Studebaker: Less Than They Promised (1983) — the documentary of the closing

1983 · WBBM-TV, Chicago · Scott Craig Productions · a Peabody Award

The film: Twenty years after the South Bend works closed, the defining screen treatment of the city's defining event arrived from outside. Studebaker: Less Than They Promised — produced by Scott Craig and Michael Beatty, directed by Craig, narrated by Walter Jacobson, and made for WBBM-TV, Chicago, through Scott Craig Productions — took its title from the company's own motto, always give more than you promised, and set out to test the motto against the pension settlement and the human wreckage of December 1963. Its producers, in the account of the film's fullest published study, worked strongest where the record here has always worked: in the human impact. The film follows one family, the Bokons, who had appeared in a 1950s Studebaker film that presented the corporation as an extended family, and reunites them to say how their lives had changed since they were first filmed — and it builds its history out of the archive itself, the producers having sifted, the study says, through a vast archive of video, television commercials and company film among it, so that the corporation's own pictures of itself run inside the picture that judges it.

The standing: The Peabody Awards' own winners' book lists the film under WBBM-TV, Chicago, and Craig's Chicago Tribune obituary states the honour plainly: he 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. The awards' judgment, as the film's study quotes it, called the film "an exceptionally well-done effort." Beatty's companion book of the same title followed in 1984. The production geography is printed as exactly as the subject: this is a Chicago-made film — a Chicago station, a Chicago documentarian — about a South Bend subject, filmed with a South Bend family among South Bend's ruins and records; the city's own screen reckoning with Studebaker was made by visitors, twenty years on, and no South Bend production answers it in the record. That asymmetry is itself part of the city's film history, and it stands here without embroidery.

Sources

1. The Peabody Awards winners' book — WBBM-TV, Chicago, IL, "Studebaker: Less Than They Promised," in the 1983 list.
2. Chicago Tribune obituary of Scott Craig (d. 18 April, at 89) — the 1983 Peabody for the film; its subject as the 1963 collapse in South Bend and the human impact of the closing.
3. Indie Auto, "Classic film shows human side of Studebaker's end" (2019, updated through 2025) — producers Scott Craig and Michael Beatty; the Bokon family and the 1950s company film; the archive the producers sifted; the Peabody judgment quoted; Beatty's book of 1984 (Michael Beatty, Less Than They Promised).
4. The Studebaker history in this record — the closure of 9–20 December 1963 and the pension settlement, cross-referenced at pointer size.