Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill has been reviewed in the Journal of Southern History.
Dale Carpenter and Robert Cochran’s Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill is a highly readable, highly usable volume, both a biography of Jack E. Hill, the pioneer of Arkansas documentary film journalism, and a guide to sixteen of his best films. Readers can learn much in each of these categories. Besides using a wide variety of sources from the Jack Hill Papers at the University of Arkansas Library and local media coverage, the authors have conducted multiple interviews, including several with Hill’s widow, his childhood friends, and his former co-workers, including Carpenter, a journalism professor at the University of Arkansas, who worked as a cameraman on about half of Hill’s films and adds memories and insights from a years-long friendship. … Carpenter and Cochran summarize Hill’s efforts as a documentary filmmaker: “nothing attracted him more than narratives highlighting the fabulous, saga-like character of undercelebrated lives constructed outside the limelight of the larger world’s attention. . . . [I]t’s high time for Jack Hill’s Arkansas films to light up the state’s screens again” (p. 111). After this book’s publication, that is happening.
—Donna Lampkin Stephens, Journal of Southern History, February 2024
Jack Hill was a pioneering Arkansas documentary filmmaker dedicated to sharing his state’s history with a wider public. Following a decade as an award-winning investigative journalist and news anchor at KAIT in Jonesboro, Hill was pushed out by new management for his controversial reporting on corruption in a local sheriff’s office. What seemed like a major career setback turned out to be an opportunity: he founded the production company TeleVision for Arkansas, through which he produced dozens of original films. Although Hill brought an abiding interest in education and public health to this work from the beginning, he found his true calling in topics based in Arkansas history. Convinced that a greater acquaintance with the state’s most significant historical events would nurture a greater sense of homegrown pride, Hill tirelessly crisscrossed the state to capture the voices of hundreds of Arkansans recalling significant chapters in the state’s history, such as the oil boom in El Dorado and Smackover, the crucial contributions of the Arkansas Ordnance Plant in Jacksonville during World War II, and the role of Rosenwald Schools in expanding educational opportunities.
In Reporting for Arkansas, Dale Carpenter and Robert Cochran present a biography of Hill alongside an annotated selected filmography designed to accompany sixteen of his best films on subjects related to Arkansas history—all newly hosted online by the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas.