August 9, 2008
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Stan Russell and John Wilcock continue their conversation about producing a public access cable TV show Stan: Well now, let’s say that I shot some stuff now and I go to my community channel, my community TV channel, how do I get them to run my show? Right…when cable first started, it was mandatory that cable companies provide local access channels of some sort, which is usually like a city hall channel or something of that kind and sometimes still is. It was mandatory thing but over the years some cable companies have managed to get it whittled away so that they don’t have to provide anything for public access. On the other hand some are very good and very progressive and do fabulous things and I’ve always heard good things about Santa Barbara’s public access channel, Cox, for example. They’re ostensibly very well organized, with lots of time available, studios to work in, people to help you, classes that show you how to do stuff. In other words, some systems are very well organized, and some are very perfunctory. But they are all obliged to consider any requests for time, and although it might seem that there is never any time available, in actual fact, very, very few people do public access shows. Not more than a dozen, or a score of people in any place usually. Because some people are indifferent, others only create when they’re paid for it. Many don’t really realize it’s there, don’t see how easy it all is. Yet they gripe about how the common person can’t get the word out. They can do an aggressively political show or something blander and more entertaining. Basically there’s no censorship. Controversial stuff is good, sex much less so because it’s so often tasteless and goes over the line. I’m talking mainly now about what went on in Manhattan. Mindless sex is the stupid stuff. Sex is what ruins it for everybody and gives public access a bad name. And if you need that garbage it’s easy to buy porn tapes and get your kicks that way without pissing off other people. Is that what you’ve seen? Well, in NY there were so many shows like that: there weren’t any here, in Ojai because Adelphia didn’t allow sex shows, which was okay with me. You could make a comparison with the library; you don’t promote nudes in the library. Why not, it’s a free country? But you just don’t. So on public access you don’t need overtly, deliberate sex shows. A sex advice show, maybe; nothing wrong with that. Anyway, you apply for a slot, identify yourself and they may give you an immediate time. Sometimes you can do your production actually in the studios. Next door to Manhattan Cable I used to pay $50 for my live 28-minute late on Sunday night. That’s pretty inexpensive with two guys in the studio working and use of the character generator and all that stuff. Where the cable company has a studio, you have the opportunity to do a live show or at least tape the show in the studio. One of my problems is that after doing my show now for 20 years –I have done 800 of them in places as varied as Hungary and Australia, Japan and Italy--and therefore I have tapes in three different formats, two of which are basically obsolete. Now, if you don’t think that you can fill the half hour show you can maybe find somebody that is already doing a show and offer to help them or maybe do a segment. Before the Internet and You-tube came along I thought there would be more of this because it had already become so easy for people to do create such bits. All the years I was doing my show in New York, people would come up to me on the street… People would come up to you on the street? Oh, constantly. In cable’s early days you had that box on top of your TV set on which you had to switch the channels. As long as the public access channel was on a low number, you’d flick past it—or on it--on your way to channel 13. So if you were switching one channel at a time your attention might be caught by whatever channel was on the way even if it was a public access channel. I was always thinking, Supposing people are on their way to NBC and they pause here, how long can they keep their attention? It motivated me to do more interesting things and cut them shorter and make them lighter. Anyway, people would come up to me and say, “Oh, you’re the guy that does that show.” And I’d say, “Yeah”, and they’d say, “Oh, I watch it all the time, all the time.” And I’d say, “Oh, did you watch it last night?” “Um, I’m not sure.” “What did you remember seeing from the show?” They could never come up with anything; never, ever come up with anything. And I realized that what it was, it was merely the familiarity of a face they had seen on television. So that accounts for why television is so incredibly desirable to people, I mean people appear on some obscure show and the neighbors call up their mother and talk about it, you know. So, it’s a way of becoming an immediate celebrity… It’s a way of becoming part of the currency, basically, but you do become immortal at the same time. So the whole thing is very interesting, My mother once suggested that I have been an influence on people in the course of my life, and maybe you remember that we were talking with Art Kunkin one day when he said “Well you influenced me” and I said, ‘Really, Art?’ and he said “Yeah, once I was putting together the paper, pasting it up and it’s such a chore, you know. And you were standing beside me at the time and you said, ‘think of it as art, Art. Think of it as art. That really made a difference ever afterwards, I thought of it as art.’” Going out with a video camera is a great aid to being enlivened by what you see around you. Richard Neville refers to “the drama of everyday life,” and that’s absolutely what video can cover best, the drama of everyday life that nobody notices, that nobody sees. I’ve done video tape and showed it to people, and it might be the street that they took to work every single day and they look at this video and they say, ‘Oh yeah, I barely noticed that door before’. They see things really for the first time because they’ve always been going somewhere and not on the way to somewhere. In other words, ‘to travel hopefully is better than to arrive’, is one of many proverbs about how the journey is at least as interesting as the arrival. Many times I go down a street that I’ve never seen before in a strange town and I say, “let’s see what’s down here, folks.” The way to do television professionally is to scout out what it is you are going to take and then take it. But I do the exact opposite, in real time , which is much more fascinating; let people discover what’s there in the same way as I did. Because there is always something unexpected. I just put together a piece of tape from Madrid, and I come to an intersection where there’s big apartment houses and I look up to see a guy on a balcony and he’s leaning almost head to knee level over the balcony. At the rate of about ten motions a minute, he’s practicing bowing. Or something. So that’s fascinating to see; well, worth, ten seconds. Then I see a unique fabulous license plate so I look around for somewhere to start so that I can pan from there to the license plate. Sometimes the scenery around me, whether it’s in a city or country, is insufficiently interesting for me to expend two sentences of what I want to say. So, I give it one sentence and I stop and I look around for something really interesting visually, turn the camera on again and continue the other two sentences. Although this might sound like it’s really jumpy, it’s almost precisely the effect that you would get if you did it separately and spent ten hours editing it together at $100 an hour. So, by all these means, you can eliminate the expense of post-production. You learn to edit in the camera as you go along, you vary every item so that everything is different from the last one, you vary the length of things. Professional television might do a montage of 30 seconds of Las Vegas lights, for they might do an hour or two of tape before montaging bits together. But if you do three seconds on a light and five seconds on a light then two seconds on another, and four seconds and five seconds and seven seconds , then three seconds, all on different signs what you end up with is exactly what they get by editing the stuff together. Except it looks even better. So I guess the general theme, is to just make a show and not be too concerned that it has to look professional. Absolutely. The idea of professionalism shouldn’t even be in your head. What you should be saying to yourself is, ‘I am the observer who is doing the show, I am going to show to people what it is that I see. But because I am doing a show I am going to notice much more than I normally would’. And if I want to do a voice over, I will say the things I want to say irrespective of the visuals. And if by any chance I am videotaping something significant such as, say, where the famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca on that Granada hillside there might be natural opportunities to create a mini drama. A shepherd and his flock pass by, bells tinkling, and you might also happen to have with you an audio tape of Manuel De Falla’s Andalusian flamencos which you can play softly in a tape recorder hanging over your shoulder (making sure the volume isn’t turned too high). In this case you can get almost exactly the same effect as if you had spent hours in the studio montaging the visuals and the audio on some four-track system. Sometimes all you need is a little forethought as, for example, if you come across a musician playing on a corner. What you need is continuous music but it’s best to seek out places to which you can pan the camera before you turn it on. Is there anything else you’d like to say about this? Just to emphasize that it’s so easy for absolutely anyone to make video, I mean it’s art and it’s fun and it’s even creative. So many people don’t do anything, if they can’t see an immediate financial return in it. But an artist doesn’t say “Who’s going to buy my canvases and paint and brushes and give me the studio for nothing so I can be an artist?” I think creatively certainly Andy Warhol taught me more than anybody else I’ve ever met. I regard myself as his number one pupil. And how things have changed. When I was in Japan, I’d be sitting at a café and the mother and the daughter who had just maybe acquired photo cameras would be like talking to each other across the table in their cell phones. click here to return to main article NEXT: ================================= |
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