Charles Guggenheim

Charles Eli Guggenheim (March 31, 1924 – October 9, 2002) was an American film director and producer.

Guggenheim was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, into a prominent German Jewish family, the son of Ruth (Stix) and Jack Albert Guggenheim. His father and grandfather had a furniture business. He suffered from dyslexia as a child but the condition went undiagnosed and he was thought to be a "slow learner." He did not learn to read until the age of nine. While studying farming at Colorado A&M in 1943, Guggenheim was drafted into the United States Army assigned to the 106th Division. Due to a severe foot infection, he avoided active duty in the Battle of the Bulge. Upon discharge from the service, he finished his college education at University of Iowa in 1948 and then moved to New York City to pursue a career in broadcasting.

Guggenheim's first job was working for Lew Cohen at CBS, where he was exposed to the new media of film and storytelling.

He was subsequently recruited to St. Louis, Missouri, to serve as director of one of the first public television stations in the country, KETC. Two years later in 1954, Guggenheim founded his film production company, Charles Guggenheim and Associates, and produced his first feature film, The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery (1959), starring Steve McQueen. In 1956, he produced the first political advertisement broadcast on television (for Adlai Stevenson). In the early 1960s, Guggenheim formed a partnership with television and documentary film producer Shelby Storck and he and Storck collaborated on several documentaries which were nominated for and/or won Academy Awards. Guggenheim 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. Storck and Guggenheim also collaborated on a well-received political film for Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp in 1966. That year, Guggenheim moved his company and his family to Washington, D.C., where he became a media advisor to many Democratic political figures. He worked on four presidential campaigns and hundreds of gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns.

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