"It's presumptuous to think you leave a legacy at all.
You do what you can do. You feel blessed if other people think it's worthwhile."
-- Charles Guggenheim

In 1954, Charles Guggenheim, a twenty-nine-year-old television producer and director, founded his own small film production studio in St. Louis, Missouri. Nearly fifty years later, Guggenheim Productions, Inc., is now located in Washington, DC, and has completed more than 500 titles. Our collection ranges from full-length feature films to campaign biographies, political spots, industrials and more than one hundred social, political, and historical documentaries. Guggenheim has received numerous honors including a Peabody, four Academy Awards and a historic record of twelve Academy Award nominations.

Charles' daughter Grace came to work with him in 1986 and has produced more than twenty of Guggenheim Productions' most current titles. She produced and managed the publicity campaign for their last project, Berga: Soldiers of Another War, which had its national broadcast debut on May 28th 2003 on PBS (check your local listings for future air dates).

In addition to continuing to make documentaries, the company is broadening the aftermarket and availability of its current films. Considering the widespread crisis in American education today, our intent is to make available to the public as many film titles from the collection as possible. Our primary mission is to widen their distribution to educators and museums around the world to inspire and celebrate our American heritage. Our goal and belief is that through a clearer understanding of our American journey we can make the world a better place.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences/Academy Film Archive will work with Guggenheim Productions on preserving critical titles from our holdings, as well as programming events with The Charles Guggenheim Center for the Documentary Film at the National Archives . The National Archives' downtown, state of the art theater located at Pennsylvania Avenue and 7th Street is currently under construction and will open in the year 2005. The Center will not only offer annual celebrations of the work of Charles Guggenheim and the vast holdings within the Archives, but it will also develop and integrate year-round programs that celebrate other accomplished documentarians, past and present. In addition, we hope to have an annual screening of Academy Award-nominated documentary films as one of the major collaborative events.

"History informs us where we come from as a people and as a nation,
what we have done, and why."
-- Charles Guggenheim