Doug Stewart

Producer/Writer/Director Douglass M. Stewart, Jr has spent over three decades in the Hollywood Entertainment Industry. He's been nominated for eight Emmy Awards for his work on primetime television specials. He was Film Supervisor for the Academy Awards for twenty-five years and served as producer of the Emmy Nominations Announcements telecast for twenty years. He provided biographies and tributes to the Screen Actors Guild Awards for ten years. Doug chronicled the life of President William Clinton in six segments for a 50th birthday celebration held at Radio City Music Hall. He also previously directed two documentary films, one the history of ASCAP-the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for their 75th Anniversary and "50 Years Of Action", commemorating the half-century history of the Directors Guild of America. Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future is Doug’s first feature length documentary, and it’s the first film ever made about Chesley Bonestell.

Bonestell has been called “The Father of Space Art” but his career also included working on many historic projects like the Chrysler Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. He also worked in Hollywood as a special effects matte painter for films like Citizen Kane, Destination Moon and The War of the Worlds. A series of his paintings of the planets in our solar system, published in 1944 in Life magazine ignited a desire in the American public to explore the Final Frontier of Space. Chesley took complicated technical drawings and turned them into breath-taking images that people could admire and understand. His best-selling book written with Willy Ley called “The Conquest of Space,” laid the cornerstone for our space program. When he and Ley teamed up with Werher von Braun, our journey to the moon, planets and stars became a reality. Bonestell’s most famous work is “Saturn As Seen from Titan,” which has been called “the painting that launched a thousand careers” for inspiring so many people to become a part of our space program.

Chesley Bonestell: A Brush With The Future was given an Audience Award at the 2018 Newport Beach Film Festival, was named Best Documentary at Comic-Con in San Diego in 2018 and was honored as Best Documentary at the 2019 Boston Science Fiction Film Festival. Articles about the film have appeared in publications like Sky & Telescope magazine, the National Space Society’s Ad Astra magazine, and earlier this year there was a cover story in Filmfax magazine.