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 olper’s fledgling production company was soon inundated with projects for networks and corporate clients. The staff grew to more than 200 as his reputation for versatility and storytelling genius spread.
Although he had missed World War II by a year, growing up in wartime had left a mark on Wolper. From his earliest work, he understood that chronicling the human condition at the ultimate point-of-crisis was inherently interesting to audiences. Again and again, he would bring civilians into the trenches and into the war councils where the destiny of nations was decided. Documentaries such as 1962’s D-Day and 1964’s The Battle of Britain and The Yanks Are Coming embedded the imagery of the world’s darkest moments in the consciousness of Americans.
Political rivalry, too, captivated Wolper’s imagination. He counts The Making of the President 1960, which was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Theodore H. White, among his favorite projects.
The 1963 documentary exemplifies the producer’s trademark narrative style – human and anecdotal, never pompous. Retracing the personal dramas behind the Kennedy-Nixon race, he gave Americans their first intimate glimpse of the quest for the nation’s highest office. After its initial airing on ABC, The Making of the President 1960 was shown in 40 countries, and it won the 1963 Emmy for “Program of the Year” as well as three other Emmys.
Of David Wolper’s numerous political films and documentaries, his avowed favorite was The Making of the President 1960, which won four Emmys. |
The documentary also made television history – as the first independently produced show to be picked up by a network. Race for Space had apparently taught network executives it was unwise to ignore or underestimate Wolper.
Around the same time, Wolper began exploring the biography-documentary format. Through 65 episodes of the Mike Wallace-hosted “Biography” series (the template for today’s A&E “Biography” series), 38 episodes of the proto-cinéma-vérité style “Story of...” series, and his conflict-themed “Men in Crisis” series, Wolper drove home the point that narrative documentaries can have mass appeal. In half-hour segments, these shows pulled audiences into the lives of such 20th-century giants as Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth and Mahatma Gandhi; they explored the dynamics between rivals like Mao Tse-Tung and Chiang Kai-Shek; and they enshrined cultural icons like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and John Lennon.
But Wolper’s fascination with political leaders never waned. He paid tribute to John F. Kennedy with A Thousand Days (1964), a documentary commissioned by the National Democratic Convention, and helped the nation mourn the loss of JFK with the movie Four Days in November (1965). Shunning partisan politics, Wolper went on to produce several films on Richard Nixon for the 1972 Republican Convention.
Serious as they were, his political and wartime documentaries reveal only one side of Wolper as documentarian. In the early 1960s, he also began experimenting with a much lighter form of non-fiction filmmaking.
The motion picture industry, he realized, was itself rich in lore. And most of its history was perfectly preserved on old movie reels: a documentary maker’s dream come true. Wolper had the inspired notion of weaving together archival footage from famous films. Thus, a new genre was born: the Hollywood compilation documentary.
Wolper defined this niche with three early documentaries: Hollywood: The Golden Years (1960), Hollywood: the Great Stars (1962) and Hollywood: The Fabulous Era (1962).
 n 1965, Wolper stumbled upon yet another programming innovation when the National Geographic Society approached him to produce a series of nature specials for CBS.
“We felt that we could apply the dramatic documentary form to travel-adventure shows, so that they would make exciting viewing,” Wolper says.
He was right. The Wolper company produced 27 “National Geographic” specials over the next 10 years, winning a host of Emmy and Peabody awards.
While working on one of the segments, Wolper got to know ocean adventurer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Together, Cousteau and Wolper hatched a novel plan: a production crew would sail on the Calypso during a five-year, worldwide voyage – amassing material for four underwater TV specials. “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” series debuted on ABC in 1967 with “Sharks!”
Among other things, “Undersea World” demonstrated that audiences respond to an active, on-screen narrator. This gave the inventive producer yet another idea. Recruiting literary figure George Plimpton (now editor of The Paris Review), Wolper sent the colorful raconteur on real-life adventures from Hollywood to a remote jungle, from a football field to a circus tent. The “Plimpton” specials first aired in 1968.
JFK waiting for the cameras to roll. |
As a footnote, Wolper also unwittingly introduced the now-familiar “docu-drama” form to television. In response to his 1971 documentary, Say Goodbye (depicting the illegal slaughter of polar bears), hunting and gun advocates complained about the use of re-enacted footage – accusing Wolper of trying to pass off the dramatizations as reality. The producer fought back. His argument was simple but effective: felons won’t ever let a film crew show them in the act; thus to depict crime, re-enactment is unavoidable. Wolper emerged the clear victor in the controversy.
He took the genre to the next level with his 1971 completely scripted dramatic documentary, They’ve Killed President Lincoln! It led to many other Wolper historical docu-dramas, including the “Appointment with Destiny” series, which ran 1971-73.
With his documentaries, docu-dramas, biographies and nature-travel programs, David Wolper gave more than spectatorship to a new generation growing up in front of the TV. He offered a sense of active involvement in the adventure, in the battle, in the extravagant and sometimes decadent lives of the world’s power players.
olper’s television career took a brief hiatus in the late ’60s, after the producer sold his company to the Metromedia conglomerate, which in turn merged with United Artists. As part of the UA deal, he agreed not to produce TV programming for a year.
The embargo gave the versatile Wolper an incentive to delve into the world of feature filmmaking. In rapid succession he produced eight theatrical movies, starting with two war dramas, The Devil’s Brigade in 1967 and The Bridge at Remagen in 1968. He followed those up with a 1968 romantic comedy, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium; the 1971 classic fantasy Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory; and The Hellstrom Chronicle, a 1971 documentary about mosquitoes that earned Wolper his first Academy Award.
The Oscar didn’t go to his head, however. Forming a new incarnation of the Wolper Organization, he eagerly returned to television at the first opportunity. “To be honest with you,” he says, “[movies] bored me. The power in feature filmmaking lies in the director, not the producer.”
But the TV landscape had changed in the interim. As the ratings race heated up among the three major networks in the early ’70s, documentaries had become risky propositions. Never slow to adapt, Wolper plunged into the booming situation-comedy arena. In 1974 and ’75, he came up with two big hits: “Welcome Back, Kotter” and “Chico and the Man.” Around the same time, he began producing serious TV movies such as The Morning After, an Emmy-nominated drama that gave a shockingly realistic account of alcoholism.
In 1976, Wolper again sold his company – this time to Warner Communications. He has remained under exclusive contract with the company for the past 23 years.
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