Marjory Potts met Frances Perkins purely by accident. Buried in books at the Vineyard Haven Library, researching an article she was writing about another subject, she came across a biography of Ms. Perkins, and all but lost interest in the subject at hand.

Ms. Perkins was the Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Roosevelt, and the first female member of the U.S. Cabinet. In her day, she was perceived as a serious figure, even grim. But as Mrs. Potts would quickly discover, she was actually anything but.

“I was blown away. This woman was witty,” said Mrs. Potts in an interview at her home this week.

The wit of Frances Perkins has withstood the test of time, and next Thursday evening at 7:30, Mrs. Potts and her husband Robert will stage a revival of their Frances Perkins documentary film, You May Call Her Madam Secretary, at the Hebrew Center in Vineyard Haven.

The film sprang directly from Mrs. Potts’s initial fascination with Ms. Perkins. “She was incredibly charismatic,” Mrs. Potts said. “She also had great wit. She was terribly spiritual and she got things done. And she was practical.”

The more books she pored over about Ms. Perkins, who pioneered reform movements in child labor, pushed for states to set a minimum wage, and supported Social Security, the more Mrs. Potts wanted to know.

“We were making films. We were filmmakers,” Mrs. Potts said, of herself and her husband. “I said, this has to be a film.”

But for Mr. Potts, it took some convincing. “At first I didn’t like the idea of making a historical film about a person with so little of the person in it. She has the newsreel interviews, maybe something like that, but that’s about it,” he said. And then they happened upon Ms. Perkins’s oral history.

“[It was] one of the longest ever recorded at that time, at Columbia University,” Mrs. Potts said. It was also the key to injecting their film brainchild with a firsthand account of their subject’s life.

“She gave [the oral history] at huge length, because she was so frustrated with her lack of effectiveness in the government at that time,” said Mr. Potts. It was after the Roosevelt administration had ended, and she’d essentially been passed over by President Harry Truman, who was next to take office. She felt as though her work had been in vain.

She also chronicled her involvement in a major industrial tragedy at the time, the Triangle fire in New York city. When a fire broke out at the city’s Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Ms. Perkins was down the street having tea. She ran to the scene, only to witness women jumping out windows to escape the blaze. “The fire exits were blocked. The exits were blocked to keep girls from leaving early. So they died,” said Mrs. Potts. Horrified by the event, Ms. Perkins appealed to the state. “She got involved in New York state, saying, ‘We have to change laws. We have to protect these women,’ ” Mrs. Potts said.

The oral history documents all of Frances Perkins’s successes, and all her perceived failures in office. And what began as a medium to vent her frustration became the centerpiece of You May Call Her Madam Secretary, which premiered on the Vineyard in 1987. More than 20 years later, just last spring, the Pottses dusted off a copy of the film and watched it. And then they watched it again. They found the issues just as powerful today as they had been in the 1930s and 1940s, when Ms. Perkins had been in office.

They decided it was high time for a film revival on the Island. “The parallels are incredible,” said Mrs. Potts about the similarities between the state of reform during the Roosevelt presidency and that of today. But one glaring difference is that no one is assuming the role of Frances Perkins today. “Nobody is pushing for the kind of reform that she pushed for,” said Mrs. Potts. “She was not a radical. Everything had to be practical and it had to be just, and you had to be able to pay for it.”

Back in the 1980s, when the Pottses first got the idea for the film, they knew it would be a time-consuming endeavor, and weren’t sure where they’d get the money to finance the project. Mrs. Potts began writing grant proposals on her typewriter. And it paid off: they landed a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“They were very, very excited about this,” recalled Mrs. Potts. The project sent the two filmmakers on a fascinating journey through Massachusetts and New York to become more acquainted with their subject. “It was so much fun. We went to the National Archives, we went to Mount Holyoke [Frances Perkins’s alma mater], we went to Hyde Park, to the Roosevelt Library. We just went to tons of libraries. We went to Columbia. We went everywhere, and we researched and researched,” she said.

It wasn’t easy. Rather than spend six months in New York going through the oral history, the Pottses simply bought a copy for about $400. They had also bought a computer, which made writing easier than on a typewriter, but wasn’t always reliable. “It was such a dream, except when we kept losing pages of script and things like that. In those days the computer would sort of swallow it,” Mrs. Potts said.

On one particularly productive day, she lost 10 pages of notes and script. She set out on a five-mile walk across Middle Road to vent her frustrations. “I just left the house, and I walked and walked. And I hated the computer and I didn’t know what to do. And I finally came back, sat down . . . [and] just reconstructed it. I said that’s life. We all know now about backing up and everything, but we didn’t then.”

Despite the success of the documentary upon its initial release — it was aired on PBS television stations nationwide — Mrs. Potts said most people still don’t know who Frances Perkins was. But she said her contributions to labor reform were revolutionary in her day, and deserve to be brought to light.

“She went along with the changes that needed to be made to have a reasonable and just society,” Mrs. Potts said.

You May Call Her Madam Secretary will screen at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center on Thursday, August 19, at 7:30 p.m. There is a suggested donation of $10 at the door.