Charles Guggenheim
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Charles Guggenheim (March 31, 1924-October 9, 2002) was an American film director and producer.
He was born into a prominent German-Jewish family in Cincinnati, Ohio (his father was a furniture salesman). While studying to be a farmer in college in 1943, at Colorado A&M, Guggenheim was drafted into the United States Army assigned to the 106th Division. Upon discharge from the service, he finished his college education at Iowa University and then moved to New York to pursue a career in broadcasting were his first job was working for Lew Cohen at CBS. It was there that he was exposed to the new media of film and story telling.
He was then recruited to St. Louis, Missouri to be the director of one of the first public television stations in the country, several years later went independent and founded in 1956 Charles Guggenheim and Associates, a film production company. There he produced his first feature film The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery, starring Steve McQueen. He also continued to produce documentaries and political films. In 1965, he moved the company and his family to Washington, D.C., where he became a media adviser to many Democratic political figures. He worked on four presidential campaigns and hundreds of gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns. While working for Robert Kennedy's presidential nomination campaign when he was assassinated, Guggenheim was asked by the Kennedy family to put together a tribute for the 1968 Chicago Conversion. It was completed in less than two months. It was shown at the convention and broadcast simultaneously. The convention hall came to a standstill for twenty minutes.
The resulting film, Robert Kennedy Remembered (1968), won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film. Although Guggenheim occasionally ventured into feature and political film production, he stayed mostly with documentary films, where he received his first Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject for 1964's Nine from Little Rock about the desegregation effort in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. He won two more Oscars for short subject documentary filmmaking, for The Johnstown Flood 1989 and A Time for Justice 1995. Twelve nominations in total.
His last documentary, was produced with his daughter and colleague Grace Guggenheim since 1986. [[Berga: Soldiers of Another War]] (2003) (TV), a little known story about a group of 350 American soldiers captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge who, because they were Jewish or the Nazis thought they "looked Jewish", were sent to slave labor camp and worked along civilian political prisoners. (Guggenheim, who was Jewish, had himself been a member of the 106th Division, which had the highest casualty rate of the Allied Divisions, but his life was spared held back state side by a severe leg infection that caused him to be left behind.) He finished the film six weeks before his death in October 2002. While finishing Berga, he died of pancreatic cancer which he had struggled with during the last seven months of his life.
Soldiers and Slaves, a companion book to the film, was published by Roger Cohen, New York Times and Herald Tribune columnists using research materials.
Guggenheim married Marion Street in 1957. They had three children: Davis, Grace and Jonathan.
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