Scott Craig, a versatile and award-winning producer of television documentaries for two Chicago television stations, has died.
Scott Craig loved telling stories as a versatile and award-winning producer of television documentaries for two Chicago television stations.
“Scott Craig was a consummate documentarian who embodied the definition (that) the documentary is like making a movie only without a script,” said documentary maker and former Ch. 2 News anchor Bill Kurtis.
Craig, 89, died after a brief illness on April 18 at Munson Medical Center in Traverse City, Michigan, said his daughter, Amy Coleman. He had lived in Leland, Michigan, since 2008 and previously had divided his time between homes in Leland and Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood.
Born William Scott Craig in Bexley, Ohio, Craig grew up in Wooster, Ohio, and received a bachelor’s degree from The College of Wooster, where his father was head of the speech department and directed campus stage productions.
“What (my father) loved was the way in which a stage production was a little different every night. As it turned out, I was quite different,” Craig told the Tribune in 1988. “I enjoy mapping everything out, putting it in place, always knowing just what’s coming next.”
Interested in drama, Craig earned master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I never took a film class or a television class, or a journalism class for that matter,” he told the Tribune in 1988. “My interest was entirely in the theater.”
Craig started work as a radio disc jockey in 1957. In 1959, he broke into television, appearing on the air at WCIA-TV in Champaign. The station allowed him the opportunity to experiment with some 40 half-hours’ worth of programming. Inspired by old Depression documentaries that he had seen, Craig and his associates started putting together mini-documentaries.
Craig came to Chicago in 1963 to work for Channel 2. Craig moved to Channel 5 in 1965, where he began winning local Emmy awards for his documentaries.
Craig’s early subjects included the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, overlooked Illinois natives and an examination of Cook County’s unified circuit court system after judicial reform in 1964 did away with a hodgepodge of independent courts.
“Rarely, if ever, does he turn out an inferior product,” the Tribune’s Clarence Petersen wrote of Craig in 1971. “In Chicago television he has thus become the standard by which all others are judged.”
In 1975, Craig returned to Channel 2 as an executive producer, and that same year he also began his own production company. Craig’s first documentary for Channel 2 was a one-hour special on Chicago musician Oscar Brown Jr.
“He was a great storyteller. No matter where you went, Scott had a story to tell about whatever was happening. He knew how to give a beginning, middle and end and keep your interest the whole way,” recalled Kathy Giangreco, who worked with Craig at his production company for many years. “He was endlessly curious about everything, and he always seemed to know the subject that was most important at the moment.”
Molly Bedell, a former producer at Channel 2, recalled the first documentary that she had worked on with Craig, a 30-minute special aired in 1978 about the role basketball played in the lives of many Black youngsters. Titled “Going Up Easy…Coming Down Hard,” the documentary “was just a natural” for Craig, Bedell said.
Bedell noted that Craig wasn’t afraid of blowback with his documentary subjects. A two-part 1978 documentary that she and Craig co-wrote, “A Matter of Policy,” took on large insurance companies and their close relationships with state legislators.
“That really is a great example of Scott’s commitment to solving a problem and also his ability to get management and everybody on board,” she said. “These big insurance companies were all over us. And it was two hours from a local station to look at what was a national problem.”
Other subjects of Craig’s documentaries in the 1970s and ’80s included postpartum depression, America’s inland waterways, the condition of Chicago’s public schools, pollution and a 1988 documentary, narrated by Kurtis, on the widows of men who served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War and the often-neglected women who also served during that war.
Craig won a Peabody Award in 1983 for “Studebaker: Less Than They Promised,” about the 1963 collapse of the Studebaker automobile empire in South Bend and the human impact of its closing, and he won a duPont-Columbia Award for “Once a Priest,” a 1977 documentary about the religious and personal fates of 10 priests who graduated from a seminary in 1957.
One of Craig’s most controversial documentaries, the Emmy-winning “Watching the Watchdog,” aired in 1981. Craig, Bedell and Kurtis took on ABC’s “20/20” program and correspondent Geraldo Rivera for ambush interviews. The duo also took aim at Chicago’s Better Government Association for its reporting, and they flagged the Chicago Sun-Times’ reporting methods in its famous “Mirage” bar investigation.
“I made a few enemies with that one,” Craig told the Tribune in 1988. “People at ABC in New York and some people right here wanted to punch me in the nose.”
Craig also produced individual documentaries on Chicago luminaries Studs Terkel, Jane Byrne and Irv Kupcinet.
Craig later produced programs for HGTV and PBS, including “Lost in Middle America,” which was narrated by actor Hal Holbrook. In all, Craig won 32 Emmy awards from the Chicago Chapter of the Television Academy.
“I’ve always been the dinosaur,” Craig told the Tribune in 1988. “There’s nothing new there. In Chicago, the stations have competed on different levels, prestige being one of those levels. And that’s helped make a career for me. I don’t have any illusions about it. I might be around long enough to see (the hour-long documentary) come back. Then again, maybe I won’t. Either way, it’s not going to change what I do.”
After retiring from television production in 2004 and winding down his production company, Craig lived full time in Michigan, where he created a radio program called “The Story Next Door” on Interlochen Public Radio. He later compiled short vignettes about people from northern Michigan into a 2013 book by the same name. Craig also wrote and directed a theatrical version of his book.
Craig authored a second book, “Laughing in Leelanau,” which was published in 2020. At the time of his death, he was working on a third book, and he also had written an unpublished memoir based on the camera operators he worked with. Craig also wrote, acted in and directed two plays adapted from works by authors in northern Michigan.
Two previous marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, Craig is survived by his second wife, Carol Bawden; another daughter, Jennifer Craig Knight; and four grandchildren.
A service will take place on June 24 at The Old Art Building in Leland, Michigan.
Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
