By John Tredrea, Special Writer
LAMBERTVILLE — Lambertville’s veteran filmmaker and painter Bill Jersey has won a prestigious Peabody Award for a documentary film he made with Jason Cohn, “Eames: The Architect and the Painter.”
”The film is about is about the couple, Charles and Ray Eames,” Mr. Jersey said. “Ray was the wife. It’s the story of two people who struggled to make design ‘applicable’ to everyone. They said they wanted to produce high-quality furniture that everyone could afford and that would be of excellent use and appearance to everyone. The arc of their story is an American success story.”
In the 1940s, the Eames produced the Eames Chair, which quickly became popular and is still in widespread use and demand today.
”They were both multi-talented,” Mr. Jersey said of Charles and Ray Eames. “He started as a painter. She started as an architect. They were extremely successful, and not only because of their talents. They were able to create trust. Charles Eames never signed a contract with anybody. All their business dealings were based on trust. As a filmmaker, I relate to the importance of that. You can’t make a good documentary if you don’t have the trust of the people you’re working with.”
The Eames also worked in films and architecture. They designed and built the Eames House on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The house was hand-constructed within a number of days and was made exclusively from prefabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction.
In 2008, the U.S. Postal Service released the Eames Stamps, a pane of 16 stamps celebrating the designs of Charles and Ray Eames.
Mr. Jersey also is an accomplished painter whose works have been shown all over the Delaware Valley area for years.
Active in filmmaking for a half century, he won an several Emmy Awards and an Academy Award nomination in 1965 for his film “A Time for Burning,” a one-hour documentary about racial tension in an Omaha, Nebraska, church. That film also won a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award.
The president of Quest Productions, Mr. Jersey has a master’s degree in cinema from the University of Southern California.
”Eames: The Architect and the Painter” garnered many favorable reviews, including that of A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Mr. Scott called the 85-minute film “lively and gratifying . . . organized with hectic elegance.”
Over the years, many of the Mr. Jersey’s films have been shown by the Public Broadcasting System and other television venues in addition being shown in theaters.
Among those films are “Ending AIDS: The Search for a Vaccine.” Shown by PBS in December 2005, it tells the story of the hopes, successes and failures of people who committed their lives to a determined search for an AIDS vaccine.
Mr. Jersey’s “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow,” a four-hour documentary series for PBS, covers the history of “Jim Crow” in America. It was produced in conjunction with Videoline Inc. and WNET in New York and also won a Peabody Award and two Emmy nominations.

