Kartemquin's first film in 1966, "Home for Life"—a chronicle of two elderly people entering a home for the aged—established the direction the organization would take over the next four decades. After the initial success of the late 1960s films Kartemquin evolved into a film collective producing films such as "The Chicago Maternity Center Story" and the "Taylor Chain" films. However, after these and a some other films were released the collective disbanded in the late 1970s due to differing opinions on the direction the company should head. After the dissolution of the collective, co-founders Gordon Quinn and Jerry Blumenthal (who died in late 2014) pushed the organization to its current model, producing high quality works that still had a political edge and mentoring a new generation of young documentary makers. They continued releasing social-issue documentaries ("The Last Pullman Car", "Golub") largely for public television and the educational market into the 1990s.