Irving Jacoby on Location in LA

Metropole Film Board is a not-for-profit corporation that serves as a fiscal agent for special documentary projects by Storyville Films and other production companies. It was originally established by Alberta & Irving Jacoby, in 1950, as the Mental Health Film Board, to produce educational films in the areas of psychiatry (The Lonely Night), child development (Angry Boy), social work (The Neglected), aging (The Steps of Age), and race (Hitch). Over the next four decades, the Film Board went on to make over a hundred ground-breaking films on these subjects, working with America’s pioneer documentary filmmakers including Williard Van Dyke: The River (1937), The City (1939); John Ferno: The Spanish Earth (1937); Shirley Clarke: Skyscraper (1960); Richard Leacock: Crisis (1963); and Jacoby himself: High Over the Borders (1942) and The Photographer (1948). A number of their films are available for viewing as part of the permanent film collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The film board was re-established in 1996 and renamed Metropole, to conduct a broader program for the planning, fundraising, and production of documentary films not likely to be funded or distributed through commercial channels

Films developed by Metropole include The McCarthy Project, a portrait of the politician and poet Eugene McCarthy, and Libraries on Fire, a documentary about the living national treasures of Indonesia, Sister Rose’s Passion and Constantine’s Sword.

Currently Metropole is serving as fiscal sponsor for The Lavender Scare, a feature-length documentary telling the hidden story of the U.S. government’s ruthless campaign in the 1950s to hunt down and fire every Federal employee it suspected was gay.

http://www.thelavenderscare.com