Jon Wilkman, ‘Moguls & Movie Stars’ Writer and Producer, Dies at 80

Jon Wilkman, a documentarian who received two Emmy nominations for writing and producing Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, an acclaimed seven-hour miniseries for TCM in 2010, has died. He was 80.

Wilkman died Nov. 30 of kidney cancer at his Beachwood Canyon home in Los Angeles, a family spokesperson announced.

A founding member and three-term president of the International Documentary Association, Wilkman also wrote and produced a Jane Pauley-hosted 1991 NBC special that celebrated the 100th episode of L.A. Law and Chicano Rock! The Sounds of East Los Angeles, a 2008 documentary narrated by Edward James Olmos.

Moguls & Movie Stars, narrated by Christopher Plummer, examined the industry from the invention of film to the birth of the New Hollywood movement in the early 1970s.

Born in Los Angeles, Wilkman, the son of an architect, graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1964.

He began his career in New York that year inside the documentary unit at CBS News, where he worked on the Walter Cronkite-hosted series The Twentieth Century (later renamed The 21st Century). Later, he produced, directed and wrote for the WCBS-TV program Eye on New York.

Wilkman launched his own production company in 1971 and did documentaries for PBS including The Great American Dream Machine and Attica before returning to Los Angeles in 1978. Later, he created documentary-like elements for the HBO telefilms Fatherland in 1994 and Winchell in 1998.

Wilkman was an author whose books included 1969’s Black Americans: From Colonial Days to the Present; 2016’s Floodpath: The Deadliest Man Made Disaster of the 20th Century and the Making of Modern Los Angeles; and 2020’s Screening Reality: How Documentary Filmmakers Reimagined America.

With his late wife, Nancy, he co-wrote Picturing Los Angeles and Los Angeles: A Pictorial Celebration, published in 2006 and ’08, respectively.

A member of the DGA and WGA West, Wilkman lectured on film history and documentary writing at USC and Fordham and on L.A. history at UCLA Extension.

Survivors include his brothers, Bill, Rick and Bob. His wife died in 2012.

Donations in his name can be made to Oberlin College and/or the L.A. radio stations KUSC or KPCC. A celebration of his life in the new year will be planned.