“That was an election in which I basically became a footnote.”

Sam Katz is talking about 2003, the year an FBI listening device in Philadelphia Mayor John Street’s City Hall office triggered the controversy that sank Katz’s second attempt to unseat him. It was Katz’s third run at the mayor’s office, following an earlier bid for governor and an earlier one still for mayor.

He’d go on to chair PICA, the state agency with oversight of Philadelphia’s finances, from 2011 to 2014, switching political parties five times along the way.

He was 57 when he gave up his mayoral aspirations and decided to make documentaries about Philadelphia’s history instead.

Now 77, Katz — who lives in Mt. Airy and is a lifelong Philadelphian — can rattle off Philadelphia facts and stories like he’s reciting his own résumé. Talking with a guide at a recent Woodmere exhibit on female artists, in front of a wall of Violet Oakley paintings, he couldn’t stop talking about Violet — about the murals, about the artist who’d taught Oakley at PAFA — until she finally suggested he take over the tour.

None of that passion, however, shows up on paper. To Philadelphia’s biggest arts and history foundations, Katz wasn’t a historian. He was a former politician asking for money.

“Let’s remember who I am,” he says. “I’m the Republican who ran for mayor, the public finance guy. Now I’m coming in the front door as the documentary filmmaker who didn’t even know what the word ‘aperture’ meant,” he says, pausing on the memory. “I’m sure they wondered, ‘What’s this guy up to?’ It’s a legitimate thing for a philanthropist to ask.”

The major foundations all said no. The money that got the first films made came from somewhere else — not from Philadelphia’s marquee foundations, but from people he knew.

It turns out that thirty years spent raising capital for cities and states, and running for office four times, had already taught him how to raise money — a skill that out- lasted every lost election. And it didn’t retire when he did. It just found a new use.

The first funder came through almost immediately: the Barra Foundation, by way of Robert McNeil, a pioneer philanthropist who lived in Wyndmoor. “The first funder for the Philadelphia project overall was Bob,” Katz says. “So from the standpoint of my filmmaking start-up, it was the Northwest Philadelphia region that gave us our start.”

The rest came the same way, and in larger pieces.

“Our productions of Philadelphia historical documentary films were launched by the support of the Middleton family, the McCausland family, the Halloran family, John McFadden and Lisa Kabnick,” Katz says. “Those four families provided the crux of the financing in the early going.”

New support emerged from many other foundations and private families, and more recently from the William Penn Foundation, the Philadelphia Funder Collaborative for the Semiquincentennial, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Lindy Communities, and Penn Medicine. “I am the fortunate one to have had a chance to make the case for the city’s history and have the case so positively responded to,” Katz says.

Katz used the same approach with his films about classical music in China and municipal bankruptcy: find whoever already has a stake in a specific story, and explore the prospect for support. Making Beethoven in Beijing, about the Philadelphia Orchestra’s history in China, Katz skipped arts foundations altogether and went straight to the orchestra’s own donor base.

“I thought the supporters of the orchestra would be the principal funders because it was such a fascinating, unique, and well-told story,” he says. “And that worked too.”

For a film on Detroit’s historic municipal bankruptcy, he found a connection to the foundations that had underwritten moving the Detroit Institute of Arts out of city ownership, and securing municipal pensions for ten years, betting they’d want that story told. He asked one for a letter committing $300,000, conditioned on matching pledges from the others. “If I can’t get them all, it won’t work financially. Everyone had to be in,” he says. “The thesis worked.”

A bigger story, and a near-collapse

By 2019, the method had worked for 12 years — the enormous Philadelphia documentary history portfolio, Beethoven in Beijing, and Detroit: Bankruptcy of a Symbol | Ruins of the American Dream. The most ambitious initiative, "In Pursuit," would require something bigger. Something more creative. Something to bring all of the talent and experience together.

Katz and his team set out to make a ten-part series on four centuries of the American story as experienced through the lives of the people of Philadelphia. Work began in the summer of 2019.

Then, in 2020, Covid arrived. And by August 2021, Katz had rough cuts of five of what were meant to be eight episodes. The project and the business were out of money.

“The philanthropic environment had completely changed,” he says. “Arts and culture went from an area of significant interest to not being on the list at all. Asking for money would have been tone-deaf.”

“So on August 31, 2021, I laid everybody off and shut it down.” Katz assumed that was the end of the “Philly stuff,” and focused on other projects of interest, including a film about Ray Didinger and Tommy McDonald, "Boys to Fame."

But then, two years later, his collaborators talked him back in — not to finish the same series, but to rebuild it around a bigger question. The country had just lived through George Floyd’s murder, the pandemic, and January 6th. The story of what was happening in Philadelphia, they argued, was emblematic of what was happening throughout the country — a way for the city’s own history to help make sense of the present.

“One of the things that makes a nation is a shared vision of its story,” Katz says, “and it may be that Americans actually have one but don’t know it. We have to help find a narrative to reflect contemporary understanding of our past, even as our present experiences seismic ground shifts.”

This meant that everything the team had edited before 2023 no longer told the story they needed to tell. “We had to jettison the narrative arc of our storytelling,” Katz says. “Thankfully, we had so much material from our hundreds of interviews and our numerous filmed re-enactment scenes. Plus, our archival portfolio was immense.”

Getting there took two-plus additional years of production and fundraising. The first episode of In Pursuit premiered in February at the National Constitution Center, followed by a 7 p.m. hour-long broadcast on 6ABC, which has agreed to air the entire ten-episode series. Episodes have been screened in church basements, community centers, schools, museums, houses of worship, and neighborhood sites ever since — thirty screenings so far, including a diverse crowd at a Germantown church on Pulaski Avenue, ninety people at the Philadelphia Film Society, and eighteen at a Quaker meeting house in the Northeast.

Katz pays close attention to who shows up. “The quality of the post-screening engagement is consistently excellent,” he says. “But for me, the number of people is an equally important metric.”

A neighborly audience

A series of screenings of all ten episodes is now being planned with community partners for Chestnut Hill, Mt. Airy, and the surrounding area to launch at the end of October. “We are hoping to generate a huge and enthusiastic audience of our neighbors,” Katz says.

Katz is already thinking about what comes next. While still finishing "In Pursuit," he’s also wrapping up the first episode of a planned five-part series on Philadelphia’s 20th-century musical history, and he’s applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for a film about the Renaissance art connoisseur Bernard Berenson.

It’s a habit that goes back to his public finance days, when winning a new client left him giddy for a few days and then anxious.

“As soon as I’d get a job, I would have a short span of utter euphoria,” he says. “And then fear would set in. What happens when this is over, how do I get the next one? I’d immediately be back in the forest, looking for the next tree to chop down.

“Of course, today none would be anywhere near the Wissahickon.”