BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — WTIU-TV, Indiana University’s PBS station in Bloomington, has received a $50,000 production grant from the Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation (AWCCF) to support a new one-hour historical documentary, Gene Stratton-Porter: Music of the Wild. The documentary, written and produced by 24-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Todd Gould, Senior Producer/Director at WTIU, is scheduled to premiere in November 2026 with national PBS distribution via American Public Television.
The film retraces the life and works of Hoosier writer and environmentalist Gene Stratton- Porter. From the years 1895 to 1945, only 55 books ever published sold more than one million copies. Hoosier Gene Stratton-Porter penned five of those works, more than any single author in history to that time. Stratton-Porter was one of the nation’s most popular authors of novels, poetry, children’s books, and nonfiction nature studies. Her wildlife conservation efforts helped save thousands of acres of wildlife in northern Indiana, as well as many other wildlife parks and preserves throughout the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Stratton-Porter was also a celebrated nature photographer and one of the first women to own and manage a Hollywood film production company in the 1920s. Her pioneering efforts in literature, business, and wildlife conservation helped blaze new opportunities for women during the early part of the century.
This funding from the Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation will help the production team develop an original music score for the film. This support will also help support production-related expenses in a variety of cities in the U.S. and Europe.
This grant will allow the video crew to capture footage of natural areas that Gene Stratton- Porter and other environmentalists actively campaigned to protect and preserve during the early 20th century. Some of those sites include two state historic sites in Indiana, as well as the National Elk Refuge near the Teton Mountain Range in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the Upper Mississippi River Basin in Minnesota, white pine forests in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, and Muir Woods in California, a place Gene Stratton-Porter revered as "sacred"...a majestic, forested area she visited with her family less than one week before she died tragically in an automobile accident in December 1924.
The Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation has been a longtime supporter of WTIU and Todd Gould productions. AWCCF helped fund documentaries on Indiana journalist Ernie Pyle and Marshall "Major" Taylor, the first Black sports superstar (track cycling) and civil rights trailblazer from Indianapolis. These two WTIU won multiple Emmy Awards and were distributed to more than 300 PBS markets around the country. Now, AWCCF is helping to provide funding for the production and distribution of this important, new WTIU/PBS documentary on Gene Stratton-Porter.
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Media Contact:
Jesse Loudenbarger
Associate Director of Communications and Marketing
WTIU Public Television
jloudenb@iu.edu
812-855-2119
