The Story of Downtown Community Television After tiring of major media's inconsequential moralizing, Manhattan's homeless produced their own documentary. Over the past 20 years, thousands of New York City's under-funded community groups have learned to use video to tell their stories. A dedicated and impoverished bunch of film-makers at Downtown Community Television (DCTV) made sure they could. Outside their hometown, DCTV is a well-known maverick in the world of professional news journalism. They helped pioneer video v6rit6 and porta-pak documentaries. While risking their lives to film the underreported underside of modem civilization, they won eight Emmy awards. In the 70’s they filmed Cuba and post-war Vietnam for PBS, suggesting to American audiences through straight, unmanipulated images that the US government was seriously misguided to fight these revolutions. PBS blacklisted DCTV after nearly a decade of this kind of radical footage. In the 80’s, working independently for NBC, they covered growing US pollution and poverty. They filmed US sponsored repression in Central America, raising the hackles of conservative network executives. The gmdge of one who became network president made DCTV victim to the most overt censorship within the US media during the Gulf War. AND Local Cameka5 DCTV began in the early 70’s, showing videos on New York street comers from the back of an old van, covering food co-ops, local politics and neighborhood organizing. With their youthful enthusiasm they won one of the first video small grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, contracting to hold video workshops, film cultural activities and show the results on the streets. In pushing themselves to fulfill an agreement which was almost beyond them, they impressed the city, which continued to give them just enough money to live with their equipment in a bare studio in the poorer parts of Chinatown. In a few years they collected enough friends, admirers and contacts that their documentaries aired nationally on public television and won awards. They usually were unable to cover their costs while working with PBS, but getting shows out to big audiences was worth sacrifices. After being blacklisted nationally by PBS, a local PBS director, fmstrated with his own system, sent DCTV to a friend at NBC. The network was relatively flush with cash in those days, and the producer was open-minded enough to know the advantages of an independent operation. He admired their willingness to die to get footage, so he sent them into the middle of the Chinese-Vietnamese war. During the 80’s NBC bought anything made by DCTV’s Jon Alpert, whose documentaries were as terrifying as they Page 10 Rain Winter/Spring 1992 Volume XIV, Number 2
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