TVTV (video collective)

TVTV (short for Top Value Television) was a San Francisco-based video collective founded in 1972 [1] by Allen Rucker, Michael Shamberg, Tom Weinberg, Hudson Marquez, and Megan Williams [2] [3]. Shamberg was the author of the 1971 "do-it-yourself" video production manual Guerrilla Television. Over the years, more than thirty "guerrilla video" makers were participants in TVTV productions. They included members of the Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Hudson Marquez, and Curtis Schreier) and the Videofreex (Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, Chuck Kennedy, and Parry Teasdale). TVTV pioneered the use of independent video based on wanting to change society and have a good time inventing new and then-revolutionary media, ½" Sony Portapak video equipment, and later embracing the ¾" video format.

The group made a series of documentaries including:

• Four More Years (1972), covering the 1972 Republican National Convention
• The World's Largest TV Studio (1972), covering the 1972 Democratic National Convention
• Adland (1974), an examination of American commercial culture [4]
• Lord of the Universe (1974), an award-winning documentary on the activities of the Guru Maharaj Ji and his followers[5]
• TVTV Looks at the Oscars (1976) concept by Rich Rosen [6]
• TVTV: Super Bowl (1976) concept by Rich Rosen [7]
• Gerald Ford's America (1975)
• The TVTV Show (1976), TVTV's final television special, co-produced with NBC television, directed by Alan Myerson
• The Bob Dylan Hard Rain Special (1976), another NBC co-production
• Supervision (1976), a multipart PBS series about the birth of television and its cultural impact
• The Good Times are Killing Me (1975) a portrait of Cajun culture. Focusing on the Cajuns' strong cultural identity as well as the life of Cajun Musician Nathan Abshire

[8]

Other participants in TVTV included designer Elan Soltes, producer David Axelrod, actor-comedian Bill Murray [9] and his brother Brian Doyle-Murray, cinematographer Paul Goldsmith, actor and director Harold Ramis [10] and producer Wendy Appel (aka Wendy Apple).

In 1976 -1977, experimental filmmaker Wheeler Winston Dixon briefly joined the collective, editing most of the Supervision series, as well as portions of the Hard Rain Special and the entirety of The TVTV Show.

TVTV alumni went on to careers of their own with the disbanding of the group in 1979, after a move to Los Angeles that brought many in the group more into the orbit of conventional filmmaking. Bill Murray went on to become a film and TV star; Michael Shamberg a film producer, most notably with his company Jersey Films, in collaboration with Stacey Sher and Danny DeVito; Allen Rucker a writer and author; Wheeler Winston Dixon an author and university professor; Harold Ramis a film director, writer and actor; Skip Blumberg a videographer and producer; Tom Weinberg a producer based in his hometown, Chicago; and Elan Soltes a video graphic designer in Hollywood.