screened on campus Thursday, Oct. 4. “Becoming Van Gogh” will be part of an afternoon devoted to “Making Documentaries,” beginning at 3:30 p.m. in 4070 Vilas Hall. Wolff will speak at the start of the program and will take questions after the documentary.

Other feature-length documentaries in the Wolff canon include “A Tour of the White House with Jacqueline Kennedy” (1961); “Of Black America,” a six-part series with Bill Cosby (1968); “The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America” (1986); “The Battle for Afghanistan” (1987); “The Moon Above, The Earth Below,” about Apollo 11 (1990); and many more. He served as for three decades as executive producer for “CBS Reports” and “CBS News Specials,” retiring from the network in 1991.

Since then he has produced and directed 13 films for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of them are “Images of Jesus” (1993) and “The Rise and Fall of Impressionism,” which PBS aired in January 2000.

Although Wolff says he hopes the screening of his documentary on Van Gogh will entertain and offer insights, he warns against “thinking deeply about thinking deeply. Max Otto said that — he was my professor of philosophy at UW. Of course, he was a pragmatist — and he was right!”

Wolff graduated with a degree from the College of Letters and Science Department of English in 1943. During his Madison years he sometimes gave lectures at the Memorial Union on jazz.

“Making Documentaries” and Wolff’s appearance are sponsored by the UW–Madison College of Letters and Science. For information about Wolff or the event, contact Lucy Mathiak, (608) 265-8287, mathiak@ls.admin.wisc.edu.