Our Founder’s Story

In 1979 I was in Managua, Nicaragua working for NBC. I was there to edit the story of the Sandinistas ending the 42-year Somoza dictatorship.

I arrived the same day Anastasio Somoza and his family fled the country, alongside the officers and their families who were leaving with whatever wealth they could carry. My first “day” lasted 53 hours. It began with watching abandoned infantry soldiers leave the military base across from the Intercontinental Hotel; within hours, Sandinista soldiers arrived and entered the compound that had served as the Presidential residence since the 1972 earthquake.

During a break while crews were out gathering footage, I used a backup camera from my sixth-floor balcony to capture wide shots of the base. As I was framing the main gate, I saw a soldier aiming his rifle at me. I fell back, pulling the tripod and camera on top of me just as a bullet hit the wall behind me. I realized he was likely looking for snipers after months of jungle warfare.

I quickly wrote “Periodista” (Press) in shoe polish on a towel and hung it over the balcony. When I eventually set the camera back up, the soldier waved at me with a thumbs up

The course of my life was set decades before I was born. Growing up with parents who both lost their hearing at young ages, I was raised bilingual in sign language and the spoken word. This unique background sparked a lifelong passion for communication, leading me from public access cable in Reston, Virginia, to earning my FCC First Class Radiotelephone license at seventeen.

My television career spanned 14 years at WRC/NBC in Washington, D.C., where I spent over a decade with the Network News Division. Specializing in videotape editing during the industry’s transition from film, I learned news ethics from Tim Russert and contributed to programs like Today, Meet the Press, and Nightly News. I also had the privilege of witnessing history firsthand, covering world leaders and traveling with Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush.

In 1990, I moved to Orlando to become the first Administrator of the Video and Film degree program at what is now Full Sail University, where I built a curriculum centered on real-world experience. Later, I joined Arnold Palmer’s Golf Channel two weeks before its launch, serving for 17 years as a lead studio and road editor and eventually as the network’s Archivist.

Throughout my career, a recurring theme has been my work with the Universal Newsreels collection within the National Archives. I have utilized these archives for projects at PBS, NBC, and the Golf Channel where I learned the value of the visual history they contained.

Inspired by the challenges students faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, I launched Historic Films Inc to provide a place where the 3,770 public domain films in the Universal Newsreels Collection and other examples of the visual history of motion picture journalism preserved and archived at the National Archives could be shared and made accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time, in order to educate and inspire future generations.

Best regards,

Jim Michael

President and Founder

Historic Films Inc