40th Anniversary of TVTV

Meet the Video Rebels Who Changed the Doc Form

Before there was YouTube and before such documentary satirists as Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, there was 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.

The Paley Center will screen a work in progress of a new documentary—including footage of TVTV at the Super Bowl in 1976 with Bill Murray and the Steelers, and Bob Dylan performing Hard Rain in 1976— produced by TVTV principal Paul Goldsmith, following the group from its inception in 1972 disrupting the political scene until its breakup in 1977. After the screening, reunited members of TVTV will talk about their pioneering legacy and how they paved the way for a new vision of documentary.