TVTV (video collective)


TVTV was a San Francisco-based video collective founded in 1972 by Allen Rucker, Michael Shamberg, Tom Weinberg, Hudson Marquez, and Megan Williams . 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 and the Videofreex. 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:
Other participants in TVTV included designer Elan Soltes, producer David Axelrod, actor-comedian Bill Murray and his brother Brian Doyle-Murray, cinematographer Paul Goldsmith, actor and director Harold Ramis and producer Wendy Appel.
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.