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225_tvtv
TVTV: Video Revolutionaries

Director - Paul Goldsmith
Run Time - 82 minutes
Language - English
Format - DVD / Digital streaming
Year - 2018
Genre - Documentary

Educational Interests- American Studies, Business, Cinema Studies, Communication, Cultural Studies, History (U.S.), Media Studies, New Releases, Technology

Institutional DVD Price: $295

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Featuring Bill Murray, Hunter Thompson, Steven Spielberg, Lynn Swan, Goldie Hawn, Abbie Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and more, "TVTV: Video Revolutionaries" is a new documentary about Top Value Television (TVTV), a band of merry video makers who, from 1972 to 1977, took the then brand-new portable video camera and went out to document the world. In those days, there were only three TV networks, using giant studio cameras, and no one had ever seen a portable camera stuck in their face. Because the technology was so new, there were no rules about how to use it or what to make. So the "freaks" used it to make format-bending satirical shows about whatever interested them - from the 1972 Republican Convention to an award-winning expose of a 15-year-old jet-set guru named Guru Maharaj Ji, called "Lord of the Universe" to capturing the Steelers and Cowboys partying hard the night before Super Bowl X.

Directed by TVTV alum Paul Goldsmith, the film is like opening a treasure chest into the 1970s, filled with cultural and political events hosted by now-famous characters who were then just beginning their climb to iconic.

QUOTES ABOUT Top Value Television (TVTV):

"Forty years ago, the video collective TVTV (short for Top Value Television) began to shoot free-form nonfiction TV with just-invented portable video equipment. Today their classic coverage of political conventions, pop gurus, and sixties icons like Abbie Hoffman and Hunter Thompson remain fresh and startling. Incisive and irreverent, TVTV helped define the independent video of the seventies, changing TV documentaries from 'white papers' to visceral, humorous, and often alarming documents of their time." - Paley Center for Media, honoring TVTV's 40th anniversary, 2012

"TVTV is part League of Justice, part television's answer to the New Journalism, part guerrilla style Front Page and part Samuel Beckett. Television of the Absurd. Through a lens, starkly. Witty, irreverent, deadpan - but never quite able to conceal the cold eye of the reformer..." - Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize winning TV critic, Chicago Sun-Times

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