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 Zoom In: New INDEPENDENT LENS Series Changes PTV Landscape for Independent Producers 
The Series at a Glance INDEPENDENT LENS, newly hosted by Angela Bassett, showcases different filmmaking genres and styles. "There are so many talented independent filmmakers working today. I'm inspired by the diversity and depth of the INDEPENDENT LENS series," says Bassett. Though not "common carriage," the NPS placement offers considerable incentive for station carriage, if not a guarantee. The idea, says Lois Vossen of ITVS, is that Tuesdays at Ten - an already familiar time slot to P.O.V. audiences - will draw a year-round following for independent works on PTV. "First-time viewers may tune in because they're curious about a particular program," explains Vossen. "But we believe they'll come back, even if they're not sure what to expect, because they're in for something that will prove to be interesting." In a new curatorial model, the anthology series is programmed by a joint team from PBS (Cheryl Jones, Senior Director, Program Development & Independent Film, and Sandy Heberer, Senior Director of Factual Programming) and ITVS (Claire Aguilar, Director of Programming, and Lois Vossen, Director of Broadcast Distribution & Communications) with program oversight by Alyce Myatt, Vice President, Programming at PBS and ITVS Executive Director Sally Jo Fifer. Of this spring's opening slate of 14 programs, six were already in the ITVS and PBS pipelines and eight came from the outside, arriving through last summer's call for submissions and scouting inside and outside public broadcasting. The series offers a $20,000 acquisition fee to programs that were produced without ITVS, Minority Consortia or other PTV funding. Supplemental funding ($3,000) is provided to re-cut programs to television broadcast lengths. PBS and ITVS are joining forces to promote INDEPENDENT LENS to stations, the press and viewers. In addition to a series website at pbs.org, publicity for the series and individual shows, select programs will have an outreach campaign. Stations are encouraged to use INDEPENDENT LENS programs to reach new local audiences. A Firsthand View: Getting on INDEPENDENT LENS For San Francisco producer Jamie Meltzer, the phone call from ITVS that his documentary OFF THE CHARTS: The Song-Poem Story had been selected for the revamped series' inaugural season could hardly have been more unexpected. Begun in 1998 when Meltzer was a graduate student at San Francisco State University, Off the Charts grew from a 20-minute look at the phenomenon of amateur poets who mail their verse off to a company that cranks them out as songs, into an hour-long probe of the intersection between poetic yearnings and a slap-dash commercial industry. Meltzer says the program, which had no ITVS funding, generated some interest as a work in progress at the 2000 IFP Market in New York but P.O.V. passed on it. He sums up his previous experience with public television in a word: "Zilch." He was unaware of INDEPENDENT LENS until an ITVS staff member encouraged him to submit his film after she saw a 10-minute clip at the San Francisco Public Library. Meltzer, who received both an acquisition fee and supplemental funds to re-cut the film for the series, says, "I just assumed a show like this wouldn't be taken seriously by public television." On the other side of the country, Philadelphia-based producers Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater came to INDEPENDENT LENS through another door. Their documentary MAGGIE GROWLS, which opens the new season, was funded by ITVS the second time they submitted it to Open Call. The film tells the story of Maggie Kuhn, the charismatic founder of the Gray Panthers and grandmother of the American civil rights movement for seniors. Producers Attie and Goldwater say they believed the story belonged on PTV but were uncertain how it would get there, especially since - without a filmmaker viewpoint as its basis - it seemed an unlikely candidate for P.O.V. As an ITVS project, however, MAGGIE GROWLS was automatically considered for INDEPENDENT LENS. The filmmakers got word that it had been selected just as they were laying back the audio on their finished film. "A few days' earlier notice would have been great," laughs Attie, who says they had to turn around and shorten the documentary to meet the series' specs. Ineligible as an ITVS project for an acquisition fee, they did receive funding toward the re-editing. Attie and Goldwater are PTV veterans. Their documentaries Landowsca and Daring To Resist were presented nationally by WNET and WHYY as one-offs. "It's a world of difference," says Goldwater, commenting both on being picked up as part of a series and having ITVS to facilitate station relations, outreach and publicity. In their previous experiences, the producers had to call station programmers to convince them to air the programs and contact the press to persuade them to cover it. Not only was there no acquisition fee, they also had to dig into their own pockets to shorten and re-package the films for broadcast. The timing is right for INDEPENDENT LENS, Attie and Goldwater say. "In light of a growing enthusiasm for documentaries [in cable and theatrical markets]," explains Attie, "it's logical that PBS should be at the forefront of creating an innovative, new series - and making room for good stories that don't fit anywhere else." Behind the Scenes with the Curators Nothing is more likely to give INDEPENDENT LENS a distinctive character than the decision to do away with genre limitations. While it is through documentaries that independent producers have contributed most significantly to PTV, the new series is also open to dramas, animation, comedies - in short, all genres in which independents work. "A concern about public service media," says Alyce Myatt, a PBS member of the INDEPENDENT LENS team, "is that it not get stuck in a rut, turning into an imitation of itself with every series, every program, every genre becoming predictable. The challenge, not just in this series but throughout public television, is how to break out of the familiar." The opportunity inherent in an anthology series like INDEPENDENT LENS, explains Myatt, "is to begin to expand the notion, the aesthetic of an 'independent' program. It's up to the field to create new definitions. But this series provides a platform." The joint ITVS/PBS curating team worked out the basics in the first round. "We all were looking first for clarity and singularity of vision," says Claire Aguilar, "but there are other things, too: excellent quality, storytelling craft, works that speak to underserved communities, and profiles and issues that haven't had previous exposure in the media." PBS programmer Cheryl Jones says the opening slate had to be diverse, "in terms of content, geography, and of people profiled and stories told." And in keeping with the mission of PBS, the INDEPENDENT LENS shows - whatever their subject or approach - "must in some way enhance viewers' understanding of the world." While the programmers admit they debated on grounds of personal taste, how a work may resonate with audiences and whether its topic was breaking new ground, no work succeeded or failed solely on how well it was made. "At the core," says Jones, "we were looking for strong, clear statements from independent filmmakers." Claire Aguilar explains that in viewing works for INDEPENDENT LENS, they first considered whether this series or another PBS venue such as P.O.V., Frontline, American Experience and American Masters would best serve the program. Throughout their deliberations, they kept in contact with their counterparts from other series. Not surprisingly, they had an ongoing dialogue with P.O.V., the popular 15-year-old series of nonfiction works that has helped define the American independent documentary. Indeed, even though INDEPENDENT LENS is open to fiction and nonfiction work, including documentaries that fall outside the scope of P.O.V., for many producers the distinction between the two independent-themed series is likely to be puzzling. A WORD ON P.O.V. AND INDEPENDENT LENS For years the award-winning P.O.V. has provided independent producers the closest thing they have ever known to a home on national television. Cara Mertes, Executive Director of P.O.V., says that while "P.O.V. remains an icon series for the best of independent, point-of-view nonfiction, INDEPENDENT LENS draws programs from a variety of styles that don't find a place on other series." Mertes maintains that INDEPENDENT LENS comes out of the success P.O.V. has had in building relationships with stations and audiences. She adds that, far from being competitors, P.O.V. forwards to INDEPENDENT LENS entries it cannot accommodate within its schedule. Curators for INDEPENDENT LENS and P.O.V. are working together to devise a process whereby they share submissions so producers don't have to submit to both series. With its higher acquisition fee (about $30,000 for an hour-long program), P.O.V. may be preferable to some producers. Years of competition for a few slots have bestowed upon P.O.V.'s lineup the kind of prestige that is akin to, say, acceptance into the Sundance Film Festival. It may take awhile for producers to shake the feeling from the old INDEPENDENT LENS that it's the P.O.V. consolation prize. But ultimately it is the success of both series that matters most for all involved - stations, independents and audiences. Station Carriage A critical unknown at the outset of the series was whether stations would carry it. Lois Vossen of ITVS says the PBS decision to distribute the series as a "hard feed" to stations in prime-time, instead of its former "soft feed" on PBS Plus, provided greater incentive for programmers to broadcast the series during or near the national slot. But it's still not a shoo-in. A series of independent works can make a station both excited and cautious, says Donna Sanford, Director of Network Programming at Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver. "We're always looking for programs that are compelling, accessible and of the people," she says, "and we realize that independent producers can extend our reach into diverse communities." But while a series with strong programs, a regular slot and a host may make it easier for a station to promote, Sanford says the bottom line is the program-by-program litmus test: "Are viewers in our market going to watch it?" Lois Vossen says the combined ITVS/PBS station relations and publicity efforts draw upon their relationships with station programmers and journalists who can help deliver local audiences. And through its Community Connections Project, ITVS will continue to partner with PTV stations, national partners and community organizations across the country to assure new audiences. What's So Revolutionary? For veteran independent producers who lobbied Congress for the creation of ITVS, INDEPENDENT LENS moves the field forward on one of its long-held goals: public television airtime. Producer Janet Cole (Regret to Inform, Paragraph 175), an organizer and lobbyist for the National Coalition of Independent Public Broadcasting Producers from 1986 to 1988, remembers the often stormy relationship between independents and public broadcasting and the widespread feeling that independents were closed out. She says, "On its face, INDEPENDENT LENS is a terrific opportunity. Opening up year-round, weekly slots for independent work is something we allowed ourselves to imagine but didn't truly believe we'd see in, well, our lifetime." Sally Jo Fifer, the series' executive producer, says the stakes are higher even than the ambitious goal of a year-round place for independents on PBS. "As important as our day-to-day work of funding new productions," she says, "is keeping committed independent producers engaged in continually creating a civic space within public television." And herein lies the quiet revolution tucked away in INDEPENDENT LENS. As upheavals in media policy, technology and ownership confound predictions about what the future holds, in public broadcasting alone lies the mandate to use the airwaves as a public resource. This is a time when serious independent producers, no matter how profound their ambivalence about public television or how strong their temptation to abandon it, are called upon to remain engaged. Over time, INDEPENDENT LENS holds the potential of embracing - and disseminating - the widest range of independent investigations into not only the art form, but into our culture and the kind of people we are in a new millennium. The series is a strategic intervention into the future of public media. That's the stuff revolutions are made of. Julie Mackaman, a consultant to independent producers, wrote "Navigating the PTV Labyrinth" for the 1999 ITVS Production Manual. In 2002 she moved from San Francisco, where she was formerly co-director of Film Arts Foundation, to Vermont, where she continues to write and consult. |
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