The Early Video Project

Peter Bradley Interview: Part One by Davidson Gigliotti Recorded: December 17, 1999 Editor's Note: Peter Bradley was head of the Film, TV-Media and Literature Department of the New York State Council on the Arts from 1966 to 1977. In many ways he was the architect of NYSCA funding for video in New York during 70s. The importance of NYSCA in early video history cannot be exaggerated. Between the determination of the New York video community to survive and the willingness of a curious and interested staff to encourage it, enough money was channeled into video to ensure its continuance. Later, the Council revised its views, but by that time alternative video and video art had established a foothold in our culture and in the granting agencies. But there were rough spots. One of the more spectacular was the incident of the Center for Decentralized Television. Ironically named, but seriously proposed in the Spring of 1970, it was the well-intentioned brainchild of Michael Shamberg, Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, and Ira Schneider of Raindance. Essentially, it was conceived as a re-granting organization. NYSCA would grant to The Center, and they in turn would re-grant to independent video producing groups and artists. It was a naive idea for the those early days, complicated by the fact that one of the Raindance people, Paul Ryan, was a paid consultant to NYSCA at the time. The public perception was that Raindance had co-opted the lion's share of the NYSCA video budget. A rancorous debate ensued, initiated and led by Global Village, which poisoned relationships for years. After receiving initial approval for a $250,000 grant, a huge sum at the time, the Center project foundered on a rock of discord. But life and work went on, and there were many successes. DG.   What I'm trying to do is to create a batch of primary sources, you know, that we can look back upon and will be useful, perhaps not only to me, but to others as well. I haven't spent a lot of time, probably not enough, thinking about since we talked last week. I'm sure my memory is fuzzy in many aspects, clear in others. Yeah, but once you start talking about it, you know, it's amazing... Right, that will really unlock stuff. Right. How did you become involved with the New York State Council on the Arts? I was working as a reporter for the Albany-Times Union. What was your special area? General assignment reporting. Occasional movie reviews, because our primary arts editor at the time was an alcoholic - had a habit of falling asleep at his desk... I worked for an editor just like that. ... on screening days. So to my great joy, I would get to go in his stead. I loved movies from when I was a kid. This is an aside, but do you remember when The Leopard came out, Burt Lancaster. Yeah! I think that was the very first film I reviewed for the Times Union, and he, Michael Piller, was the guys name, he was British - of course at that time all newspapers if they wanted a cultural reporter, anybody with an English accent was... Oh, de rigeur.. So he had actually gotten a promotional trinket from the distributor of the Leopard, whoever it was, which was a toy leopard that crawled around. I remember, he wound it up and it started crawling around his desk, and kept rocking in his chair, staring at it and just about the same time his head hit the desk, the leopard reached the end of the desk and fell on the floor. And then I got to go. And I remember observing Burt Lancaster in his make-up looked uncannily like Albert Schweitzer, which I found... Yeah, that was kind of strange...He was also in another Italian film, or another film about Italy, was it 1900...? That was a Bertolucci film. Yes, he played a very important role in that one as well. Really. So, I did investigative reporting, too. In fact, I probably must have been in my investigative reporting stage, when I just finished a big series on poverty in the capital district that actually led to the surplus food program being initiated by Albany county which had resisted because giving food to the needy had been the purview of the Democratic party then, and they didn't go for the surplus food program, because they thought it would diminish the prominence of the fact that they gave poor Democrats turkeys at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Pointing that out - because the War On Poverty had begun by then - that they were alone in not taking advantage of it. So it was instituted. And then ACP nominated my series of articles for a Pulitzer. Great to be nominated! Great to be nominated. But about that time the girls were both in school and it was a morning newspaper. So I would leave for work about two in the afternoon - the shift was three to midnight - before they got home, and they had to go to school before I woke up. It was not a real family-type schedule. So I began looking around for other work. Right. Uh, so I decided I really wanted a job where I could see more of my family. And about then an article appeared in the New York Times, which I read every day - so that's how I started my day, reading the New York Times in the city room - and there was an article on the entertainment page that said "State Arts Council to Push Film". What year are we talking now? '66. And the budget of the Arts Council in those days was... Under $500,000. I noticed in the article that a consultant to the Council had to help them shape the first program to support film, along with the more traditional arts. The consultant was Omar Lerman, whom I had met in my hometown of Corning, New York, where he was the producer the Corning Summer Theater. And I had been an intern in the summer, so we knew each other. So I called him up and I said I'd just read about this and is there anyone on staff who'll be doing it, or are you going to hire anyone to do it? And he said, yeah, and you'd be perfect. I must have told him my interest in film. At that time actually I had applied five months earlier to the Ford Foundation for a grant to support me while I spent six months at the Museum of Modern Art Film Library studying films, on the rationale that one reason American films were lagging in creativity behind the French New Wave films which were appearing all the time, was that the level of criticism was so inferior. I would become a film critic and elevate the level of American film criticism. They turned me down, but anyway... So Omar said that the head of the Council staff, meaning John Hightower, just write him a letter and tell him you're interested in being considered. John Hightower. He was the Executive Director at that time. I'd forgotten that. And then he left the Council a couple of years later to become Director of the Museum of Modern Art. Had kind of a stormy tenure there. There was a strike, I think. The curatorial staff, I think, among other difficulties. Anyway, so, I went to New York, interviewed for the job and was hired. And I think I was the sixth employee. So NYSCA was new at that time. When was it founded? NYSCA was started right around then, '65, I think. Rockefeller had proclaimed it. So basically it was about a year old. Where was it located? In the Fisk Building, 250 West 57th. Yeah, I remember it. I just remembered that The New York Review of Books was in the same building, and that was a prime source of good read. Great cover. OK so that's how I joined the Council. And it was determined that I could continue to live in Albany because there would be occasional lobbying to do, and it would be handy for me, handy to have a man in Albany. So did you work at home? Yeah, I had an office at home. I spent usually three or four days out of ten in New York. I was sort of a commuter, but not a daily one. That was great, man, that was ideal! It was. I would get on the train about 6:30am go to the dining car, which at that point had table cloths, a heavy silver pitcher of coffee, and the New York Times, and usually I was good till about Poughkeepsie. The Hudson on the right. And Tarrytown, Peekskill, I guess, it was stunning. And I worked there for several days and come back. Where'd you stay? The Hotel Wellington, 55th and 7th, I think. And then, later, the Henry Hudson on 58th St. The most famous celebrity I saw in the Wellington lobby was Ingemar Johansson - drunk, staggering around drunk. Yeah, well, Floyd Patterson sort of put an end to his... Yeah, and it didn't surprise me that he was there because the SAS crews and stewardesses also stay there. Then, I'm not sure how much later, probably a couple of years - TV Media came into the Department. Did Ken Dewey have something to do with that? I don't think he did. Ken Dewey when he came he largely... he may have had some sort of connection...but at any rate I can't even remember the name of the department now, but it was for minorities, to add minority programs to the Council staff. What the heck was it called? Special something... Special Projects. Ken primarily helped develop that program which started with Vernette Carol being brought on staff. She was a black actress and producer. I'll look that up before we talk again. That's where Ken largely was. TV was intentionally called TV/Media to include the new critter on the street, video. and also the six public television stations. So now we're talking what...1970? Boy, I don't know. That I will check also. If the first guy was Russell Connor, is that correct? No, I think Paul Ryan preceded him... You know all the staff had used to write mini-summaries of the previous years, that will tell not only when TV/Media was launched but kind of the take we had on the whole thing, what context. Do you have those? Yeah, I have them in the garage. I do have a complete set of annual reports from my years there. And they were handsome, very well designed, kind of Reader's Digest size, and also listed all the grants from each program. But I think...but anyway I'll get all that out before we go much further. Maybe I'm just rambling... No, no, the rambling part is OK, we can go back and get all that stuff. This is the time when everybody tells their story. And you, one of the questions that I would ask you though, which is a touch off-topic, but which is nevertheless occurs to me to ask right now, and that is: all the proposals that people did and handed in to the art council. What was the final disposition of them? I'm sure they were filed somewhere. Do you mean contemporaneously, like what happened at the end of a year, for instance, or do you mean where are they today? Yeah, like where are they today? That would be an interesting question. Because I'll bet that some of those proposals would be interesting to see. I bet they would be. I'll call Ellen and ask her. I don't know the answer to that. But I know each program kept them, well I was there eleven years, I don't remember ever throwing them out. I think it was just assumed that they would be there for historic purposes. Forever. And that was before computers. On acid free paper. [laughter] Right, on acid free paper, right. Now that was before computers, of course. Right. Interesting. I'm sorry. Go ahead. So anyway, we think Ken Dewey was there, Oh, not Ken Dewey, excuse me, Paul Ryan. And Paul's... I don't know how that came into being either. We first hired him as kind of a consultant, somebody who knew something of the terrain. Do we remember a year here? No, but that will show up in an annual report, too. Would you feel better if you went out and got those annual reports now? No, I might be brighter, or more accurate, but I don't feel a need to, Frankly, I'm not sure if they are in the garage here or in a storage room across town. But it was the first year of the big money. That would have been 1970, I think. I don't know, no. 1969. No, I wouldn't have guessed it was four years after I started. I think the budget made the big jump from something to several million dollars... From two million to twenty. Yeah, from two million to twenty million dollars, I think that was in 1969. I think you're right. Yeah, 'cause that's I think when, uh... 'cause I think 1970 was the first year when everybody stood up and took notice. Because before that I don't think NYSCA amounted - one hesitates to say this, but it didn't amount to much before that. And after then, of course, everybody got, you know. It made a difference for museums and orchestras, but beyond that... When was Woodstock? Woodstock was in '69. Summer of '69. By then were you in Lanesville? Oh no, good lord, we didn't go to Lanesville until late 1971. Summer of 1971 we moved to Lanesville. Because I know he writes about going to Woodstock with a camera. [The 'he' referred to is Videofreek Parry Teasdale, who recently published Videofreex: America's First Pirate TV Station, a fine memoir of his experiences with the collective] Right, you got his book? Yeah, it's fun. I'm not deeply into it yet, but I've scanned the whole thing. Oh, yeah, it's just lovely. It's a lot of fun his book. Of course, it's Parry, you know. I mean Parry's distinct point of view is there throughout, and he was always, how shall I say, somewhat straight laced. Although his voice is quite jocular. Yes, it's jocular, but it has its dark side, too. What impressed me was how skinny everybody was. Ah, yes, I wish... Anyway Paul was there for a while as a consultant and that probably...through the whole Center of Decentralized TV thing. Because of his Raindance associations. But I don't know when Russell came in either, 'cause Russell is the first staff full time staff video person. Well he came in after he got fired from the Rose Art Museum. And it may be that Ken suggested that I talk to him. Ken may have urged me to consider him. But Frankly I don't remember interviewing anybody else. I may not have. Well, Russell had every qualification. He had worked for WGBH and he knew about television and he'd been involved in early video art and stuff and he had that wonderful credential of getting canned out of Brandeis for having the New York video community in his gallery. That was certainly.... You used that phrase last week when we talked about Russell being canned from Brandeis, and somehow or another... He probably didn't tell you that. ...if I knew it, it long since slipped my mind. That happened to us a lot, actually. We'd go someplace and whoever invited us would get canned. That was frequent... That's not quite the messenger being beheaded is it? That's what happened to Don West. So here we are at the Center for Decentralized Television, this is probably one of the first video proposals to come into the TV/Media Department. I wonder what other proposals there were that... Well, I'm pretty sure there were other proposals from the Videofreex...People's Video Theater, Global Village, because it seemed.... You see, we were involved with Allon Schoener over in the Visual Art Department. Allon probably would have...we were all on one floor at that point in the Fisk Building, and I do remember the first time I met Parry. He came with a portapak and he had stood in front of the subway and shot the subway tracks and environs, en route, and then played it back for me on my desk. You must have had a... I don't know if I looked at it through the camera, no we wouldn't have had any monitors for him to use. So you would have looked at it through camera. Through the eyepiece, yeah. That would have been one of the first of the new.... it was shortly after New Year's 1970 that we got the new AV portapaks. At some point, I think fairly soon after the budget increased significantly, the legislature attached strings to it that the grants would have to be....there would be a per capita element in the distribution process, ie: based on the number of residents in a county. Everybody would have to get something. And New York City, having big counties, would have quite a bit, of course. And plus the density of national organizations that happen to be in New York like the Metropolitan Museum, Lincoln Center, MOMA, all the orchestras, some of the theater companies. But that occasioned a lot of meetings with artists, and I think at one of them, at least, the sort of vying for TV/Media dollars began to surface. [tape change. the conversation turned to the Center for Decentralized Television controversy] I believe Arthur [Kerr] was the interim Director between John Hightower and Eric Larrabee. It felt to him to shoulder the burden of dealing with exponentially larger amounts of money and figuring out how to meet the legislature imposed criteria of per capita. Which also occasioned hiring a lot more staff of fiscal people. Do you remember what your allocation was for TV/Media that year? No, I don't. I think I'll be able to find out. How were they allocated? I do remember the first year it was something like $40,000. That would have been in '69 or something. '66. Yeah, OK. And who applied for them and who got them? That first year we developed the program and essentially it just was schools, where we developed film series with...I think there were only five cities across the state who found it of interest, where over the course of the school year there was a series for elementary aged kids and high school kids and then adults. Was Father John Culkin involved in any of those? He was, I think, on the original advisory panel, which was different from the panels per se that then became the standard, where panels actually voted on projects. But, yeah, the original panel John Culkin, Sydney Lumet, who wasn't able to attend as regularly as some of the others but pretty much...was pretty good about attendance, wonderfully elegant older woman whose name escapes me temporarily but who worked for the MPAA, Motion Picture Association of America rating arm, whatever it was called. Hamilton was her last name. I'll have to look that up too. But anyway at that point... Just the three of them? I think there were five. We decided what the program would be. It wasn't a grants program per se at that point. And then it evolved. And that will show up in the annual reports that I'll dig up, too. It won't list everybody who applied but it will list everybody who got grants. Good. So that's information we can look at back to 1966. We are sort of jumping back and forth, I know it seems a little bit confusing, but every time we jump, maybe it sort of puts you back more in those days. Going back to 1970, the first year of the big money, or the first year when the major money was routinely available, do you remember how the Center for Decentralized Television evolved, how that situation evolved? I think Russell was there by then, and in place. I tend to think not, somehow. Because as I ponder about it, I don't remember him going to various meetings with me, which he surely would have had he been on staff. What I remember is...I don't remember who first brought it to me - the idea - whether it was Paul, or Michael or Ira. Come to think of it Beryl Korot was in that group, too. Was there a second woman? Megan Williams, perhaps. Ira and Beryl were a couple at that point. Either Paul brought it my attention. It must have been Paul. So I went to see them. 51 5th Avenue. It all made a lot of sense to me at the time. I think given a certain amount of naivete about how large sums of money can sometimes affect human behavior. More in the abstract intellectual sense, I think. But at any rate, I became convinced that it made a lot of sense in terms of instead of parceling out relatively small sums to a whole bunch of people, that maybe a better way to advance the medium was a pool of funds which would have a kind of critical mass and therefore a coherence that could advance the medium faster in terms of societal impact. A model might have been Roger Larsen's Filmmakers Coop. It might have been. They were probably the very first film organization that the Council made a grant to, as opposed to just putting out film series. Although they didn't do any re-granting, which is what the Center for Decentralized Television proposed to do. But anyway, I bought into the idea that it was a more intelligent or potentially it would be more effective in advancing this brand-new video medium, than parceling out a bunch of smaller grants. And Raindance was not, I think, a 501(c)3 organization at that point. So, and where Vic Gioscia fits in I don't recall. I can help you with that. Vic Gioscia had a walk-in drug program on St. Mark's Place, very bright man, he's a philosopher. Yes, I remember being very impressed by him. He worked for Jewish Family Services. He's not only a philosopher but he was also a psychologist as well, his Master's was in Psychology, and he was au courant with a lot of intellectual ferment going on that time. And he was teaching at Adelphi, I think. And he had gotten involved with...also he had attended Fordham... and Fordham, a lot of things came out of Fordham, you know. Paul Ryan came out of Fordham, Marshall McLuhan was teaching in Fordham in 1969, although he wasn't really teaching much because he had brain surgery, so he kind of a little bit out of it. But Paul Ryan was his graduate assistant. And Vic Gioscia, Ryan, Gillette - Gillette was at the Free University up on 14th Street with Allen Krebs, and somehow or another Frank Gillette... because of a Fordham student who was attending the Free University in the evenings, ran across Frank Gillette and brought Ryan and Gillette together. So was Frank part of Raindance, too, then? Oh, yeah, he was part of the Raindance circle, yeah. I don't remember why Vic Gioscia was attached to the ... Because he was hanging around. He was wiser and he was older. He was an older advisor and somebody who was very interested in video and the video groups because he'd been involved with it as a form of psychotherapy. Video was used in psychotherapy in the late sixties quite a lot, by some very advanced people, Fritz Perls out at Esalen, for example. I don't know about dates at this point, but there was a lot of psychotherapy stuff going on and, you know, kind of advanced stuff and they using... some of the characteristics of video were interesting therapeutically. OK, so that was an area of confusion for me, was whether or not he might have had an organization that would have been non-profit. No. You're right, it was more in the mentor older guy. But he did one other thing. He made a videotape himself, and for the Arts Council, too, he claims this and I believe its true. He did a tape for the Arts Council which was sort of a survey of video groups in New York at that time. No, that doesn't ring a bell with me. Ehh, it's probably on a shelf somewhere, hey. But Raindance, not at that point having been incorporated not for profit, the conduit- ie: the eligible recipient - became the Jewish Museum, in the person of Karl Katz. Allon Schoerner had done a show for them. Maybe even Allon suggested that they would be the way to go. So I do remember a breakfast meeting, and I'm virtually certain Russell wasn't there. I think Paul probably was, wearing two hats. Where was the breakfast meeting? I don't know. I think it was a typical New York breakfast spot. It wasn't in a hotel or any place like that. It was in a restaurant, a coffee shop or something? Coffee shop. There was Karl, Ira, Michael, me, and presumably Paul. And, now Karl later went on to the Metropolitan Museum from the Jewish Museum, where he headed up their programs for video and film, collecting films, they may have commissioned some - Bill Sloan, do you remember Bill Sloan? Oh, God, I remember Bill Sloan well. His daughter, I think, worked for Karl Katz. Anyway, we had breakfast and talked it all through. Karl was concerned; one concern I think was with that amount of money, and I don't remember what it was, but it could easily have been $250,000, a quarter of a million dollars, which was mind-boggling... Yeah, it was big sum. I think he wanted to make sure that it wouldn't jeopardize the Museum's eligibility for things more central to their own programming. Yeah, for their own grant proposals, of course. And, I'll just free associate from this point, or rather I'll speak my memory, which may be a wholly inaccurate, but anyway. It ended with us all agreeing that we would go forward with that. And then, so, we did. Essentially, that must have been - instead of making a number of grants, the staff - me - decided that a single grant that would include regranting much of the money, but in a coherent way, was the way to go. And, it must have been after that meeting, when Karl agreed that the museum would be the recipient, that a full proposal was presented, although there was probably at least a draft by then. But any rate, that proposal was presented to the Council Film Subcommittee. Do you remember the proposal ? No. Do you remember being impressed by its literacy or non-literacy? Yes, I would say it was very compellingly written, it presented to me a very strong argument for putting all the eggs in one basket. In retrospect, I wonder if I was out of my fucking mind or what. [ general rueful laughter] I love it! Well you were at considerable risk, too! [more rueful laughter] Yeah! I mean, there you were ready to give a quarter of a million dollars to this group of video maniacs. You must have had a little frisson...! Particularly as a former investigative reporter I had a certain obliviousness to what the public perception would be - and Paul's involvement, of course. I don't know how I, uh... You don't know how that one got by. But these things happen. Yeah, in the heat of a brand new era. Oh yeah, right, sure. Anyway, I think I'm right in saying that we presented it to the subcommittee, and also I think I'm right in thinking that Eric Larrabee was a member of that subcommittee. He was not yet Executive Director. This I really will have to check. Arthur Kerr was still doing it? Was acting-Director, right. Eric was a member of the subcommittee, usually had three or four Council members. Who was the other? I think Arthur Levitt, Jr... I think he was there forever. He later was Chairman. Come to think of it he probably was; must have been on the committee, because I remember his being very unimpressed by some Raindance tapes that he'd been shown. As well he would be. But any rate, it passed. And I had a fair amount of anxiety about it. Did you sell it to them, basically. Probably, yeah. I assume so. I definitely advocated it. But I think some the anxiety was that it was such a large sum of money, period. And also, I'm sure, that it was going to one organization. I gotta pause here for a minute to go to the john. Want me to call you back? Call me back in three minutes. I'll call you back in five. Five minutes. OK, ciao. [pause] How you doing? Ready? Yeah. OK, so let's see, where were we. We were right in the middle of this thing here. We were presenting it to the sub committee. Now there are a couple of other memories that I have which I'm not sure are contemporaneous with this, but I think they probably are. The sub-committee approved it, although there was considerable discussion, I think, led by Eric, about how it might be perceived by the field and in general - the lion's share of the budget going to one organization. Yeah, how it would look on the front page of The New York Times! Right. Even though integral to it was the fact that it would go to a lot of other players eventually. But nevertheless it put one organization in significant control. Creating a re-granting organization. Yeah. There was some leeriness about that, but evidently I was able to persuade them that it was a good idea. I have a vivid recollection that also, and I presume this may well have happened just a week later or something. Usually there was about a week or ten days between subcommittee meeting and full Council. I'm going to New York on a Monday afternoon, rather than Tuesday morning, in order to meet, in the lobby of the Wellington Hotel, John Reilly and Rudi Stern. So I presume if it related to the Center, word must have gotten out that this was the plan. And they augured strongly against it. And I don't remember...I mostly listened, I expect, and then told them that I would give whatever their points were considerable thought. I think they were the only organization at that time that actually did have a 501(c)3. Maybe they were. But somehow or other, I had the sense that they knew what was afoot. They were not just lobbying for their own interests. They were lobbying not to be cut out, and have competitors dole out the dough. And I think by then also that John was not everyone's favorite character. So anyway, but then I also remember meeting with Eric again, maybe I reported this to him. That would suggest that he was...but any rate, between the subcommittee voting for the concept, my probably meeting with Rudi and John, and the Council meeting itself, we realized that it was imprudent, it was improper, really, that it was not a good way to go. Wasn't there something in the New York Times on this subject? I don't recall it. There was some newspaper something there. Really. Yeah, because I think John Reilly managed to make sure that something got in the newspaper. Because I remember very distinctly, there were a lot of meetings, apparently there were a great many meetings and a lot of testimony, if you like, from various video groups somewhere along the line. In opposition to this, or just to talk about... To work out the deal. 'Cause I think, as I remember it, there was some wheeling and dealing finally. And I was away that summer. I had gone to San Francisco that summer and I came back in Autumn basically, and things were pretty well straightened out by then. But I remember David Cort saying "Well, that John Reilly may not be very good at understanding media, but he's very good at using the media." And I think that there was some newspaper something in there. I had a sense that when I met with John and Rudi that Sunday evening that direct threats were made about how miserable...that it would become widely known what a bad decision that was. Yes, I'm sure. So, I'm wondering if there was some timing involved. Maybe we decided to make no grants to video organizations at that particular meeting, rather to invite applications from many more organizations. Yeah? But at any rate, it was scuttled. I'm thinking that it must have been a much more shocking denouement to Ira and the Raindance people than me. I do remember a sense of relief. I began to see the light, that although on the one hand it seemed persuasive to me that the Center for Decentralized TV with that critical mass of funds could advance the medium from infancy in an effective way, it was a sense of relief that a grant that was so replete with vested interests on the part of a consultant, and essentially giving all the money to one of many groups who may have been at the same stage of development, really...I think in terms of the history of video, it was a good decision to scuttle it, even though it had passed the next to last hurdle. You may be right, of course. But I do not remember any consequences of...you know, where I personally felt that my job was at stake, or anything like that. Did you know that at one point previous to this that Ira Schneider had been partners with John Reilly and Rudi Stern? Gee. I think maybe I did. I've totally forgotten it. I've a card somewhere with Ira Schneider and John Reilly's name on it. Yeah, yeah, this definitely rings true now. See, Ira Schneider pulled out of Global Village, I think it was December 15th, 1969. And I remember it because I was invited to assist him in removing all of his equipment from Global Village one wild winter night, which I did. So there was bad feeling there. That would explain why, I mean, even though he might normally have been combative and aggressive, why John Reilly was even further provoked by the fact that Ira was going to get the goodies. Oh, yeah. Definitely. So over what period of time are we talking about this taking place? It certainly wasn't a long, drawn out period, I would guess two months maybe. From the incipient presentation of the proposal to the denouement that would have been two months. Would have been around summer, right? I'm also thinking that we must have had to present it to a committee, a panel before the subcommittee. Right, and I'm wondering how that, what happened there. Who was on the panel that year? That I don't know either. Was Elaine [ Summers] on the panel? Ed Emshwiller? Russell brought Elaine in, because they knew each other from somewhere. And since I've concluded that Russell wasn't there yet, that must have been later. Shirley Clark was also on the panel, but she came in through film, no video, so maybe she was on the panel then, I don't know. Ed Emshwiller? Ed I think probably was on. But as a filmmaker he would have come on, not... but again that was... Well, there weren't any videomakers, I mean, on the panel at that time. There wouldn't have been any. True. Stan Vanderbeek was a panelist, but there again that can correlated with the annual report. Because all of that is listed in the back. OK, good, good, that's great. Let's do that. I don't want to ask you to run all over town collecting this stuff. But now my own curiosity is aroused. No, I know. You see, all of this stuff is very interesting and the other part about it is that, you know... Culkin was, I think, the original of the original five when it was just the film program. But I think he dropped off or cycled out before.... Gerry O'Grady, was he...he may have been on that panel. He may well have been. And he, interestingly enough, and Eric knew each other somewhat because... Buffalo, Buffalo. Yeah, but I don't remember if Eric was Provost down there or not. Anyway, let's knock off for now. OK. Thank you! This is beautiful, man, beautiful. When do you want to do it again? Oh, how long will it take you to check out some of those annual reports? I could probably have it done in time to talk on Friday. Friday, OK [scheduling conversation] End of Part One Send comments on this interview to: davidsong@home.com © Davidson Gigliotti, 2000CE