TV LAB: License to Create

Short Synopsis

An historical, educational documentary about the TV LAB at Thirteen/WNET, New York, 1972-1984, where the democratizing effects of technology expanded the creative possibilities of television, nurtured video art, revolutionized documentaries, and allowed diverse, ethnic voices to be heard.

Description/Treatment

Before YouTube, before Reality Television, before the Internet, there was the video synthesizer, the PortaPak, the digital time base corrector and the TV LAB where artists could put their hands on television equipment to create what became the new global phenomena of video art, where documentarians revolutionized storytelling by using portable video equipment to capture scenes that network television had ignored, where writers and choreographers experimented and innovated to expand the possibilities of television.

This feature-length historical, educational documentary offers video and media artists a chance to see the history of their field and learn from the masters who preceded them.

Inspired by Nam June Paik, The Rockefeller Foundation and The New York State Council on the Arts fund the TV LAB at Thirteen/WNET in 1972. WNET selects David Loxton, a British-born drama producer, to direct it.

John Godfrey, chief engineer of TV LAB, uses the newly invented digital time base corrector to stabilize small format video for broadcast. Paik and Godfrey’s programs Global Groove and Suite 212, with Russell Connor’s participation, transfix audiences worldwide and inspire younger generations of video artists.

To prepare, not startle, viewers, Loxton creates the series VTR -- Video & Television Review. Connor introduces TV LAB artists in their homes and studios. VTR places their work in a context -- e.g., Jon Alpert & Keiko Tsuno’s start in community video in Chinatown; TVTV (Top Value Television)’s alternative portable video coverage of the 1972 national political conventions.

Michael Shamberg, a Time magazine journalist who founded TVTV, said: “The idea that you could take this equipment and apply it to journalism, and therefore kind of do your own mainstream television -- that was the radical idea.” TVTV’s first TV LAB program Lord of the Universe wins a duPont-Columbia award. TVTV’s Superbowl changes coverage of sporting events: including tailgating parties and interviews with players’ wives. TVTV’s goal: “to upset the aesthetic apple cart” of broadcast television.

Nam June Paik creates swirling color imagery with the video synthesizer that he and Japanese electrical engineer Shuya Abe invented. The Paik-Abe synthesizer uses video feedback, magnetic scan modulation, non-linear mixing, and colorized images from an array of cameras in a TV studio. Bill Etra demonstrates the more precise Rutt-Etra video synthesizer that shifts, stretches, twists, turns and collapses his image on a television monitor.

TV LAB’s video synthesizers also infuse drama and dance programs. David Loxton pairs director Don Mischer with choreographer Twyla Tharp to create Making Television Dance, which also documents their creative process. Loxton and Fred Barzyk produce and direct, and Diane English co-writes The Lathe of Heaven, a “speculative fiction” drama based on an Ursula Le Guin story. It becomes a cult classic: Tom Hanks says it influenced him to become an actor.

Alan & Susan Raymond’s The Police Tapes inspire the roll call opening of Steven Bochco’s network police drama Hill Street Blues and other reality cop shows. Kit Fitzgerald and John Sanborn, second-generation artists-in-residence at TV LAB, make early MTV music videos.

Bill Viola, who slows time and creates images of depth and mystery, and William Wegman, who composes short, humorous video poems featuring his Weimaraner dogs, built extraordinary careers after becoming artists-in-residence at the TV LAB.

Viola, Paik, Connor and public television executive Jim Day are among those invited to the Rockefeller estate in Bellagio, Italy in 1977 to meet with European public television producers and executives. The Rockefeller sponsored conference leads to the establishment of INPUT – the International Public Television Screening Conference in Milan in 1978. INPUT still brings creative public television professionals together in a different city somewhere in the world each year to see the best programs that each country puts forward.

As opportunities expand abroad, controversies occur at home. Filmmakers become jealous of video makers at TV LAB. The Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting become the major funders of the TV LAB and create Non-Fiction Television, a documentary strand within TV LAB. Independent journalistic documentaries like Jack Willis’s Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang and Bob Richter’s Pesticides and Pills: For Export Only shake up public television.

Though peer review panels choose whom to fund, Loxton still exercises his executive producer’s authority to encourage quality and diversity. He helps Bill Miles make I Remember Harlem into a four-hour documentary series. He raises money for Independent filmmakers Jesus Trevino and Jose Luis Ruiz to make documentaries on Latinos and immigration, for Lynne Littman to respond to the women’s movement with a film on Mothers and Daughters. Loxton and Barzyk continue to produce and direct innovative drama. Other artists and filmmakers create dance and video art programs at the TV LAB until 1984 when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting withdraws its funds and the LAB officially ends.

Advertising and commercial television copy the innovative techniques first used at the TV LAB. The technology spreads and so do the number of cable channels. The many creative artists who launched their careers at the TV LAB reflect on television now and then and the impact of the Internet in restoring some of the freedom that they had at the TV LAB.

Underlying the story of TV LAB is the story of television and American culture and how both have changed.