An Interview with George Stoney

As a community and media activist, a professor of film and video, and a maker of a great many films and numerous videotapes, George Stoney is one of the most vocal and influential advocates of the use of video as a social tool, today. Born in 1916, Stoney began his career as a journalist and began working in film as a director and writer after serving as a photo intelligence officer in World War II. He joined the Southern Educational Film Service in 1946 and formed his own company, George C. Stoney Associates, in 1950. For 20 years, Stoney made some 40 sponsored social and educational documentaries, including the well-known All My Babies (1952) about midwifery.

In 1968 Stoney was invited by Frank Spiller of the National Film Board of Canada to become executive producer of the Challenge for Change program, which was begun in 1966 to create films and later videotapes about the social concerns of various Canadian communities. In 1970 he returned to New York to serve for two years as the chairperson of the Undergraduate Division at New York University (NYU) where he has since taught film and video. In 1972 Stoney and Red Burns founded the Alternate Media Center in Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and in 1976 he was one of the founding members of the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers (NFLCP), an advocacy association for public access and community programming on cable television. He is presently one of the most outspoken proponents of public access on cable. Throughout his varied career, Stoney has always remained a spokesman of social justice and the rights of individuals. He has always worked in collaboration with others and will rarely take individual credit for a work.

This interview represents an edited transcript of three conversations in August and September 1983 and includes Stoney’s additions and corrections.

Marita Sturken: Can you explain to me how the use of video came about in the Challenge for Change program? Did it precede your arrival?

George Stoney: It was simultaneous. I went up there in 1968 when the portapaks were just coming out. I had used the Ampex video rigs in 1965 and 1966 when I worked at Stanford, but they were so clumsy and full of bugs that I got terribly frustrated with them. When I got to the Film Board, a group wanted to use video and I had to approve the budget. I was so skeptical that I said, “OK, but only so long as you make a film about the experiment.” Colin Low, the philosophical father of the Challenge for Change program, from the Film Board had conducted an initial experiment on Fogo Island in Newfoundland from which we worked out a lot of theory. But we found that in film the turnaround time was much too long, and the use of complicated film equipment caused the whole process to be dominated by a professional crew. So the idea that people could do their own recording themselves had not yet evolved. Then Bonnie Klein and Dorothy Henaut, with some help from others working in Challenge for Change, decided we should try and experiment with half inch video. The old CV Sony portable video decks were just coming into Canada at that time, and they decided to use them to see if ordinary people could use the technology on their own. An experiment was launched in Montreal with a French Canadian community group, and we made a film about it called VTR-St. Jacques. This film records, quite honestly, the experiences the people of the St. Jacques neighborhood had using video in 1969. I have used that film ever since because it makes clear many of the problems and limitations groups have been having when using video as a tool for social change: the cost of the equipment as opposed to other priorities, the time it takes, how it can distract attention from more important things. Nevertheless, the St. Jacques experiment convinced me that video could be a powerful tool if used with caution and thoughtfulness.

MS: Were there problems in getting the video circulated and seen?

GS: At that time very few people had video equipment. The editing and copying of tapes was very difficult, and there was no video projection. There was no 3/4 inch cassette distribution pattern such as we have now.

MS: Was there cable television in Canada?

GS: Oh yes, that’s where I got into cable television. We were looking for ways to get the Challenge for Change material seen. I found that many Film Board distribution people had developed such fixed and out-of-date ideas they could not handle our material properly. They were convinced, for example, that theaters would not show something that had been on television, and that network television would not use anything that had been used locally. I said, “Look, this is information. It’s important. We are going to get it out anyway we can.” Even in 1968-69 about a quarter of the people in Canada had cable. It came there very early, partly because many people lived in remote areas and needed a stronger signal but mostly because they wanted the American programming. We found that cable operators had systems with eight to 12 channels, and usually they were only using three or four of them. There were no satellites to make Home Box Office, distant signal importation, or all of that possible, so they had blank channels and many were happy to have us fill them. We began with the really small mom-and-pop operators who would help us put in little studios with portable cameras and often with high school volunteers as crews. We found some local shows already going, usually very primitive stuff, but it was there. So they would run our Challenge for Change tapes, and sometimes we did live shows as well. You see, the difference in the Challenge for Change program, at least in the beginning, was that the films and tapes were not important in themselves. It was the process and the ideas.

MS: How would you define the basis for Challenge for Change?

GS: As we developed it at the Film Board, it was a social contract between the people who were in charge of a government program-an agency or a social service-and the people who were the recipients of that program or service, designed to find out how they felt about what was being done and what they would like to see changed. Out of our work social theorists later tried to develop an approach and mechanism that would be applied to a vast array of social conflict situations. But in my experience it is limited to places where the people who are in power are willing to listen and respond. You see, when I go to somebody with my camera and microphone and I say, “Look, give me your soul,” I’ve got to be able to say, “Look, it’s going to help you, not hurt you.” If you tell me what you think, it is my obligation as the intermediary to go to the authorities, get them to look at it, and respond. If I can’t persuade either party to live up to their part of the contract, it won’t work. Now the advantage we had at the Film Board is that we worked through a highly respected government agency, cooperating with eight leading government departments, so we could pretty well guarantee some kind of response. People have misunderstood the Challenge for Change approach because they don’t understand that a response is part of the bargain. I have not found this technique working very well in the U.S. There are not many countries in the world where one can make such a bargain, so the concept is not as transportable as people seem to think.

MS: In the Challenge for Change program did you train people to use the equipment themselves?

GS: Yes, we did. In some units we trained using film, but mostly it was videotape. I think one of the more successful video projects was in Drumheller, Alberta in 1969. In each case there was a community organizer who was the catalyst, and in Drumheller it was Tony Karsh, an excellent fellow who used videotape himself and trained other people to use videotape. About 1904, coal was discovered in the Drumheller area located about 80 to 90 miles northeast of Calgary. By the 1940s there were 40 some mines, and a booming economy. By 1969 only one mine was left, and it was about to close. In the moldering little mining camps around Drumheller lived a lot of old people and single mothers with lots of kids. There were also a lot of economic, social, and health problems. For example, people were moving their privies all around and the Red Deer River was getting terribly polluted. Yet the government wasn’t going to give money for a sewer system to people who hadn’t given any indication that they were likely to pull together to help build it. Challenge for Change was called in there by the mayor because he wanted to get people stirred up. So, Tony came and started going from house to house with the video equipment, recording oral history and getting to know people. There were groups of immigrants who had come over since 1904 from all parts of Europe. All had had the same kind of experience, but they had kept to themselves and they didn’t know each other very well. Tony would make a tape of one person and show it to the next person.

MS: And they were receptive to being taped?

GS: Well sure, a nice young fellow comes in and wants to interview you . .. Later Tony invited them to meetings to see the tapes and discuss their problems. Tony was such a good teacher because when he came into the room with the equipment he looked like he needed help. He would act like he had six thumbs, and before long people would just take the equipment away from him and say, “Tony, let me show you how it works.” Before long he developed really skilled crews. Anyway, he got the people to realize that they had to organize to make successful presentations to the provincial government. They had to show that they were going to be responsible in order to get to the government. And they did get somewhere. Drumheller was one of our better examples. There were others attempts to do something for one-industry towns that were losing their industries, particularly in the North. Most of the experiments were described in the Challenge for Change Newsletter, which Dorothy Henaut did a whale of a good job editing. She decided that it should not be a puff piece for the program but a critical journal which aired a lot of our problems.

MS: At the point that you left the National Film Board in 1970, video must have been well integrated into the program.

GS: I can recall an amusing incident. During the summer before I left, an inspector from the government in Ottawa came down to look at us. He wanted to know what all this expenditure for video equipment was. It wasn’t film and this was supposed to be the Film Board. So I took him into the equipment room and showed him 44 rigs we had just bought all lined up. He said, “Well, how many feet are these going to expose?” I told him that it would probably be more than the Film Board’s whole output, and that we could wipe them and use them again. He just had a fit, and I found many people at the Film Board who felt like he did. Unfortunately, later they got into that mode of thinking even in relation to Challenge for Change, measuring its success by how many films were shown rather than what those film showings accomplished.

MS: Is the Film Board continuing to use video?

GS: I haven’t been to Montreal for at least two years, but I know they are using it for a drama workshop and as a way of preparing themselves to do films. I don’t know that they’re using video in the way we used it in Challenge for Change. Until recently, I used to visit the Film Board almost every year to see old friends and new films. People would always take me aside in the cafeteria and say, “George, NFB’s not what it used to be in the old days.” Then I would go to the Friday afternoon screenings and see beautiful new films by people I had never heard of, particularly the Women’s Unit. So I wouldn’t say that the Film Board in general has lost its edge. What I do regret is that what we started so bravely and successfully there, which was the integration of video into the whole process of making films as tools of social change, seems to have been diminished. When I came to the NFB most of the filmmakers were not so much interested in how their audiences perceived their films, as whether or not they won prizes. I required that all of the films in the Challenge for Change program be audience tested in rough cut. Most of the filmmakers just hated that idea. Even in the very well-chosen group of filmmakers, I found at NFB only one in 10 was suitable for our program. There was not much ego gratification in going out and showing a rough cut, seeing the audience respond, and then coming back and recutting it - cutting out all of the little jokes that other filmmakers would love because they didn’t mean anything to the audience and putting in something else that was a little blunter and more didactic because the audience was not getting the point.

MS: You would test films in the communities in which they were made?

GS: Wherever we could. A good example is a film called Up Against the System, which was about the attitude of relief recipients. Terry Filgate was the director and cameraman. He chose to make it in Toronto where he knew there were some strong welfare rights groups. My only admonition was, “Terry, get eye contact, because in my experience if you are looking people in the eye, you can’t pity them, and if we arouse pity, viewers won’t want to get involved. When you talk to people on relief, get their anger and their hurt.” And he did that. He talked from behind the camera so that all of the interviews were directed into the camera. Terry came back and edited a 30 minute rough cut, putting in all of those nice “in” jokes and oblique observations so popular at the Film Board. Then I said, “We’re going to have an audience test,” which Terry understood. Because we didn’t have travel money, I lined up 10 audiences in Montreal in both French and English communities that were similar to the location in Toronto. After the third screening Terry called me up and said, “George, I don’t need any more testing. It’s a mess. They are talking about the personalities and not the issues.” So he came back and cut out all of those character-building things and sharpened the issues. We tested it in that form, and it was fine. Before we printed it, I took the cut back to Toronto to show to the Minister of Welfare who had helped us make the film. First, this was to explain to him why we hadn’t used any of the long interview that we had done with him, and second, to make sure that we didn’t have any factual errors. This was not for censorship, but this film was blasting his whole system, and I felt responsible to that. I knew that if we had factual errors, that would give the welfare agencies a chance to get off the hook. In my experience, Canadian government officials are very different from those in the U.S. They tend to be much more responsible and proud to work for their government. Somehow when you criticize them, they feel you are criticizing the government’s program and not their personal program. In this case, the Minister of Welfare looked at the film and said, “Well, I think that you could have spent your 20 odd minutes on the screen to better advantage, but when will it be ready? I would like to have it premier at my next regional conference which will feature sessions on our attitudes toward recipients.” He did use it at his conference where it created something of a sensation, and it was shown at other welfare conferences across the provinces. Then, a friend who worked for Health Education and Welfare (HEW) came up and she invited me to put on a show in Washington. That was a day I won’t forget for a long time. There were 32 middle management people in the room. I began by explaining how the film was made and about the Challenge for Change program, and then screened the film. There was not a peep out of them. When the film was over someone said, “Isn’t it nice that all of these are white people talking about welfare. So often we just hear about blacks on welfare.” Well, I just let that one slide. The next question was, “Why do you make these films? They don’t promote any program.” So I went right back to the basis of the Film Board, which was to introduce Canada to Canadians and the rest of the world. I said, “This is going to tell a great many Canadians how many other Canadians feel.” It didn’t mean anything. The next question was, “Does the government know you are making these films?” I said, “They paid for it. It’s designed for use in their programs.” The final question was, “How long do you think you will get away with it?” Not a single person in that room thought it might be useful to know how recipients of welfare feel. Since I have been back home I have done a number of Challenge for Change type programs, and I don’t think that a single one of them has been more than marginally successful. This is primarily because of the attitude in the U.S. that if somebody criticizes you, they are automatically your enemy, that mutual concern is impossible in a governmental or even an employer-employee situation.

MS: Do you think that is part of the American personality?

GS: It certainly is. I have tried the Challenge for Change approach with a church group in 1972. Jim Brown, Paul Barnes, and I did a film called People on the Move for St. Peter’s in Manhattan, about why the church was moving, and we used the rushes week after week to keep the congregation together during the time that they were preparing to move. (The church was bought by Citibank, and the original structure replaced by the Citicorp building.) As soon as the ministry got what they wanted, they didn’t seem to want to hear anymore from the congregation. I found they were promising people one thing and then doing another. For instance, we recorded the minister promising some old ladies, who were very concerned about losing the old church, that the new chapel was going to be a model of old St. Peter’s. That very afternoon he met with Louise Nevelson over plans to make it a fashionably modern chapel. I am going to keep trying Challenge for Change in the U.S.-this next spring in Atlanta-but understandably I am becoming more skeptical.

MS: I know that quite often in your films you used a narrative form in a documentary format as a means of providing information. Would you ever consider using that kind of format in video?

GS: I don’t see why not. I regard video and film as interchangeable. You see, one of the reasons I got so excited about video first was the cost. Now, of course, post-production costs have grown so that video often costs as much as film, but in the beginning the cost difference was important. In my experience as a maker of sponsored documentaries, I found I was making films for people like doctors, nurses, and social workers who should have been making their own communications. Filmmaking was so cumbersome and expensive that they were having me translate for them. There are certain advantages to that, but there are also advantages in having them more directly in charge-as they could be with video. Also, we were constantly making films that weren’t local enough because we needed to sell these expensive products in other places. I had come to realize that my ego was very involved in the production. Although I was supposed to have great social purpose, in general I wanted people to look at my film, sit back, and say, “That was a good film.” Fortunately in video I have never developed this attitude. I am very happy when I use video if I never show the whole piece. I try to start a dialogue right from the beginning with the monitor. In fact, depending on the audience, I might start a tape halfway from the end. I’ll freeze-frame, make a remark, or zip ahead to confirm something. If I haven’t gotten a dialogue going between the audience and the tape after three or four minutes, I haven’t done a good job. Now, video art is very different, but in social situations, I think of it primarily as an aide.

MS: It seems like you approach it in a less linear way than film.

GS: Yes, and they can be interchangeable. When you see video in a darkened room with a big projector, you get the same response as film. It is the ambience of the viewing situation that makes a difference. I think that when we get good definition and big-screen projection-not the Advent projector we have now-it will all look like film. When you take a film and translate it to video and show it on a monitor, people respond to it as they do to television. One of the hardest things to overcome in terms of using video usefully on television, cable or otherwise, is the terrible television watching habits that all of us have developed. And we blame television instead of ourselves; it’s like blaming sugar for obesity.

MS: When you came back to the US to teach at NYU, was the department primarily film at that time?

GS: It was completely film. I came back in the fall of 1970 to be chairperson of the Undergraduate Division, a job I did for two years. There was a little video presence on the campus before I got there. Jackie Park, of the NYU film faculty was involved, and Bobby Mariano-who is now an official in the cable industry-was student leader of a half inch portapakbased organization called Videotheque. That fall we started what I believe were the first formal classes in which video was used.

MS: You must not have had very much equipment if you started immediately.

GS: We had, per student, probably as much as we have now. There was equipment on campus which came from student activity funds. At that time there were all kinds of revolts on campus, so the attitude was keep the students quiet and give them some toys. Videotheque was a place where students from all departments could come in and learn to use the equipment. Mostly they used it for social concerns, particularly the relationship between the students and the administration. Bobby Mariano was very active in that, and Maxi Cohen got involved soon afterwards. That fall we started a class called Video in the Community. Jackie and I taught workshops, and we’d get into the community with our portapaks.

MS: How did the Alternate Media Center come about?

GS: The Alternate Media Center got under way in 1971 with a grant from the John and Mary Markle Foundation, which had recently decided to turn from support for medical education and make a major commitment to media. Both Red Burns and I were thinking about experimenting with the use of video in closed-circuit as one variety of “alternative media,” but the Markle Foundation got more and more interested in cable and pushed us in that direction. We had some opportunities to do cable, but we also did a lot of training of people locally in half inch video for closed circuit use because in the early 1970s, so few people in Manhattan could get cable.

MS: Was this in the community or with students?

GS: We operated in the community. In fact, the students would come in only to assist us in one way or another. We tried to prevent the Center from being a way of supplementing the school. I knew that trap and Red caught onto it very soon. We had a number of very good people. Joel Gold worked with us, and Woody Vasulka was our engineer for awhile.

MS: Were you involved when the FCC held hearings in Washington, D.C. about access in 1971?

GS: We didn’t testify in front of the FCC, but Red and I went down and we showed the first portapak to the engineers. I think our visit had a good deal to do with the fact that they didn’t require broadcast standards for access. That meant that you could shoot with a portapak, which opened up all kinds of possibilities.

MS: Did you begin programming for the public access channels in New York City immediately? [In July 1970, under the Lindsay administration, New York City granted 20-year noncompetitive franchises to Teleprompter Corporation, now Group W Cable, (for upper Manhattan) and Sterling Information Services Ltd., better known as Manhattan Cable Television (for lower Manhattan). These franchises stipulated the provision of public access channels beginning July 1, 1971. The introduction of the concept of public access into cable television regulation was part of an initial attempt by the FCC to establish diversity in cable and to prevent it from becoming a copy of commercial broadcasting. After several years of consideration and a year of public hearings, the FCC issued regulations, effective March 31, 1972, which required every cable system with 3,500 or more subscribers to originate local programming and to provide “one dedicated, noncommercial public access channel available without charge at all times on a first-come, first-served non-discriminatory basis.” Since its initial strict stance toward the cable industry (which also included prohibiting the networks from cable industry (which also included prohibiting the networks from cable television ownership), the FCC has gradually been relaxing its rules point by point. In 1975, however, it was the Supreme Court which dealt a major blow to access regulators. In the case of the FCC vs Midwest Video, the court ruled that the FCC lacked the authority to issue regulations that, in effect, reduced cable television to the status of a common carrier. The Supreme Court ruling, however, did not signal an end to public access cable. While the FCC cannot now require access, state and municipal governments can. At least for the time being. In June 1983 the U.S. Senate passed S. 66, a bill which is intended to “eliminate government regulation in order to prevent the imposition of an unnecessary economic burden on cable systems in their provision of service to the public.” While S. 66 does not require public access channels, it does allow that they may be mandated or offered by the cable company. Under consideration now in the House of Representatives is a slightly modified version of S. 66, H.R. 4103, more commonly known as the Wirth Bill since it is sponsored by Representative Timothy Wirth of Colorado, the chair of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee. The Wirth Bill gives more authority to municipalities which require public access channels and provides for leased access. However, its provisions covering “leased access” are so full of exceptions they are useless. The recision of cities’ right to regulate rates makes their power to enforce requirements of the franchises (i.e., for access) almost nor-existent. A vote is expected on the bill in early 1984.]

GS: The channels were there and we put some of the first tapes on.

MS: What kind of tapes were those?

GS: Our first programming was about Washington Heights in the Teleprompter area because that’s where the concentration of cable subscribers were located. We wanted to see if people would respond to a different kind of television, so instead of trying to make our stuff look like conventional programming, we just had video crews go up there and say, “Hey man, what’s happening?” and record their response. It was all very laid back. Phyllis Chinlin and Joel Gold were very active AMC staffers at that time. They did a whole series of tapes about people protesting to get a stop light. We put the unedited tapes directly on cable as well as having community playbacks. There was a fascinating tape called Blacks Respond to the Riots (1972), sparked by an item in the New York Times about blacks and Hispanics having a fight at 155th St. the night before. Joel went up there by himself and stopped somebody on the street and said, “Hey man, what’s happening?” One man starts talking, telling what he knows, and people gather around. The next person takes the microphone and the next. Than a wonderful crazy guy starts spinning a big tale and everybody else corrects him. Finally, a young guy from the Catholic school nearby tells them what really happened. When the tape is through you have a feeling, not that you have learned exactly what happened the night before, but that you have learned so much about the dynamics of this neighborhood, that you know it’s a neighborhood worth keeping. I think the tape ran as two unedited half hours and we repeated it every day for a week. We found that people often watched it two or three times. Phyllis Chinlin went up to talk to people about relief conditions in the neighborhood. Now, Phyllis looks like your proverbial upper-middle-class Californian, which she is, and she never pretended to be anything else. But I think because she didn’t intrude, people just gave her their souls. For example, a social worker told her exactly what the system was really like. When Phyllis brought it back, I remember we whistled: “Have you thought what is this going to do to that woman if we put it on cable?” So, we called the woman up and asked her, “Do you really want us to run it?” She said, “Please do. I have been trying to get up the courage to quit.” It ran on cable and she did quit.

MS: It has always seemed problematic to me that everyone was so excited about getting on cable in the first years of public access in New York City, when in 1971 or 1972 who had cable? How many of the people in your tapes had cable?
GS: Very few people had cable, so we would recognize that and do other things. There were a few places in Washington Heights where people could go to see the tapes, like a barber shop, but mostly we did a lot of playing back in houses and on stoops. In fact, at that time we made a nine inch monitor a part of the rig so when everybody went out they could playback on the street.
          The use of closed circuit video is so powerful and so neglected. Now, unfortunately it has gotten a bad name, the way that almost anything does in this country, because it was oversold. We keep looking for panaceas. Video is just a help; it’s not a cure. I use it all of the time myself, to see what it does just in terms of getting people to change their ideas of what television should be. I would say the problem is greater now than it was 10 years ago, because of what we perceive as acceptable television. I love to do black and white and say, “Look, it isn’t television.”
          We also did tapes in the Village when we got our center going. I remember there was a series of tapes on a gay murder which the police decided they could not solve without cooperation from the gay community. Phyllis did a couple of tapes and the police came to review the tapes with the gays and to respond in an open meeting. We got a dialogue going in our access center about the incident for the first time. We also made tapes about P.S. 41 when it was developing its alternate school P.S. 3, which has now been running for 10 years. They had a charrette (an intense brain-storming session) for a weekend with parents, school administrators, outside advisors, and the kids. We covered the charrette and had playback in the lobby and outside. We bicycled tapes up to headquarters, and I had my old stationwagon out in front of the school with two monitors on it with cardboard hoods. People could go inside and perform and then go outside an hour later and see themselves on cable. There were few subscribers at that time so we used that to really try to be innovative. I just wish that there was anything like that kind of innovation now. Instead, people are trying their best to make their stuff look like conventional television.
          Another tape which is a good representation of that time is Under One Roof, made in 1972. I was working with Jane Benedict, a terrific woman who has run the Metropolitan Council on Housing for many years. We were doing some tape on rent strikes, and I got some students involved. Jenny Goldberg and John Kraus went over to the East Village and discovered a rent strike and began taping. They found that the people in the building were taking the landlady to Landlord-Tenant Court, and they asked the judge if they could bring the videotape as evidence to show the violations. With one eye on the press, he let us. Then Jenny and John went back and recorded a meeting with the tenants who were afraid to strike but would come to a tape showing. Afterwards they agreed to talk with the organizers about the strike. This was recorded. It was very important because it showed that they were frightened and bewildered. The organizers saw why they didn’t come to court. As one of them says on tape, “I am not an American. I’m afraid. If I give up a day I will lose my job.” So, it illustrated why the Landlord-Tenant Court was not a satisfactory solution. Most important, during the playback the two resident organizers could see and hear themselves feeding these people a lot of malarkey, like, “You are a more worthwhile person than her, so she can’t put you out on the street.” When Jane Benedict saw the tape she was able to see the faults in the training and to do something about it. After the tenants saw the tape, one of the non-strikers invited the crew to record in her apartment so she could make her testimony.
          In the Challenge for Change program we had stressed the idea that people should do everything themselves. This tape helped me realize that it is really not so important that the people who have the concern actually use the camera themselves if they are directing the camera or holding the microphone. In Under One Roof that woman says, “Take it here; look at this.” It might have taken a long time to train her to use the camera. The next use of this tape was in a legislative briefing in Albany. They recorded what the tenants said and the answers they got from their representatives. This was brought back and played for the people who couldn’t go to Albany. Finally, it was edited and put on cable, which was its least important use. Now, Jenny and John were very proud of the tape, but they weren’t getting credit for it as filmmakers, so they went over and tried to do a film about the same situation. Today, that film looks conventional and dead, with long traveling shots of East Village slums, and music. The difference is revealing. It happens all of the time-an immediate human experience loses its meaning when it is turned into filmmaking cliches.
MS: It seems like there was a grace period in the beginning of public access when a lot of tapes were being generated and shown.
GS: Teleprompter at that time was way ahead of Manhattan Cable in terms of fostering access, and when Irving Kahn was sent to jail all that changed. (Irving Kahn, president of Teleprompter, was indicted in March 1971, and the following October found guilty of conspiracy, bribery, and perjury in connection with a $15,000 payment to Johnstown, Pa. officials to obtain an exclusive television franchise. He went to jail in March 1972.) We had many more problems with Manhattan Cable, which was much less interested. In the mid-1970s when we were still carrying stuff up to Teleprompter’s upper Manhattan studio the technicians went on strike. We went up and made a tape with the people on the picket line, and, with their permission, put it on cable. Teleprompter had been combining local origination-which is programming done by the agents of the cable operator, who have control over the content and the scheduling-and public access-which is programming done by the people. So, to the union it looked like a scab situation. But I have a feeling they had no idea what we were up to, and that was partly our fault. We should have educated them about the difference between public access and local origination. Now a lot of us at the NFLCP are working hard to do just that so that you don’t lose it all when cable companies unionize.
MS: What were your projects at the Alternate Media Center besides programming for local public access?
GS: We did four big experiments that grew out of a number of earlier attempts to influence public access and cable operators, where they would let us in. Red Burns decided to do four projects in very different parts of the country, and in each case the cable company put up some of the money for the coordinator who went in for three to six months. First came Reading, Pennsylvania, where there was an old system with cooperative management. Phyllis Chinlin went there. Next came Orlando, Florida, where we sent Bobby Mariano when the system was first opening up to see what would happen when you started access right in the beginning. DeKalb, Illinois was a place where they had cable for some time with a tie-in with the college. And Bakersfield, California was chosen because it was on the West Coast and there was a strong minority group that was Spanish speaking. Eileen Connell, who is now Vice-President for Warners,
MS: When they left, would a local person take over?
GS: Yes, they helped to find and train a local person.
MS: At that point was the role of the Alternate Media Center finished?
GS: We had enough money to monitor them, and that monitoring proved to be an important element in the longevity and success of the project. In Reading we did two projects. Red went back there with a National Science Foundation-funded project for senior citizens because it had been such a good access center and the cable operator was so supportive. NSF wanted to know if there was any cost benefit in using cable and telecommunications to improve the dissemination of information on social services. Red went down to Reading and chose three senior citizen centers with residences attached, so you had, in effect, a captive audience. There were day programs so that other people from the neighborhood came into the centers and were used to coming in. There were also a number of people who were hooked into this from their homes but could not respond except by telephone. There were two other up-links besides those in the three residences: at the Social Security Office and City Hall. This meant that the people at Social Security could talk directly to and be seen by the three senior citizens’ centers, and the senior citizens who came to the center could be seen by City Hall and Social Security.
          Red realized after she worked it out that a whale of a lot of money was going for demographics and evaluative studies by sociologists. She thought this was wasting a lot of money but she had to go along with it. She told the evaluators that the moment she saw that changing the program would make it more viable, she would change it. They all doubled up in fits, saying, “What is this going to do to our computer cards?” She said, “That’s your problem. My problem is to find a way to do this project without abusing these old people, to get information to them, and to make it live. We have no right to come into this place, exploit these people for our experiment, and then leave them no better off than they were in the beginning.” And she did change her design, very quickly, as she saw things develop. The first change was that while all of these senior citizens needed this information, very few of them needed it at any one time. It wasn’t enough to draw them into the center. So Red mixed this information with a sing-a-long, a period when people could say “Hi” to the people in the other centers, and programs about local history. Soon the program was three hours instead of a half hour, and the people would come in droves. Now there is an independent agency running it, and they have both young people and seniors who run the programs and the cameras. The experiment was funded for only one year, but Red set it up so well, building in the whole idea of getting local funding, that it has worked ever since.
MS: How exactly does the two-way aspect work?
GS: The program goes on live. You see one of the centers, then another. They do a split screen so the citizen can see and be seen by the offical he questions. Now, it is no longer just senior citizens who use the service. Every Thursday night they have three hours of municipal programming with neighborhoods using the centers. Both the former mayor and the present mayor have used it very expertly, because they have a chance to talk to the people face to face. Reading is the only place in the country that uses a two-way system in a really freeway on a regular basis. You don’t just press buttons, like with Warner’s QUBE system, where whoever determines the questions also determines the answers. It has worked in Reading because they kept the old system on the poles when they installed a new system using two of the old channels for the return links. In newer systems where the wires are supposed to be two-way they don’t work nearly as well, which may be why you don’t have true two-way in other places.
          I have been working very hard to get senior citizens involved in access, because they have the time and don’t have to make a living out of it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if in the next five years half of the access centers were run by people over 65, with all- of the minuses and pluses that implies. We need a mix of ages, races, and classes if we are going to have public access responding to all the needs of the community.
MS: What was your role in all of these projects?
GS: I was very involved in running the internship program which I haven’t described yet. In 1972, I was on the panel at the National Endowment for the Arts. There was a lot of worry about the coming of cable and fellow panel members thought they should be doing something to foster good model programming. They asked me to look into it and to plan a method of training. I knew enough already about the cable industry to say that if we didn’t get inside the business, we wouldn’t have a chance to influence it. I also knew that the local systems we needed to get into were the ones in cities where a majority of the people subscribed because of their geographical situation (mountains, remoteness). There were no satellites then, but some cities already had 60-70% of the population on line. These were already in place and were “grandfathered,” that is, exempt from the FCC’s requirements for access because they were up and running before access was mandated in 1972.
I talked with Brian Owen, a young guy from Texas who at that time was the local programming representative of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), the cable industry’s association, and we planned the program together. The Endowment gave us about $110,000 a year, and I wanted to match that with money from the industry. We figured that would give us about eight internships. To be a valid applicant, a person had to find a cable company that would guarantee half of his or her salary and access to equipment and a channel. Then the applicant and the cable system applied together. The first thing this did was cut down on the number of applicants, so we could give them more attention. Second, it meant that the marriages were made before the intern came to us. I wasn’t training people and then trying to persuade the cable companies to take them. Third, people had already found places they could work in, locations where they wanted to live. Fourth, it was guaranteed that we had hustlers, which is the first skill required of access coordinators.
          In the beginning, the interns took training with us for a couple of weeks-most of them had some video background-and they went out and did access programming in their communities. They came back in the middle of the year for a week, and at the end of the year to help train the next group. They had money for telephone calls so they could stay in touch with everybody else in the circuit, and each of them got a portapak, not for programming but for playback so they could keep their hands in and could view tapes from everyone else since we had a tape swap. They could also come back for a second year if the cable operator put up all of their salary, and many of them did. I would visit each one of them at least once a year and they would come to New York. It built camaraderie. The program lasted four years, and I must say it worked brilliantly. I am quite as proud of designing this program as of any film or tape I have made.
MS: Why did it end?
GS: I had a sabbatical in 1975 to 1976, and before I left I said, “Next year is going to be the last year.” The reason was that I saw the amount of money was fixed, and we were having some difficulty with the cable companies. The FCC wasn’t enforcing regulations. Profits in cable, except in those places where it was a gold mine because it was necessary for good reception, weren’t moving. Cable was in a slump, and you couldn’t borrow money to build new systems except in certain places. Although I had pulled some pretty good deals, the University’s pressure on me to kick over more money was going up. I could see that before long I would just be running the program to keep it going. I also thought that we had done enough so that the money from the Endowment could go to support other programs.
          There were 29 interns in all, a very strong group who decided that the camaraderie was the thing they wanted to keep up. In 1976 they decided to start the NFLCP which is built on that idea of networking. I am not the father of the Federation. It was their idea. It was a hell of a good idea, and it has done far better than I ever dreamed it would.
MS: Did that money at the NEA go to other cable projects?
GS: Not directly. It certainly did free up some money to go to individual grants, but on the other hand, the NEA has been very helpful in supporting the Federation for their annual meetings. They would never have had their first national meeting without the NEA and the cable companies. You see, the cooperation between the cable companies and the Federation has always been very strong. That is why I am very disturbed about things now. We’ve always been inside and had friends on the inside; a lot of our members are employed in the industry. Yet today they have to battle their employer’s trade association, the NCTA.
MS: How many people were involved when the Federation
GS: About 50, I suppose. By the time we were meeting in Madison, in 1978, which was the first meeting I attended, there were about 250 people there.
MS: Are these all people who are access programmers?
GS: It’s a mixture. When we met this summer, in Portland, Oregon, with more than 600 in attendance, many people came representing cities. We have trained a lot of city cable officers, programmers, access coordinators, church people, librarians, and people who are using cable as an extension of their professional life, like teachers and nurses.
MS: Are you still working with the Alternate Media Center?
GS: I am not formally attached to the Alternate Media Center now. I got involved in the Federation, and Red has taken AMC more in the direction of business, which disturbs me. She says, and very rightly so, “George, that’s where the money is. And I haven’t been able to find the grants to do the things I would like to do.” Now AMC is involved in teleconferencing, the use of computers, and that kind of direction with a general business orientation. Red is a survivor. While we have philosophical differences, and I regret the fact that she has taken less and less interest in access, I really have to respect what she has done. She knew a long time before the rest of us that we couldn’t trust the cable companies and had to work out strategies to support the AMC ourselves.
MS: Why do you think cable came out of its slump?
GS: It was the satellites, very simply. The satellites mean that you can sell movies, sports, and programming of wide general interest. Also, the FCC’s relaxation of the limitations on distant signal made a difference. Before, the cable operators could only legally put on cable what was available in the area with a good antenna. Now they can bring in distant signals, and I don’t know why the Supreme Court hasn’t taken after them because they’re stealing people’s programs out of the air. It’s all for bucks. Local advertisers in Los Angeles, say, are paying for programming and there is nothing to keep the cable companies from bringing that programming across the country and charging for it. I have never understood the morality of it.
MS: Was this an unofficial relaxation of the regulations?
GS: No, it was official. Also (though I don’t know if this should be taken seriously or not) the Nixon administration had a big fight with the broadcasters, and so they favored the cablecasters at that time. However, it was the satellites that made the difference because the cable companies could borrow money again. Nobody was going to put cable systems in most big cities before the satellites because there was no reason to. In Philadelphia, for example, which is a flat city, you didn’t need it for better reception.
MS: How do you think local programming has evolved in
GS: It depends entirely on the kind of facilitation it as been given. In the localities where it has had good leadership, it has been very influential. Where it has had bad or indifferent leadership, it’s just nothing. It has been greatly influenced by geography. Our best examples are places where you need cable for better reception, so the penetration is high. For example, in Dubuque, Iowa we had an experiment led by AMC intern Sue Buske, who is now the executive director of the Federation. When Sue left Dubuque, access fell into less able hands, but it is still going well because about 70% of the people have cable.
          On the other hand, there are systems like the one in Columbus, Indiana. I went there in 1971 at the behest of the Irving Miller Foundation because they wanted to do something about local communication. The franchise only covered the town, not the county where a good part of the people lived, so maybe 20% had cable. I helped start an access center there. The Foundation kept giving it reasonably good support, and there were some excellent people there, including Bill and Esti Marpet, who did excellent stuff. But after 10 years of fine access programming, they finally had to give up because cable never got to more than 30% of the people.
MS: I have noticed that many of the artists in New York who are programming for public access, all seem to live in neigh
borhoods downtown that are not wired yet for cable.
GS: Yes, and that is strictly illegal. According to the franchise, all of Manhattan should have been wired seven years ago. Why doesn’t the Koch administration enforce the franchise? Go ask Morris Tarshis, the franchise director. Go ask Susan Herman, his assistant for cable television. It’s like a policeman walking past someone committing a crime. There are a hell of a lot of people in Manhattan, 12 years after the franchise went into effect, who can’t get cable. Think if it were water. Information is that important.
Everywhere I go I stress that because we are dealing with government regulations, rules about access have to be written into the franchises, but those franchises aren’t worth the paper they are written on if they aren’t enforced.
MS: Do you think that cable companies should finance public access?
GS: I am concerned about the administration in such cases. The people who are doing the facilitating need to be paid. But I am worried about the programmers being paid, because what you are going to get, then, are more people doing the kind of programming that is expected of them. I am also worried about the municipalities having control of that money.
          An interesting case in point is the situation in Canada. Frank Spiller, who was my boss at the National Film Board, went from there to become an advisor to the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Commission) which is Canada’s equivalent of the FCC. He helped them to realize that if they I didn’t insist that cable also carry local programming it would be a conduit for little except material from the U.S. Since then local programming in Canada has been supported more than it is here. I went up there in 1982 for a panel at a Canadian cable television conference, and when I screened all of the programs entered for awards I was appalled at how uncontroversial and essentially dull most of it was. It all could have been made in the Queen’s parlor. I divined that this was because it was all made by or facilitated by cable company employees. Although most of the coordinators came out of a good Canadian tradition of social animation they couldn’t help but look over their shoulders to see how the company that provides their salaries was responding.
          In the panel I said, “You have all heard awful things about access in New York City. You know about “Ugly George” and all that stuff, but it is the one place in the United States where an Arab can look you in the’eye and tell you how he feels. Can that happen on your system?” “Never,” they said. I said, “New York City cable is the one place where the IRA can look you in the eye and tell you what they think.” They said, “That would be seditious.”
          Frank Spiller has done a very important report in which he describes 10 years of local programming in Canada and says that much of it has been of little use because it hasn’t adopted the model of the independent, non-profit access organization. You see, it would be much easier to leave it to the cable companies, and a lot of good access has been done under the aegis of the cable companies. My own feeling is that access centers have done best where they have had to scramble for money. Some of the best have gotten very little from the cable companies, and I don’t think that’s right either. Access should be supported by the cable company in exchange for its exclusive franchise, but that money should be matched by money from other places, not only volunteer labor but foundations, individuals, and organizations. If it is all beholden to the cable companies, I think it will disappear finally when the franchise wars are over.
MS: It will be called access but will it be something else?
GS: There is a lot of water in cable stocks and cable economics will fully dictate what happens to access when it is totally supported by the cable companies. The cable companies are beginning to say this, though not to their investment counselors. The other day the president of Manhattan Cable said that he didn’t know a big city franchise that was showing a profit. When the shakedown comes, access is going to be the first thing they will drop if it hasn’t developed some muscles and support from other places. Access is not a place to make money, but a place to speak freely. For the independent producer who wants to get paid for his or her work there is leased access.
MS: What is the difference between leased and public access?
GS: Leased access is a form of public access. It means that you buy a block of time and pay a certain amount of money which is determined by the regulators, and you can then put ads on your show. The big kafuffle over leased access is that cable operators, through the NCTA, do not want regulation over what they can charge for leased access. They want to give favored attention to people who buy big blocks of time or to insiders. They will lease to another corporation that is really part of their own organization, and shut out everyone else, which has begun to happen. We in the NFLCP say that leased access is a function of the cable company as a common carrier, so there has got to be an equality of competition. Leased access is crucial to making cable open to entrepreneurs, which is what Sidney Dean, who is the cable advisor to the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and the City Club of New York, says and I fully agree. I am grateful in part to leased access because it got all of the porn off public access since it is being supported by the massage parlors. That’s because I’ve had so much trouble trying to explain this small amount of porn on New York public access which seems to fascinate the whole world.
MS: What do you think will happen with low power television?
GS: The FCC has bungled it so badly that what could have been another way to get diversity and more widespread access to the airwaves has mostly been lost. Construction for low power is much more expensive than anyone imagined. You’ve got to have engineering studios. You can spend a couple hundred thousand dollars before you’re ready to go on the air. I do see low power as one answer to a very severe problem in cable-that is the matter of territory. Take Knoxville, for example, where there is one franchise for the city, another for the county, and great areas that are not covered by either one. To take care of this, cable has interconnection. Interconnection, an arrangement which makes it possible for two or more cable systems to share the same program at the same time, without the use of a satellite. But this mechanism is much more difficult than the theorists would have you think. Because cable companies seldom make any money on these interconnections, even though they may be required by their franchises, the interconnection services are poorly maintained and monitored. The connection between Manhattan Cable and Group W often simply doesn’t work. Why should they care? No pay services are carried on interconnect; low power could fill that gap.
Low power could mean a great deal more if it got into the right hands, instead of Sears and Roebuck. The NFLCP had a hotline for awhile to help people draw up the applications, but then the FCC went to the lottery system. If low power gets in the wrong hands it is going to be one more commercial.
MS: The arguments for public access are very different from the way that printed media is considered in terms of access. Why do you think that we should have access to electronic media when it can be argued that we don’t have access to printed media?
GS: That is, of course, what the NCTA is saying, that they are telepublishers and should have First Amendment rights. If S. 66 or its equivalent gets passed, it will mean that the cable companies have the right to say what goes on their channels. Their argument is that you wouldn’t tell the newspapers what to print. I start from the premise that Michael Myerson, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, does, which is that the First Amendment was designed to give us freedom of speech. If subsequent developments keep us from having that freedom of speech, we should use the First Amendment to get it. I think it should apply to print as well, if printed media gets into monopolistic hands. We are talking about a quasi-monopoly with electronic media. When I was a writer, there were a lot of outlets where I could sell my work. If I am an electronic journalist, the networks won’t handle anything that they don’t have complete editorial control over, and there is no other place I can go. It’s not the same thing.
MS: But when a magazine publishes your piece, it does have editorial control over it.
GS: Sure they do, but I have many more choices. I can bargain with them. In broadcasting there are so few gatekeepers compared to the gatekeepers in print that we need a whole new strategy to do something about it. True, there is no more competition in local newspapers than in local TV news, but look at all of the alternatives you have in print-the shopper’s guides, the neighborhood newspapers, and the alternative papers. These are very influential in many places.
MS: What would you consider to be the ideal programming for access?
GS: I would like to see a variety of approaches, with one or two channels that are pure access. These would be on a first-come, first-serve basis where anyone can get on and do what they want to and people are given the right to the means of production, perhaps requiring them to match resources at some time if they can afford to.
MS: Do you think they should be regulated in any way?
GS: Obviously there have to be some rules about the use and timeliness of the work, but beyond that I don’t think anyone should control content on those channels. The facilitators should be available to the access programmers, and try to influence their programs, not in terms of subject matter but in terms of being smart about reaching their intended audience. I am ashamed to say that I know of very few access centers where there are good critical assessments held for local producers. It is happening in a few centers; it should be happening in more. Because cable systems have more channels now, I would like to see separate channels dedicated to community programming, especially government programming that has an access concept-not where city hall is telling us but is listening to us and sharing its problems with us. It’s the difference between having city hall show a program done by a PR firm about putting out our garbage as opposed to the garbage collectors getting on cable and showing why we need to cover the can and separate our bottles. This way we get to know the garbage collector better, and he or she doesn’t hate us. Right now we are fighting each other. This would be a way for us to understand what the hell the other person’s problems are.
          My idea from the beginning is that cable is only one means of transmission. It has no other attraction than that, and there are many disadvantages to cable or broadcast. Take, for example, a tape on natural childbirth. Put it on either network or cable and most people are going to watch it for the sensation of seeing something they shouldn’t see. But if you have that same tape in a parents’ class and watched by people who, in three or four months, are going to be having a baby, you’ve got the power of concentration and group interaction. Cable is a great way to reach a whole community, but it is a very clumsy way to transmit those particular kinds of tapes that are designed to make changes.
          There are exceptions. In Reading recently there was a drug bust in the high school. You can imagine what the local TV news and papers did with that story. The student leaders were very upset. Now, in Reading they have an interactive weekly program called “Generation Gap” which pairs senior citizens and high school students. The students appealed to the seniors to have a program on this incident. It was a great way to get to the community. Because you’ve had a big hoopla, people know to watch, and people could come to the center where the broadcast was recorded live if they wanted to take part. Some parents might not want to come to a meeting because their kid was involved orthey were afraid their kid was involved. They could sit home and watch or maybe call up anonymously.
MS: If you were to define a communications system that you
GS: I would like to see access centers, run by independent groups, as places where you could record easily-not studios but places where you could meet and also record, and also as places where people can gather for community concerns. You could have closed-circuit playbacks and you could decide what should go on cable. New York City’s franchise in 1970 called for 10 head-ins in each of the two divisions of Manhattan. We still don’t have that because the franchise has not been enforced.
MS: What are these head-ins supposed to consist of?
GS: Ten community studios. Just think what we could do if we had those in this city. I live in the West Village. We could use its studio for a meeting we are going to have in my apartment building about co-oping. Much of it has to be private, but we might want to record some parts of it that could be used to link us with other people in this area facing the same problem. Down the street just last week there was a block association meeting about co-oping that ought to have been on cable.
MS: Of all of the aspects of access, which is the most important?
GS: It is important that people take responsibility for informing their neighbors about their concerns without going through intermediaries all the time. There is something very healthy about that responsibility. Gradually, we can train our media gatekeepers, like the reporters and editors, to develop habits of consultation that the concept of the journalist as a “star” discourages. We would develop a whole new generation of journalists who would get the access feeling. I had hoped this would happen faster, and if we had thorough access it would.
I have always said, right from the beginning, that my interest is not in cable but in access. I think that the public access concept should be applied to all electronic media. Broadcasters, too, should have times when people have the right to be on the air. Cable is merely a useful rehearsal ground.