George C. Stoney

Who was George C. Stoney?

George Cashel Stoney was a documentary filmmaker, an educator, and the "father of public-access television". Among his films were All My Babies, How the Myth Was Made and The Uprising of '34. All My Babies was entered into the National Film Registry in 2002. Stoney's life and work were the subject of a Festschrift volume of the journal Wide Angle in 1999.

George Cashel Stoney was born in 1916. He studied English and History at the University of North Carolina and Balliol College in Oxford, and received a Film in Education Certificate from the University of London. He worked at the Henry Street Settlement House on the Lower East Side of NYC in 1938, as a field research assistant for Gunnar Myrdal and Ralph Bunche's project on Suffrage in the South in 1940, and as an information officer for the Farm Security Administration until he was drafted in 1942. Throughout this time he also wrote free-lance articles for many newspapers and magazines, including the Raleigh News and Observer and the Survey Graphic. He served as a photo intelligence officer in World War II. In 1946, he joined the Southern Educational Film Service as writer and director. He started his own production company in 1950, taught at Stanford University from 1965–67 and directed the Challenge for Change project, a socially active documentary production wing of the National Film Board of Canada from 1968-70. With Red Burns, Stoney co-founded the Alternate Media Center in 1972, which trained citizens in the tools of video production for a brand new medium, Public-access television. An early advocate of democratic media, Stoney is often cited as being the "father of public-access television".