The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1955 — the present
The roster, honestly drawn: South Bend has sent the screen one producer of the first rank — Sydney Pollack, raised here, who spent his last two decades godfathering other directors' films through his own company — and, behind him, three more national producers with exact and different ties: an actress-producer born here who now executive-produces a film franchise of her own (Vivica A. Fox), and two producers formed at Notre Dame in their student years, a novelist who founded his own production company (Nicholas Sparks) and a sportscaster who founded hers (Hannah Storm). The city's own production record is the stranger and better story. South Bend television was built by a university: Notre Dame owned its NBC affiliate for half a century, ran a commercial production company out of the station's studios, and let high-school students produce a weekly network-affiliate comedy series for nineteen seasons — a show made by teenagers that the industry named the best of its kind in the nation. Public television's producers have documented the region ever since. The record side, by contrast, is thin, and this chapter prints it thin: no South Bend–born record producer holds a national credit in the record reached, and no commercial recording studio seated in this city built a national catalogue — the city's one national hit was carried to a Chicago studio by a twenty-one-year-old manager who owned the label it came out on. The theatre's producers were the circuits, and they are carried at the size the theatre record gives them. It is a short roster. It is also, name for name, a true one.
Sources:
- The entries that follow — each name rests on the credit records, trade coverage, and institutional sources cited with it.
- The negative findings — the record-producer and studio tests — are set out in the note to this section, with the searches that produced them.