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TV History, Episode 3: “Personal Video”, A Rare Progressive Defeat in the Arts.
Two weeks ago, we made a nostalgic return to the launch of America’s small market television stations. Last week, we took a look at an early form of television that could have blanketed the country twenty years before it did. This week we do an autopsy on a flashy offshoot of television that became famous, then forgotten.
You’ve spent most of or all of your life in a world where you could buy or rent a copy of a movie and see it whenever you wanted. “Let’s run ‘The Godfather’ after the kids go to bed tonight” is a privilege that only a couple of well-heeled electronics hobbyists enjoyed before roughly 1980. That’s the home video revolution you grew up with. It’s centered around pre-recorded tapes, usually Hollywood-made entertainment.
But for progressive arts activists, 1967—80, the rather ordinary way that video turned out was a shock, a stunning cultural defeat for what was supposed to be one of the brightest new fields of the arts. A young generation would take hold of the nation’s communications apparatus, and bingo—everyone would have 50 TV channels, 49 of which would carry nudity, one of which would carry dreary talks. (Exposure to actual Communist countries has convinced me it would have been the other way around.) The shift would be inevitable; demographics would do all the work.
This was all real—once upon a time. Andy Warhol and a handful of other Sixties luminaries adopted video art as The Next Big Thing. There were some good experimental tapes made, and they shouldn’t be as forgotten as they are, but the big picture was people with too much money, wasting it on a self-indulgent artistic dead end. When it was going on, many of its practitioners believed they were making history and made elaborate efforts to record their own ascent to greatness. I remember those times and those people. They had a slogan: “VT is not TV! But it will be!” Like a lot of alliterative bits of affirmation, it’s witless, of course. What it literally means is videotape (VT) is novel and politically radical, and even though you see it on a TV screen, it’s not TV (defined as professionally made “corporate media”). “But it will be” was the taunt and the threat, that tomorrow’s video art, radical in style and subject, was not just going to exist on the TV dial someday, alongside “Ironside” and “Mission: Impossible”, but was going to supplant them completely. Not in the sweet by-and-by (which few radical artists believed in anyway), but in ten years or less. Now it’s all an over-hyped disappointment they’re happy to forget. Sometimes, though, history has its revenge. Sometimes memory can give it a helping hand.
First, here’s a quick primer in the real history of videotape. Television professional, and Ricochet’s visual supremo @ejhill has given us expert commentary on the early history of video tape recording, back in the days when video recorders were the size of two refrigerators and as expensive as ten Cadillacs. Only TV stations and their networks could afford to buy them. Professionals were (once, alas) always willing to spend what it took to ensure competitive picture quality.
The quest for a simple, foolproof and affordable home TV recorder is as old as TV itself, but even as of the mid-Sixties it was still hard to see how we were going to get there. By then, smaller videotape machines were available for industrial and educational uses, but they weren’t for home use. Open reel semi-pro video machines were still as expensive as a car, suitcase-sized, weighed 70 pounds, and required at the very least a skilled hobbyist to thread up and operate.
In 1965, Sony released a complete set of recorders, portable and home-bound, in a half inch open reel format. With some modification this format would remain in production almost eight years. It was almost ready for the home, but it was in black and white at a time when color was the one have-to-have reason to replace a TV. Users still complained about threading reels of tape.
An artist named Nam June Paik bought a camera and recorder after seeing it at the Japan pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. This began a trend: video artists experimenting with the new medium, much as 16mm film encouraged the development of experimental movies. When the product wasn’t quite ready for the mass market, it was embraced by a cult market.
That’s where I came in. New York University’s film school was one of the first places to buy Sony’s new technology. I worked in the TV department and got my girlfriend (long since my wife) a job in its brand new Alternate Media Center. She dispensed portapacks, the combination of a Sony camera with a bulky, shoulder-strap carried recorder, and assigned time on editing tape decks. The experience of home movies was one thing; but these were like home movies with sound that didn’t have to be developed; you didn’t drop your film at a drugstore for a week. You didn’t need to darken a room and bring out a projector to see them. You could play them back right there on any TV set. Plus you could re-use the tape.
The students did a couple of notable things with the bulky, heavy equipment. The so-called landlord documentaries told the truth about a class of bureaucrat-protected slumlords, and less crusading tapes marked the end of the 3rd Avenue elevated train in the Bronx. I worked on one that was in-between, “The Charette”. This was a European term for an intensive over-nighter to complete a project. In this case, a public school board in Greenwich Village was presenting a weekend of panels to help plan a new school for the neighborhood. The discussions would be videotaped and aired, with only a couple of hours’ delay, on all the cable systems of the Village. The populace would be informed, see? Then they’d vote. Of course, not everyone had cable in 1971. In fact, maybe 10% of the area did, and of that, maybe 1% cared. Panelists said some amazingly ”woke” things even by our present day standards.
It was the high tide of Nixon-era radicalism, really similar to today in many ways. This brings in the other half of the progressive video arts vision that became the Island of Broken Dreams: Public Access channels, pioneered in Manhattan at the birth of cable TV. Naturally, they reasoned, audiences would increasingly reject shallow manufactured TV shows in favor of wrenching social documentaries that tackled the issues that really mattered, and if they didn’t currently exist, public cable utilities would be compelled to manufacture them.
It set the socially approved pattern for the package deal that nearly every community would sign with its chosen cable overlord. It would require those precious forums of electronic democracy, public access channels, which like our 1971 Charette tapes project would make TV the high tech extension of the voting booth of the future. Identity politics ruled, just like today. I saw posters in upper Manhattan, near Harlem, in the black-red-and-green of Black nationalism: ”Beware the Cable! Demand People’s Television!” Cable was OK and would be accepted…but only if they paid the right activists. Which, of course, they did, generally through “community consulting and opinion surveying” fees. Radical video counted on public access, its only way of reaching the public in those pre-internet days.
A minor personal note: those Charette tapes had to be shuttled to the cable TV company’s office. They were on a multi-hour time delay, and were only two subway stops away from the school where the meetings were held. But the local school administrator in charge of the project insisted that we take taxis, just in case. I was nineteen, had lived in the city my whole life, and had never hailed a cab. It was a waste of their money. I learned that they didn’t care.
In 1971 Sony introduced its next hoped-for solution for mass market home use, ¾ inch videotape in cassettes that didn’t need threading and weren’t prone to jam. This time the format was color as well as black and white. The quality was really good, so good that for fifteen years, it bridged professional and semi-professional uses. But again, like semi-pro 1 inch tape, it was still too expensive for home use. U-Matic, the commercial name for ¾ inch, was the upcoming home format for the world, until the moment it was introduced and suddenly it wasn’t.
Availability of video recorders made possible the existence of new comedy clubs, like Channel One and its raunchier competitor, The Groove Tube. The restaurant/bars were smallish comedy rooms with a live intro and then an hour’s decidedly grown-up entertainment via parody and other comedy videotapes seen on a bunch of ceiling monitors, like one of today’s narrow-body airliners. Remember, this was a time before recordings or cable. By 1970, movies were now more or less permitted to show as much flesh as they wanted, but television, being broadcast, was subject to government regulation. So the simple dumb novelty of seeing an occasional bare breast and hearing things you never heard on TV was a built-in easy shock laugh. Comedians who participated learned some things about working with cameras, years before SNL went on.
Nixon was re-elected. As optimism about the imminent radicalization of the United States faded rapidly, so did interest in experiments in video art. Woody and Steina Vasulka, a likable if pretentious old couple, moved the center of the video art movement to the Mercer Arts Center in 1973. As depicted in the first episode of HBO’s one-and-done series Vinyl, the ancient building collapsed in the middle of the night, burying the Sixties in a literal way.
Underground video’s only real distribution platform, Public Access, became a free speech free fire zone. It did feature some of the hard left content its creators hoped to encourage. But in New York and other cities, it often drifted off into salacious talk shows and softcore porn. The FCC couldn’t regulate it—it wasn’t broadcast over the air—and the cable companies claimed that lax community standards in the Seventies made it difficult to legally kick them off the channel. Public Access was finally tamed, and it’s still there; if you have cable, chances are you have it, presenting city council meetings in between bizarre self-produced panel shows about astrology and high fiber diets. This is not what the left originally wanted, or seemingly anyone else, for that matter.
There finally came a point when mainstream, popular home video did happen. The first Beta and VHS machines went on sale in 1976-77 and cost more than $1000 (that’s a cool $4200 in today’s dollars). They built their sales slowly over the next couple of years. VCRs didn’t really take off until the price dropped to $500 or less, after the turn of the Eighties. But then, in only a couple of years after that, it seemed like everybody had one, rental stores sprang up, and every movie you ever heard of was out on tape. VHS had a good long run. At the end, home machines were finally selling for less than $75 by the time there was no longer a large, profitable enough market to be worth mass production. Over a half century, that’s a pretty dramatic cost slope; $70,000 down to $1000 down to $75.
Video art never fully disappeared. Like a number of other disappointing cultural projects, the survivors retreated to secure slots in academia, generally becoming the media department’s more radical wing. Film guys like me showed old movies made by old white guys; the gals in the video department got grants to examine emerging lesbian identity.
Did I say nothing of value was done? No; some of the quirky, individualistic student work was worthwhile. A young woman interviewing her grandmother, or daily life sailing in the merchant marine, or visual abstractions set to music in the style of “Fantasia”; they were not unlike some of the things people post on the web today. Good stuff. But all of them were formats that could have been filmed. There was nothing or little specifically using any unique features of television or tape. Experimental film had some real contributions to make to the history of mainstream filmmaking; experimental videotape had little to teach the future.
Far from being history’s darlings, the more radical video artists of the Nixon resistance era mostly disappeared, like the vengeful spirits returning to the Ark of the Covenant at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. The lid of the Ark slammed down around 1980, and now their claims of high tech eternal greatness echo like the empty boasts of Ozymandias.
I have a personal postscript. In the early Nineties, my employers, the American Film Institute, had been holding an annual event called the National Video Festival. This was the video department’s big deal. Since it consistently lost money, and the film festival consistently made money, AFI took the video festival away from them and gave it to us to manage. In the tragicomic remnants of the video arts community, such as it was by then, this was treated like the fall and sacking of Constantinople. It’s a rare feeling being a barbarian overlord, let me tell you. But really, my interests and their should have been the same: make the event financially viable, therefore sustainable, and get an audience—yes, honest-to-God people in those seats.
They were used to charging $400 for a pass to a weekend event. The only people who came were academics in a tiny, charmed circle: snobbish, exclusionary, and damned expensive in their tastes. Artists expected to be flown in and have their hotel bill covered. Total attendance in a good year was 100 people. That’s no typo. No one paid for a pass with real money, their own money. Every one of them charged it to their college. They’d watch radical tapes about Chicano activism and not one working class person got within a mile of the place.
I didn’t do that much, at least at first, to mess with the content. We sanded off some of the rougher edges. But we went after that sense of privilege. We made the festival free, no admission at all, since that was my frank estimate of what people would pay. Attendance shot up into the thousands, though old timers griped that they were the “wrong” people. We dropped limo service and airfares. Bill Viola, at that time the biggest remaining artist—activist was furious, but he didn’t have the clout he thought, or that he once had. I got the ingrates a few more years of a video festival. Then one by one, each of the video artists asked to be in AFI Fest—the film festival—now that we had video projection. The revolution was truly over.
Requiescat In Pace!
This is part of a series of posts about TV history. Ricochet’s actual master of TV history is television professional @ejhill. The Rico writer who could put all of this in a better cultural framework than I have is @titustechera. The guy who can explain how electromagnetic waves interact with the universe’s grand plan is @hankrhody. @dnewlander and @jon1979 seem to know everything about this stuff. If any of them disagree with me, frankly I’d have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Published in General
Clearly, I failed.
Yeah, you have to examine those EJ comments carefully as soon as they land in the digital mailroom. He put a dash in the middle of “high-jacked”. A clue? A reference to RCA video jacks? Or high band video recording, a quiet improvement in Sixties VTRs? Maybe a reference to Rod Serling’s “The Doomsday Flight”, blamed for a string of copycat plane hijackings?
And that’s the one thing they always get wrong in depictions of old TV. As I stated, most “old” equipment seen in films are hollow shells. Mostly the insides have been replaced with lipstick cams and their displays replaced with LCD screens. There’s two reasons for that. One, showing a live television output on film requires the video to be reduced to 24 frames per second. At the normal 30 FPS you’ll get a rolling black bar in the picture.* I don’t think that’s necessary for LCD screens. Second, the lipstick cams are have poorer resolution that corresponds to earlier TV.
*Look at the movie credits. 24 frame video playback is a thing.
Almost every TV screen seen in a feature film is actually a film shot that’s been matted in. Rare exceptions: the closed circuit cameras in “Seven Days in May”, giving the characters a view of things going on elsewhere. In fact, director John Frankenheimer had been a director of live TV and knew how it was supposed to look, but in one politically charged scene he goofed: what’s supposed to be TV coverage of a fanatical right wing rally is an obvious film montage of the weirdest angles of the ugliest people they could find. It’s not just that it sticks out as propaganda; damn it, it sticks out stylistically.
“Marooned” (1969) uses real TV screens, and it shows; it’s part of the plot, as the astronauts’ wives have several scenes with them. Extra points for using black and white video, authentic for the time.
What next, then? Unsteady work?
Hopefully I can make it to retirement. If I can’t I’m a greeter at Walmart, I guess…
The real thing, including the diagonal rolling bar in the TV image. Murrow’s “control panel” appears to be either faked up, or an audio monitoring station.
Oh, man! No pyramid of human skulls? Not even a little one?
This was particularly fascinating for me because, even though I was never aware of the artistic video movement, the technological developments that powered it also had a strong influence on my childhood.
My dad was a cutting-edge kind of guy, willing to put up with technology that wasn’t quite ready for prime time. We had a microwave oven in the early ’70s, as well as a “pocket” calculator. And we had a video tape recorder; it was a black-and-white open-reel machine, so it must have been the Sony that Gary talks about. We just used it to record stuff from TV, like the animated “Star Trek” series that aired in 1973 and 1974.
But things got better a year or two later. One of the major retailers (I think it was Sears) had tried to bring a consumer video cassette system called Cartrivision to market. The technology wasn’t really there yet, so it failed, and as a result there were warehouses full of Cartrivision hardware being sold off at fire-sale prices. Somehow my dad found out about this and bought the necessary parts to assemble a working Cartrivision deck for our family room. He also bought a bunch of empty cassette shells and big reels of tape; we had to spool the tape onto the reels and assemble the cartridges ourselves.
Never mind that the system was temperamental; the picture was always noisy and low-quality, and Dad had to tinker with the machine constantly to keep it running. The best part was that there was also a Cartrivision camera, which was capable of recording images of about the same quality as the video the Apollo 11 astronauts beamed back from the moon. With the help of friends, I started to produce my own video programming, consisting of childish comedy skits acted out in the family room. (None of this equipment was portable.)
Sadly, our Cartrivision system had given up the ghost by about 1978 or so. About that time we got our first VHS deck, and I remember being stunned at how much better it was. We laugh at VHS quality now, but it was a huge upgrade from what I was used to: a rock-solid picture with little noise, clean edits, and overall better quality. My friends and I continued to produce video skits throughout high school and college; I still have all of the stuff we did on VHS, and 90% of it is pretty terrible.
It still amazes me that I carry in my pocket a device capable of producing higher-quality video than even the best professional equipment could produce back in those days. If my 1970s self had had access to a modern smartphone, I can only imagine what he could have done with it. (Most of it would still have been childish and terrible, but it would have looked great!)
I’m delighted that anyone else in the universe remembers Cartrivision! One of the odditities of renting films on the format was the pre-records would not rewind; you were renting one play only. (Each cartridge had a mechanical counter on it, like a little odometer.) When the company went under they dumped the players into the second-hand market, just like you say. I was tempted; glad to see somebody took up the challenge.
If it had truly been 100% up to me…
All during the VHS years they could have used ‘no rewinding’ as a selling point.
Another thing that was dumped on the used market circa 1973 were TK-41 camera chains–yes, complete color TV cameras, plus their control equipment–that had once cost in excess of $75,000 were offered at $500. This would have been a difficult restoration (all the Orthicons would have had to be replaced, for one thing) and the equipment was enormous and heavy. You were, in effect, buying 15 year old technology for 50 cents a pound. But still…would I grab the deal today? Probably.
Manhattan Cable Television (nee Time-Warner, nee Spectrum) had their regular public access channels, A through D (they went with letters above the 2-13 numbers in the 1970s), and then they had Channel E which was where all the salacious stuff went. And before Avenue Q did their “The Internet is for Porn” song, Channel E was where “The Cable System is for Porn”. Porn publisher Al Goldstein caught on to the new video outlet quickly, and probably had the most infamous show of the period, “Midnight Blue”, where DJ Alex Bennett was the host. I don’t think MCTV ever gave out public access viewership numbers, but the battles over Channel E created the most news stories.
As noted at the end of the OP, commenters like @jon1979 contribute most of the nutritional value of these posts. IIRC, Al Goldstein was the distinguished publisher of the aptly named Screw Magazine.
Yeah, Goldstein originally called the show “Screw Magazine of the Air”, but Manhattan Cable objected to that part, even if they couldn’t do anything about the naked women and all the four-letter words out and about on the show, because of New York City’s evolving laws on censorship.
Chicago was one of the last cities to get cable. But this new thing called OnTV came out, where you’d get the box and pay monthly for the programming. Because they weren’t under the constraints of network TV, they pretty much put boobs in there every chance they got. They showed movies too, but there was a game show where they had a wall with a bunch of holes in it, and women would be behind it with just their boobs sticking out of the holes, and men would have to find the boobs of their girlfriend hahaha. Then there was another one with butts I think.
As David Sarnoff said in 1939, television will bring the greatest educators and highest cultural authorities to lecture in the American living room.
Hoo boy, hope he didn’t live to see The Kardashians.
“Gilligan’s Island” should have sent him around the bend.
Fortunately for the General, it was on CBS, run by archrival Bill Paley. The Paley fortune came from La Paloma cigars, so to the end of his life Sarnoff referred to him as “that tobacco fellow”.
Outside of Manhattan (where Time owned Manhattan Cable and got HBO on it almost right after it’s start-up), cable didn’t come easily to the rest of NYC because due to an arcane law from the 19th Century on open access to underground conduits, MCTV and TelePrompTer Cable could wire Manhattan without having to put in their own ducts. For people in the areas without cable who wanted uncensored movies, they could subscribe to Wometco Home Theater, which was broadcast with a scrambled signal at nights on UHF Ch. 68 (when the signal was unscrambled, the station was better known around the area as the home for The Uncle Floyd Show, which may have been the first show to cater to adults who used to watch kids shows 10-20 years earlier)
Central Ohio was one of the early cable markets, call it beta testing, so we had it early. But several years even before that, my grandma in Jackson, Ohio had it in some of the earliest alpha testing. We loved it; we could watch Batman four times per day. (Three channels, one doing two episodes back-to-back.)
My wife’s grandmother, on 70th Street, was the first person I knew who had cable, and it’s just as Jon describes: one dial, no rows of push buttons. It took a while for a 77 year old lady from eastern Europe to grasp that you had to change the channels at the cable box, not at the TV any more. This was probably mid-1971. She had a black and white console set that her son gave her about a dozen years earlier.
I moved to the west coast in 1977 but visited back home often, and I recall New York’s Wometco. It’s strange to think that instead of a package of channels, there were premium TV providers on both coasts that just provided one over-the-air channel; the one with the movies and some sports on it. And at least at first, the non-porno stuff was transmitted “in the clear”; with a bootleg antenna and frequency converter (both technically legal, BTW) that amplified an artificially weakened sync pulse, you got Wometco for free. There were little bootleg TV businesses running out of the back of car stereo installers and other fringe players in urban electronics.
In the late 70s, central Ohio had a service called Qube (pronounced cube). Their box had an extra four buttons that they used for interactive, audience-participation programming. They could do panel shows, with polling to see who was winning the argument, or quiz shows so that you could play along. But there was never much of that programming, and it died very quickly.
But they used the Qube boxes for years after that, which was cool because if you burned the paper off a metal twist tie, and pried the box open, you could insert the twist tie at a certain spot on the exposed circuit board, and get free pay-per-view.
That was, by all accounts, the most successful of all the pilot projects. Kudos for being an eyewitness.
In the runup to Walt Disney World’s EPCOT, (the futuristic city Walt intended to build, not the world’s fair-like Epcot we know), interactive TV was going to be a major feature, in the hotels as well as residents’ homes. In a couple of European hotels in the late Eighties and early Nineties I was impressed with their teletext information, but it was crude 8-bit, 40 column text, and spelling anything out without a full keyboard just didn’t happen. With standard TV definition, even in 625 line Europe, you couldn’t risk making the print much smaller.
I guess that sync-pulse trick must have been a pretty common low-tech way to scramble subscription channels back in those days. I remember when we first got cable in South Carolina; there were no porn channels, but there were premium movie channels like HBO. My parents didn’t subscribe to those, but the audio still came through perfectly clearly; and with careful adjustment of the horizontal-sync setting on the TV, you could sometimes get a wobbly, but watchable, picture.