Filmmaker Scott Craig produced hundreds of documentaries, winning 32 local Emmys, a national Emmy and a Peabody Award. He died April 18 at age 89.
David C. Brigham
Scott Craig knew how to tell a story.
As a producer, writer and director of documentaries for more than 40 years, he told a broad range of stories that hit local and national airwaves for stations like PBS, WBBM-Channel 2 and WMAQ-Channel 5.
Mr. Craig laid out in vivid detail the human impact of the closure of an automobile plant in South Bend, Ind.
He unfolded Mike North’s head-scratching rise from the high school drop-out and hot dog stand owner to one of Chicago’s best known and most successful media personalities.
And he teamed with former WBBM reporter Bill Kurtis for “Watching the Watchdog,” which drew attention to reckless investigative reporting methods and coined the phrase “ambush interview.”
He worked on hundreds of documentaries and won a national Emmy and 32 local Emmys, as well as a Peabody. In 1997, he was inducted into the Silver Circle of the Chicago/Midwest chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
Mr. Craig died April 18 of multiple organ failure. He was 89.
“Scott elevated documentary production in Chicago to a new level,” said award-winning television producer and friend Thea Flaum.
“He knew how to find the story in a subject that would engage people and tell it with power. In some ways, he helped pave the way for the rising tide of documentary production that we see today,” Flaum said.
“He started in Chicago with Channel 5, and he went to Graceland Cemetery and found famous tombstones and told each of their stories, and from then, he did a series of wonderful, usually hour-long documentaries,” said former colleague Ed Spray.
Mr. Craig later joined Channel 2 and worked on documentaries with Kurtis and Walter Jacobson, as the two helped transform the station into the best watched news program in town.
“Those were Camelot days when everything was clicking,” Spray recalled.
Mr. Craig later formed his own production company, Scott Craig Productions.
One of his favorite projects was “On the Waterways” — a 13-part PBS series hosted by actor Jason Robards in which a group of aspiring young filmmakers traveled the country in a 60-foot motorboat, telling the stories of locals at different port towns along the way.
“He loved working with those young guys and teaching them how to tell stories,” recalled Mr. Craig’s daughter, Amy Coleman, a former supervising producer for Oprah Winfrey.
He also produced two installments of the “Frontline” series for PBS and worked for HGTV on “The Good Life” and “Extreme Homes.”
Mr. Craig could also captivate with his own story. After graduating high school in Wooster, Ohio, he and three friends bought an old hearse for $360.50, named it Ava after movie heartthrob Ava Gardner, outfitted it with beds and drove to Alaska. They painted “From Wooster, Ohio to Fairbanks by Hearse-Back” on the rear of the vehicle and garnered media coverage along the way.
In Alaska, Mr. Craig, an Eagle Scout inspired to head north by reading Jack London tales, earned money fighting forest fires. When he wasn’t fighting forest fires, he earned a better wage as a comedic lip-syncing performer at nightclubs in Fairbanks.
Mr. Craig was born June 24, 1936, in Bexley, Ohio, to Evelyn Craig, a homemaker, and William C. Craig, a theater professor at The College of Wooster, the school his son would later attend before earning a PhD in theater from the University of Illinois.
Mr. Craig began a family with his first wife, Susann Craig, and found steady work at a CBS affiliate that served the Champaign and Urbana area as a host of children’s programs. He performed magic tricks and interacted with puppets. He also served as the station’s weatherman.
His entrance to filmmaking happened unexpectedly, when his boss asked him to head up a documentary unit at the station.
“You know a story has a beginning, middle and end, right? You’ll do,” Mr. Craig said, quoting his old boss, for a story that ran in the Glen Arbor Sun, a newspaper in Northwest Michigan not far from Mr. Craig’s home in Leland, where he retired.
“After a couple of films, a big city TV station reached out to bring him to Chicago,” his daughter said.
Mr. Craig was a longtime Lincoln Park resident before retiring to Michigan — although he never stopped telling stories.
He began hosting “The Story Next Door” for WIAA, a public radio in Interlochen, Mich., in which Mr. Craig described colorful local characters. The stories later formed a book by the same name. He also published “Laughing in Leelanau: Or I Swear It’s True,” a collection of funny local yarns.
Mr. Craig, who almost always wore a Cubs hat, loved golfing and practical jokes of all kinds, like prank calling his grandkids.
In addition to his daughter, Amy Coleman, Mr. Craig is survived by wife Carol Bawden, his daughter Jennifer Knight and four grandchildren.
A memorial is planned for 4 p.m. June 24 at the Old Art Building in Leland, Mich.