• U.S.

Show Business: Tube-lt-Yourself

5 minute read
TIME

Some day, predicted Andy Warhol a few years ago, “everybody will be famous for at least 15 minutes.” Thanks to the Federal Communications Commission, such universal celebrity may soon be possible. In 1972 the FCC ruled that all cable-television stations entering the top 100 market areas in the U.S. and having more than 3,500 subscribers must provide at least one channel for the exclusive use of the public on a first-come, first-served basis.

“It’s like an electronic Hyde Park speaker’s corner,” said Shirley Simmons, a member of an off-off-Broadway repertory company planning to perform on public access. Indeed it is. Anyone can walk through the cablecaster’s door, sign up for an available time slot, and go on the air (or, more precisely, through the wire) with any kind of show: Tom’s neighborhood news, Dick’s consumer reports or Uncle Harry’s rendition of I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.

Public access is strictly do-it-yourself. Cable operators are required to provide the hardware—studio facilities for live programming or video-camera and editing equipment for taped shows—and the cable time. Some cable companies also provide technical assistance, but few can afford to hire full-time public-access aides. The FCC lets the cable company charge a small equipment fee for programs that run more than the minimum five minutes allowed all applicants, but most stations schedule longer shows at no charge. If openings allow, in fact, even regular weekly shows may be arranged for. Usually the user’s only expense is for video tape (about $10 per half-hour).

Although public access is still in its infancy, at least 150 of the 3,000 U.S. cable stations now spend from $50 a month (in Wapakoneta, Ohio) to more than $200,000 a year (New York City) on such programming. DeKalb, Ill., schedules 24 hours a week; San Jose, Calif., 100 hours; in New York City, two companies now offer 600 hours a month.

“The first fear that cable television has about public access is that fringe groups will be the ones to use it,” says Sharon Portin of Channel 3 in Lynnwood, Wash. “Our experience has been the opposite.” The most active participants are community groups: religious organizations, libraries, ethnic and minority associations.

Public access can never be accused of being monotonous. The schedule in Reading, Pa., has included the regular half-hour Che-Lumumba-Jackson Collective Black Community News and a twelve-year-old budding sportscaster’s report on the junior stock-car races. Bakersfield, Calif., has programmed square-dance instruction, an environmentalist appeal to save Redrock Canyon and a college spoof called Stagnet.

Technical quality on public access is highly variable, from the charmingly erratic to the abysmal. Most cable operators offer instruction in the use of camera and tape equipment. Even so, “it takes a little practice to get the hang of using the camera,” notes Joe Collins of Orlando, Fla.’s Orange Cablevision. But stations encourage novices to air their efforts. Thus Orlando has recently seen one Warholesque half-hour that consisted of a man cutting down a tree, and another that zeroed (or zigzagged) in on the ducks around Lake Eola.

This delightful “anything goes” informality can go too far. Annie Patterson, 59, makes vigorous use of Orange Cablevision to air her “inside” knowledge of a Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Since The Annie Patterson Show often displays “real bad form,” Program Coordinator Debi Amos personally supervises the telecasting but says, “I can’t stop her because I have no law or rules to stop her with.” That dilemma is not unique. In Reading last year there were two programs by the Ku Klux Klan.

The FCC forbids cable companies to interfere with public-access programming, except in a few cases, including obscenity. But even here it has left unresolved the question of who is responsible for deciding what is obscene—the company, the individual user, or some third party like a committee. In New York, where a state law prohibiting any censorship of public access further muddies the obscenity issue, a program called The Underground Tonight Show recently showed a startlingly explicit tape of a “female-masturbation therapy class.” One of New York City’s cable companies carried it, preceding it with a disclaimer explaining the legal muddle. The other simply cut five minutes from the eight-minute tape. Both companies may have acted illegally. Another weekly New York show, produced by Anton Perich, 29, features a campy troupe of players doing takeoffs of various sexual proclivities (and occasionally of their clothing in the process). Because of a few shows like these, the New York public channels are sometimes called “pubic access.”

Cable companies unanimously do not want to assume censorship responsibility. Says a spokeswoman for New York’s Manhattan Cable TV: “It is not our channel; it is the public’s channel.” But many operators would like some sort of community-review system to try to implement the FCC’S obscenity clause.

In most cities, however, public access is barely getting off the ground, much less flying in the face of convention. “It’s really hard work getting people to do things,” says Sharon Portin, station manager in Lynnwood. Her company’s biggest problem, she adds, is that “one minute we’re the good guys for making our studio facilities available, and the next minute we’re the bad guys for refusing to take our remote equipment down the Columbia River on a raft filled with a 16-piece band.”

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