The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill, by Dale Carpenter and Robert Cochran.
Jack Hill was a pioneer Arkansas documentary filmmaker who between 1990 and his death in 2012 produced approximately seventy films. Trained as a journalist, Hill founded TeleVision for Arkansas, his independent production company, following a decade as an award–winning television news anchor at KAIT in Jonesboro. Although Hill brought an abiding interest in educational and public health issues to his work from the beginning, he found his true calling in topics based in Arkansas history. He ultimately gathered these topics into a conscious if open–ended set he called The Arkansas Series.
Bringing varied perspectives to the retrieval of Hill’s work, Dale Carpenter and Robert Cochran offer in Reporting for Arkansas an introduction to and biographical sketch of Hill and his work as well as an annotated playlist designed to accompany a reissue of sixteen titles centered in The Arkansas Series (plus three bonus extras) to be hosted online by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.
Dale Carpenter has taught broadcast journalism and documentary filmmaking at the University of Arkansas for twenty–four years, and as a documentary filmmaker his films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have received seven regional Emmy awards.
Robert Cochran is professor of English and director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of several books on Arkansas culture, including Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton, coauthored with Suzanne McCray.
Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill is part of The Arkansas Character series, which publishes in-depth portrayals of insufficiently celebrated accomplishment (and insufficiently rebuked foul behavior) in all arenas of human endeavor. Equally welcome are accounts of big-screen events and famous players (office holders, rock stars, movers and shakers) and adventures of local legends, unheralded artisans, stars of unlit stages. “The classic is the local fully realized,” wrote William Carlos Williams, “words marked by a place.” But not only words. Every form of excellence (and outrageousness) rooted in this place.
Reporting for Arkansas will be published in May 2022.