TeleVISIONS (Autumn 1977)

8 Film Fund: With an estimated total of over $200,000 for its first year, the newly. established Film Fund begins operation this fall. According to Fund staff members, guidelines for film, video and slide programs will be available on November 1, with a grant application deadline of January 15. Grants will be announced April 1. Selections will be made by one of two panels, one that will review proposals from producers east of the Mississippi and one for those in the West. The Fund will have two deadlines per year, the second being planned for September 1st. There are likely to be more films funded than tapes or slide shows, since a principle criterion is the method of distribution. The Fund’s organizers are giving emphasis to programs which are not aimed primarily at public TV audiences. Hence, the distribution plan is an important part of any proposal. While grants will be made for research, pre-production, and production phases of projects, two-thirds of the first year’s grants will be reserved to complete, edit or distribute programs. Maximum grant is $25,000. Typical grant will be $5,000 to $20,000. The Film Fund has been organized primarily by filmmakers and film backers who have been working for social change. Some board members are associated with foundations which have found it difficult to evaluate film and media proposals, even though they might wish to contribute. Hence, the new’ fund will provide a place for producers who want to use film, video or slides for social change to go— not only for money but for advice in funding, distribution, promotion, etc. Staff member Miles Mogulescu, himself coproducer of Union Maids, emphasized the service aspect of the project. In addition, organizers hope that foundations and donors without expertise in evaluating media projects will be willing to trust the collective skills of this project enough to transfer funds for disbursement through The Film Fund. Producers who wish to submit proposals are strongly urged to contact the Film Fund for guidelines and to talk over the project before submitting a proposal. Rushes are not to be sent unless specifically requested. Contact: The Film Fund, 186 Hampshire St., Cambridge, Mass. 02139. (617) 661-4599. CPB Revolving Fund: Meanwhile, the first two documentaries of ten produced under grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Revolving Documentary Fund will go into the fall public TV Station Programming Copperative (SPC) in late Oct. The SPC will be a test of the stations’ will to back documentaries, since the revenue earned during this market will be put back into the fund for future programs. The two shows are “An Element of Risk”, by KCET-TV and “Even the Desert Will Bloom” by WXXI-TV. Trade group for A-V producers: Formed to counteract the threat by the Department of Defense to limit audiovisual production to a select 100 contractors a year ago, the Independent Media Producers Association has grown into a Washington trade group actively lobbying on behalf of a wide range of independent producers. Their first battle was won when proposed DoD regs were withdrawn and the Office of Management and Budget took over to draft new, less limiting procedures for media contracting. OMB regs were released for comment July 1 and are available. (See below) IMPA’s 100-odd members include other associations, like the NY-based Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers and International Quorum of Film Producers (IQ), as well as distributors, film productions houses, smaller mom and-pop operations, some large industrial firms, and many individuals. Fees, while due for a change, are now $25 individual, $100 for a group. Contact: Bill Williams, IMPA, 1100 17th Street, N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20036. (202) 4662175. Govemment A-V regs: OMB’s new proposed regs cover motion pictures contracted by the government—which totaled 1,303 titles in FY 1976, at a cost of $17,533,846. Three main changes were made at the suggestion of IMPA and other commenters from within the industry: that no restriction be made on the number of firms which can qualify as the government contractors; that criteria will be based on production capability, not capital plant, equipment, and size of investment as DoD had specified; and that qualification would be determined by a newly established Interagency Film Review Board that would view sample work from a producer, not review physical assets. OMB issued the updated regulations in a memorandum in May. Comments were received in July. Public hearings on the newly revised regs will be held in November; following any revisions they would be published in early 1978 for implementation by the “lead” agency, probably DoD or the General Services Administration. The rules apply only to film production. Contracting procedures for video ($11,854,554 worth of outside contracts in FY 76) and audio/mixed media ($3,738,806) will follow, although the regs will probably resemble the film package that is finally passed. OMB is also working on the establishment of a new government-wide audiovisual data base, to be housed at the GSA’s National Audiovisual Center. This computer-based inventory would list facilities and software for all federal agencies. For input or further details contact Lester Fettig or Chuck Clark at OMB: (202) 395-3436. AV Management study: Meanwhile, the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, which is a casualty of the Carter reorganization plan, has hired a consultant to examine federal agencies management system for financing audiovisual materials. The first phase of the study, due in November, will be delivered by consultant Robert Lissit to Barry Jagoda, President Carter’s media advisor. Lissit has reviewed every cabinet-level department and a number of other agencies like Action, EPA and NASA for procedures for AV selection, criteria, administration, distribution, audience and effectiveness. HEW’s Bureau of Education for the Handicapped Media Services Office gave 31 media projects a total of $3.4 million to serve the needs of the handicapped and those working with this population. Of the general audience grants made were: $120,000 to La Luz Cinema Video of L.A., a minority-oriented business which will do 12 five-minute spots on handicapped achievers, and $150,000 to Dick Farr, an individual handicapped producer from San Francisco, to produce the pilot of a series called “Just Like Everybody Else”. $120,000 was granted to WGBH-TV to test language levels with captioned children’s television programming. The Foundation Center has a new publication which lists foundations that make grants to individuals. Over 1000 foundations are profiled and a detailed description of the kinds of programs they funded is given. (The Foundations included made grants to over 40,000 individuals totalling more than 56 million in the year profiled.) Prepayment is required. Send $13 to: The Foundation Center, 888 Sev enth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10019. PRINT Winn’s Pop Paranoia Deserves an Answer TV’s power is her villain By RON SUTTON The Plug-In Drug by Marie Winn (NY: Viking Press, 1977) Hardback $8.95. The Plug-in Drug is a provocative book, easy to criticize but hard to dismiss. Marie Winn’s thesis is that the act of watching television, regardless of content, can be addictive. She is especially concerned about the effect of excessive television viewing on young children. After a brief, negative discussion of the television experience—broadcast television is all Winn knows and considers —she turns to such areas as verbal and non-verbal thought, reading, violence and aggression, play, family life, free time and “hooked” parents. | don’t think I’ve ever read an author who linked so many modern ills to the television tube. And she finds plenty of support in her references, which are selective and uneven. She quotes with equal force from studies and writings of the fifties and the seventies. Even the old Himmelweit study of 1958 is noted, and that was done in England twenty years ago! Her idea of field research is to go to the playgrounds of Denver and New York and ask some parents and children she finds there what they think of television. Or she suggests that persons who are upset with their children’s reaction to television write to her. She also throws in some lengthy home interviews and peppers the text with anonymous quotations from all the unanimously anti-television persons she consulted. This methodology hardly yields statistically valid or an objective position. It does, however, forcefully give one woman’s view, backed up by anecdotal reportage that is cogently and clearly presented. A number of her points raise quite valid issues. Broadcast television can soak up too much of our time. It is a powerful medium—almost too powerful to ignore —due to its colorful moving visuals, its variety of sounds and its easy availability in our living room. We do need to establish some priorities in relation to television viewing. We need to use television and not let television use us—or as is Winn’s fear—our children. Talking with children and young people and setting some limits about what they are experiencing in watching tv, would help them fit television into their world, not let it become their world. Even conceding this, I’m not at all certain that Marie Winn’s “Chicken Little” hysteria adds much in the way of insight into the television problem. She is too frightened by television and too imprecise in her criticism. For example, she complains that television viewing is physically passive. Well, a person reading a book looks strangely passive to me —ditto for meditation, praying and playing chess. Physical passivity has little to do with what goes on in an attentive mind. Winn frequently cloaks her antitelevision rhetoric in such flimsy material. Her discussion of the left and right hemispheres of the brain—verbal vs. nonverbal—reveals her true bias for print as the only valid medium of learning and art. She is verbal, views events linearly, is committed to high culture. Anything, like television, that seems to threaten these bastions of Western civilization is ugly, barbaric and destructive. Like Innes and McLuhan, when she is self-confident about the impact on our society of moving image and sound, she can be challenging and provocative. When she be comes self-righteous, she is unbearably absurd: “In his television experiences the child returns to that comfortable, atavistic passivity that was once his right and that he must now renounce if he is to become a functioning member of society. It is only while he watches television that he is freed of the risks of real life.” (p. 175) One almosts wants to prescribe medication for her “future shock” when one reads such reactionary and outrageous statements which frequent the book. This is the tragedy of Marie Winn’s presentation. She is an educated person, a graduate of Radcliffe and Columbia University and a successful author of ten books for parents and children. But she is a visual and media illiterate. Marie Winn does not understand nor does she appreciate one little bit the artistry, value, and impact of moving images and sound in our society. Her fearful reaction is to suggest pulling the plug. She echoes the voices of countless mothers and fathers down through the centuries who were convinced that radio, movies, comic books, pulps, theaters and novels would rot their children’s minds and bring civilization down around their heads. Winn is scared and alarmed. She’s done something to exercise that fear: she’s written a book that points an accusing finger at the one-eyed monster in our homes. No doubt about it, television is her supreme villain, her bogeyman, her dragon to be slayed. She advances an oversimplified, unenlightened, visually uninformed argument, but it’s popular and current and demands an answer. Media education and literacy are one possible reply. But that antidote needs developing in an article or book of its own. Ron Sutton is Assistant Professor of the Visual Media Program at The American University in Washington, D.C. TV and the Left: Left publications are beginning to review and discuss television on a regular basis. The Guardian has been increasing its television coverage, both reviewing programs and commentary. Recent issues have reviewed the PBS series, “The Age of Uncertainty” with John K. Galbraith; “Washington Behind Closed Doors” and an article on “Eyewitness News” by Tim Patterson. A subscription is $15/year. Write: Guardian, 33 W. 17th St., NYC, NY 10011. “Television without Tears: An Outline of a Socialist Approach to Popular Television” is an article by Daniel Ben-Horin appearing in the Sept/Oct. 1977 issue of Socialist Revolution. A subscription is $12/year. Write: Socialist Revolution, 396 Sanchez St., San Francisco, Ca. 94114. Field of Vision—edited by R.A. Haller and John Burchfield. A publication of Pittsburgh Film-Makers, a center for the making, study and exhibition of cinema, video and photography. Summer issue contains an extensive article on Stan Brakhage with bibliography. P.O. Box 7200, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15213. Single copies $1.