Viewers of the Arkansas Educational Television Network may have recently heard the song “Arkansas (You Run Deep in Me)” being played as the network highlighted many of its locally produced programs.
AETN’s new executive director, native Arkansan Courtney Pledger, may well relate to these words written by Arkansas singer/songwriter Waylon Holyfield: “You’re in my blood and I know you’ll always be. Arkansas, you run deep in me.”
Pledger was sitting in front of three computer screens on her desk on the second floor of AETN’s headquarters in Conway.
“Arkansas has a way of pulling you back,” Pledger said, softly.
“I was born in Little Rock,” she said, adding that she and her parents moved to Memphis when she was about 4 and then to Jackson, Mississippi.
“I spent the summers in El Dorado and Fordyce, where my parents were from. Arkansas was really important to me growing up,” Pledger said. “We moved a lot. … Then I moved a lot after I left home.
“I’ve always considered Arkansas my home, even though I spent my school years in Mississippi. I always came back for family reunions. I always thought I would come back [to Arkansas] eventually.”
Pledger spent the past 30 years or so as an actor and a film and TV producer and director in New York City, Los Angeles and London. She is a recipient of Women in Film’s Lillian Gish Producing Award and has been nominated for a prime-time Emmy.
She moved back to Arkansas — Little Rock — permanently in 2012 to become executive director of the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute, which is the umbrella organization of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Little Rock Film Festival, as well as several other film festivals in the state. During her leadership, the Hot Springs Film Festival was designated an Oscar-qualifying festival in the category of documentary short subject by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Pledger assumed her duties at AETN on March 21.
Kathryn Jones of Bentonville, AETN Commission chairwoman, said the commission “voted unanimously to hire Courtney based on her extensive resume and unmatched experience.
“We are confident that she will build relationships and develop new projects that will greatly benefit AETN and its constituents. Her commitment to cultural programming for and about Arkansans is an optimal fit for AETN’s viewers and supporters.”
Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Pledger’s hiring during a news conference March 7 at the state Capitol.
In a prepared statement, the governor, said, in part, “Courtney’s extensive experience in television and her executive leadership skills make her the ideal candidate for AETN. Her work to establish the Hot Springs Documentary
Film Festival as an Oscar-qualifying event demonstrates her outstanding leadership skills. Courtney’s passion for this industry is second to none, and I am excited about her vision for this agency.”
Pledger said she is still in the “early days” of her job at AETN, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary as the state’s only public educational television network. She is responsible for policy implementation, strategic planning, budget preparation, and operations and management of the statewide educational network and its private foundation, among other duties.
“I’m learning the ropes. We are lucky to have this public television in Arkansas,” she said.
“The public brands in many states are community-based or university-based or government-
related. We are lucky here in Arkansas that we are a state agency and have a generous backing of supporters as well, making it a unique combination,” Pledger said.
“I am steeping myself in all the different aspects, … looking at the programming,” she said.
“I am looking forward to getting to know Conway, … its people and businesses,” said Pledger, who continues to live in Little Rock. “I’ve been driving around, having lunch at different places. It’s beautiful.”
Pledger said her first “real” job was in public TV in Jackson, Mississippi, where she grew up.
“I was an intern at that station. I always felt I might should have taken that path,” she said.
“This is serendipitous,” Pledger said, referring to her current position in public TV.
While she was not actively seeking another job, she said she could not pass up the opportunity to apply for the job at AETN. She replaces Allen Weatherly, who died Nov. 1, 2016, after leading the network since 2001.
“Last October was the 25th anniversary of the Hot Springs Film Festival,” Pledger said. “It was a huge celebration. That’s about the time this job started to surface. It just felt really right for me.
“A couple of people called me and asked if I would be interested in this position, and I said, ‘Yes,’” she said. “I was offered the job, accepted it. … My first day was March 21, on a Tuesday. The governor announced it. … I thought that was great of him to do that.”
Pledger said public TV “came about when I was a teenager, so I feel like I have been watching it all my life. If I am home long enough to turn on the TV, I usually tune in to AETN or PBS first and see what’s going on.”
AETN is among 349 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations in the United States and broadcasts through six stations in the state — KAFT-Channel 13 in Fayetteville; KEMV-Channel 6 in Mountain View; KETG-Channel 9 in Arkadelphia; KETS-Channel 2 in Little Rock; KETZ-Channel 12 in El Dorado; and KTEJ-Channel 19 in Jonesboro.
The network offers four channels — AETN PBS or AETN 1, AETN Create, AETN PBS Kids and AETN World. Children’s programming is also available on AETN 1.
In addition to PBS and local programming, AETN also offers educational opportunities to teachers through ArkansasIDEAS (Internet Delivered Education for Arkansas Schools).
This can be accomplished in face-to-face settings, in mobile labs, through webinars and live streaming.
“This connects K-12 educators with quality Arkansas Department of Education-approved professional-development
and educational opportunities,” Pledger said. “It’s all free of charge. We partner with the state Education Department. We have 36,000 users across Arkansas who can select from 611 courses.
“Teachers are required to have a certain number of professional-development hours. Sometimes it’s difficult for them to get these hours, especially when they work full time. This is just a tremendous opportunity for them.”
Pledger said AETN does a lot of outreach, too.
“We offer things such as the PBS Kids Writers Contest and AETN Family Day; we send PBS characters such as Clifford the Big Red Dog to schools,” she said. “These are just some of what we offer.”
Pledger said among the new PBS programs coming to AETN soon will be Ken Burns’ 10-part documentary The Vietnam War, which will air in September.
“We will be doing outreach about this new series,” Pledger
said. “We will be working on new locally produced programs relating to the series.”
Pledger said AETN wants to expand its locally produced programming.
“We want to examine what it truly means to be statewide,” she said. “We are the only statewide public media network, and we want to see how we can better serve every corner of Arkansas, … how we can be accessible to everyone.
“If you support AETN, as a donor you have on-demand access to public television programming,” she said. “You can watch AETN and PBS anywhere, anytime on any device. It’s a great time to be watching PBS and AETN.”
Pledger said she will attend the PBS annual meeting in San Diego, California, on May 15-17.
“I’m really looking forward to it,” she said. “That’s when they will release the fall preview of shows.”
Pledger was born in Little
Rock, the only child of the late Reece Lynton Pledger of Fordyce and Wilda Lynn Reasons Pledger of El Dorado. Her father was an area vice president at Commercial Credit Corp., and her mother was a violinist in community symphony orchestras and a teacher.
Pledger graduated from Wingfield High School in Jackson, Mississippi, and from Millsaps College, also in Jackson, where she started out as a music (voice) major with a theater minor. Before she graduated from Millsaps, however, she and a friend took a trip to New York City that would change her life.
“We cooked up a plan to go in the summer after our junior year. We pulled it off,” Pledger said.
“It was a great summer. We attended a theater school in [Greenwich] Village. I ended up wanting to stay in New York,” she said.
“My parents were not happy about that, but it turned out well. I learned a lot that year. I did go back and get my college degree,” Pledger said.
“The head of the theater department worked out an arrangement so I could get credit for my professional work in New York,” she said, adding that she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in theater. “That was unusual then. So it all turned out well.
“After I graduated, I went back to New York, did commercials, got into the production side … and finally moved to Los Angeles. Opportunities opened up, especially on the production side.”
While in New York, she got a small part in a Broadway show starring silent-screen legend Lillian Gish.
“That was something,” Pledger said. “My mother came to see the show and got to know Ms. Gish. In fact, they wrote letters to each other for a long time. I wish I knew where those letters are now.”
From Broadway, Pledger headed to Los Angeles to try her luck in Hollywood. Persistence paid off, and in 1981, she landed a permanent role in the TV series Walking Tall, starring Bo Svenson. After the show was canceled, other opportunities came along, especially those for a producer.
Pledger’s resume includes being producer for such TV films as A Killing in a Small Town, which garnered a 1990 Emmy and a Golden Globe for leading actress Barbara Hershey, and Challenger, which was about the space-shuttle disaster.
Pledger moved to London in 2000, where she spent several years producing films with
Sarah Radclyffe, who co-founded the production company Working Title Films in the mid 1980s. Pledger and Radclyffe worked in the London-based venture Jigsaw Films, producing films based on children’s literature.
In 2009, Pledger became senior vice president for Los Angeles-based Radical
Pictures/Radical Studios, working to build the company’s graphic-novel publishing and film brands, forging partnerships with major film studios, including Dreamworks, Disney, New Regency, Fox,
Warner Brothers and MGM.
From 2011 to 2014, she served as a senior creative consultant to award-winning Aardman Animations in the United Kingdom.
“My last job in California … it really made me miss the people of Arkansas,” she said. “I felt like Arkansas was home. … Moving back just made sense in a lot of ways.”
Pledger has three adult children with her former husband, British actor Stuart Wilson — daughter Miranda and twin daughter and son, India and Liam.
Miranda Wilson, 27, lives in Athens, Georgia, and is the house manager at the University of Georgia Performing Arts Center.
India Wilson, 22, is a senior at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where she is scheduled to receive her degree in sociology in May.
Liam Wilson, also 22, currently lives in Little Rock. Pledger said he “probably will go back to the United Kingdom” and end up in filmmaking.
“My kids grew up watching public TV. … That’s why they’re so smart,” Pledger said, smiling.