FAIRFIELD – Parsons College called Fairfield home for nearly a century from 1875 until 1973.

The college’s storied, turbulent and fascinating history had never been made into a documentary film … until this year. Fair Field Productions has announced that its feature-length documentary on the college, “Parsons,” will premiere with three free showings on the weekend of Oct. 6-8 at the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center. The Friday and Saturday showings, Oct. 6-7, will be at 7:30 p.m., with a Sunday matinee at 2:30 p.m.

The film is the fifth in Fair Field Productions’ Fairfield History Series, of which eight films are planned. Producer and director Dick DeAngelis said he is excited for residents to see the film to learn how Parsons College came to be, how it changed over the years, and the lasting legacy it has left behind through its thousands of alumni.

“This film is about the 98-year history of Parsons College, and we try to take some of the things people think they know about the college and either confirm them or debunk them based on interviews and deep research,” DeAngelis said. “And then we try to make it entertaining with music and storytelling. We tell a little bit of history, and then we have someone tell a story from that time in history.”

Documenting the history of a college that closed 50 years ago is a race against time, since even the college’s youngest alumni are now in their 70s. DeAngelis spoke to about 100 Parsons alumni to gather information for the film, and interviewed 30-40 of them. He interviewed four people who were over 100 years old at the time, and who could speak to the college’s humble size in the 1940s and early 1950s, before the explosion in enrollment that occurred later. Unfortunately, DeAngelis added, all four of those alumni have passed away since their interview.

“One lady was 103 when we interviewed her, and she came to the college in 1938,” DeAngelis said. “Here’s a person who can tell you first-hand about what makes this college such a wonderful place.”

Fair Field Productions tries to give viewers an insight into each of the eras that the college went through. DeAngelis said one tidbit the public might not know is that the college was originally intended to be just for men, but women showed up to class on the first day, and instead of turning them away, the college became co-ed. The documentary chronicles the college’s rocky times in the late 1940s when it lost its accreditation, gained it back, and then went bankrupt in 1955. In the wake of that bankruptcy, the college hired a new president, Millard Roberts, who took the college’s enrollment from a few hundred students to more than 5,000.

The film touches on the college’s bad publicity from a Life Magazine article in 1966, which precipitated a decline in enrollment, which caused financial troubles and ultimately the college’s abrupt closure in 1973.

Since Roberts was at the center of Parsons’ rise and fall in the 1950s and 1960s, DeAngelis badly wanted to include a clip of him in the film. To his surprise, nobody locally had any footage of Roberts, and the only clip he could find was from an NBC broadcast where Roberts was interviewed. When DeAngelis reached out to the current copyright holder, Getty Images, he learned that just a couple of minutes from that broadcast would cost him $12,000. DeAngelis reduced his request to just 80 seconds of footage, and Getty said he could have that for $5,200. Thanks to a generous donation from the Parsons College fraternity Phi Sigma Epsilon, DeAngelis was able to include that snippet in the film.

“I had never spent that kind of money on a clip before,” DeAngelis said.

In conjunction with the debut of “Parsons,” Fair Field Productions is offering to show all the films in the Fairfield History Series from Oct. 1-8. Fairfield Mayor Connie Boyer plans to declare that week “Fairfield History Week.” Members of the public can watch any of the films for free that week by going to fairfieldhistoryseries.com.

DeAngelis said Fairfield residents and Parsons alumni have been fantastic financial supporters of the film. He also received five significant grants from organizations such as the City of Fairfield’s LOST fund, Greater Jefferson County Foundation, Humanities Iowa, Iowa Arts Council Humanities Partnership and the Sterling Foundation. Everybody’s Whole Foods is the corporate sponsor of the film.