Screening Reality by Jon Wilkman

Author:Jon Wilkman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Advertisement for the Sony Portapak video camera and recorder.

AUTHOR’S COLLECTION

Back in New York City, Teasdale joined Cort at a video collective on the Lower East Side, co-founded with artist Mary Curtis Ratcliff. Cort was thinking big—nothing less than a reinvention of American television. The unlikelihood of success was ignored: “We just went for it,” Ratcliff remembered.16

In the late 1960s another guerrilla documentary movement, the radical collective Newsreel, based on film, not video, emerged in New York and San Francisco. Like the Film and Photo League, Newsreel documentarians, mostly white, middle class, college educated, were revolutionaries and agitators. Shooting rallies, protests, and acts of resistance, their films were projected in the streets, the place where many of their stories originated. In leftist rhetoric that ironically echoes attacks from the right nearly sixty years later, Newsreel’s goal was “to counter, to talk back to, and crack the façade of the lying media.”17

Using video, David Cort had similar goals, but looked to make change from the inside out. Somehow Cort wangled an interview with CBS producer Don Hewitt. Hewitt wasn’t interested in offering airtime to the counterculture, but in a turn of events that qualified as a 1960s pipe dream, a mail boy connected Cort with Don West, an executive assistant to Frank Stanton, president of the network.

One of CBS’s most popular variety shows, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, had trespassed beyond folk songs and sibling rivalry jokes. When the brothers’ humor turned against the Vietnam War, affiliates rebelled. There was talk of cancellation. If that happened, West, a Smothers fan, had an idea for a “with it” program that would focus on current affairs and pop culture to retain younger viewers and their buying power. He called it The Real World. Cort and his Portapak collective convinced the CBS executive that they were the producers to safely bring The Real World and the spirit of the counterculture to primetime. To West’s surprise, Mike Dann, the network’s head of programming, thought it was worth a gamble.

After their equipment had been upgraded by CBS engineers, and an adequate production budget allocated, supplemented with West’s own cash, Cort and Ratcliff’s collective, now called Videofreex, was determined to reveal the “real” America on videotape. They were not cinematographers; they were videographers. Along with other Portapakers, they learned as they did. To artist and videographer Skip Blumberg, “the video explosion was a free for all.”18 When Videofreex returned from roaming America, Don West rented an upstate New York farmhouse where they could edit forty hours into a fifty-three-minute program called Subject to Change.

Unlike film or two-inch tape, half-inch video wasn’t physically cut. It was edited by copying shots, one after another, onto a master tape. In the early days, it was a laborious, imprecise process. During postproduction, if David Cort wasn’t the sole auteur, he played the part. Parry Teasdale described Cort’s “penchant for theatrical bellowing, his wheezy laugh, more a tic than an expression of humor, his Whitman beard and Afro hair, and his parrot, Oberon, sitting on his shoulder nibbling on his ear.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.