Crichton, Judy 1929-2007 (Judy Feiner Crichton)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born November 25, 1929, in New York, NY; died of leukemia, October 14, 2007, in New York, NY. Broadcast executive, television producer and writer, and author. Crichton was one of the first women to carve out a place for herself in the field of television news programming, and her name is linked to a few of the most reputable and lasting series ever broadcast. After a long apprenticeship as a producer and writer for television game shows such as I've Got a Secret between 1952 and 1968, she spent the 1970s producing documentary specials for the Columbia Broadcasting System news series CBS Reports, including "The American Way of Cancer" and "The CIA's Secret Army." She was the producer, codirector, and coauthor of the Emmy Award-winning special "The Nuclear Battlefield" in 1981. Crichton moved to the American Broadcasting Companies in the early 1980s, where she produced and wrote documentary specials for the ABC News Closeup series; these included the 1986 specials "After the Sexual Revolution" and "At a Loss for Words … Illiterate in America." One of the specials became a book, with Crichton credited as coauthor: To Save Our Schools, to Save Our Children: The Approaching Crisis in America's Public Schools (1984). In the mid-1980s Crichton moved to WGBH-TV in Boston as the first executive producer of the long-running, award-winning Public Broadcasting System series The American Experience. In that capacity she was responsible for one hundred or more documentary specials until her official retirement in 1996, after which she served the network as a consultant. She also continued to write for The American Experience, including a special that she and David Grubin later adapted as the book America 1900: The Turning Point (1998). In 2000 Crichton was awarded the National Humanities Medal of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2007, p. B9.

New York Times, October 17, 2007, p. C12.