Last Chance for PBL

The hand-held camera intrudes rudely into a Brooklyn bedroom. There, a pregnant young wife is but a few days away from the birth of her first child; she giggles as her husband presses a parfait glass to her abdomen in hopes of hearing his baby. The wife is Debbie North, a commercial artist and the sole support of her husband Bruce, a painter of unbought paintings. The people are real, and so is the rest of the cinema-verite film that follows their practice sessions at a natural-birth clinic and their visits to in-laws (Mom still wishes Bruce had gone into dentistry). A listener can even hear the chatter of Debbie's teeth as she is driven to the hospital. Finally, with Bruce exhorting her in the delivery room ("Push, push, push") and Debbie's face twisted, she gives birth to a boy in full view of the camera. "Oh, my God," he mutters. "Oh, my God."

From the Norths' lying-in, the two-part film shifts somberly to a different sort of hospital: one for advanced-cancer patients. Balancing taste and excruciating intimacy, the camera team now details the last days and thoughts of Albro Pearsall, 52, a Manhattan gold smelter dying of lung cancer.

Flickering Flame. Birth and Death, as the film is titled, this week provided a powerful start for the Public Broadcast Laboratory's second and possibly last season. A $12,5 million, two-year experiment of the Ford Foundation, PBL was founded to prove that public TV, if adequately financed, could light candles of culture and significance amid the darkness of commercial TV. But during its first year, the flame of PBL flickered disappointingly.

In the beginning, the lab's 96 staffers were infused with a save-the-world fervor. "PBL," promised a national ad campaign, "will use television as it's never been used before." But 25 Sunday-night telecasts later, PBL Executive Director Av Westin confessed despondently: "We took some deserved lumps for our brash we'll-show-you attitude. The year had its successes and failures, but it was not totally satisfactory from anybody's point of view."

The successes included a muckraking series on the meat-packing industry, a first-rate U.S. TV premiere for Harold Pinter's The Dwarfs, and a colloquy between a group of concerned college students and a melancholy Walter Lippmann. Most important, the lab exposed a not-so-latent racism in U.S. society. There were bitter confrontations between militant blacks and self-righteous whites, stark views of ghetto living conditions, including one film shot and narrated by Gordon Parks, and cutting satire, such as a Negro-slanted aptitude test (sample question: "How long do you cook chitlins?"), By chance, PBL's camera crews tracked Martin Luther King throughout the last three months of his life; the result was a stunning obituary that last summer was voted the best TV documentary at the Venice Film Festival.

Flatulent View, Since each program was padded to fill at least a two-hour magazine format, the arresting segments were buried among too many soporific ones. PBL wasted time too often duplicating the spot news and standard documentary coverage that the commercial networks already were doing thoroughly and more lavishly. There was too much controversy for controversy's sake. And the PBL chief correspondent, Edward P. Morgan, unburdened himself of weekly editorials (always winding up with the line, "That is the shape of this observer's point of view") so flatulent that dial switchers probably thought they were listening to Pat Paulsen parodies.

Despite bright expectations that PBL could avoid bickering and office politics, the lab became embroiled in the same sort of power struggles so notorious at the commercial networks. Executive Director Westin, a 39-year-old former CBS producer, was the hapless mediator. His staff members were fractious because they did not feel they had freedom enough to experiment. The managers of many of the 130-odd public TV stations that carry PBL protested, on the contrary, that the programming was too avant-garde for their audiences. As the lab seemed to flounder, the Editorial Policy Board, a group of outsiders headed by ex-Columbia Journalism Dean Edward Barrett, became increasingly meddlesome. Also constantly kibitzing was Fred W. Friendly, the former CBS News president who first developed the PBL concept

Idea Man. At the end of the first season, last June, the Editorial Policy Board urged the foundation to dismiss Westin and wondered if maybe the whole project should be dropped. Instead, it was the policy board, not the lab, that the foundation eliminated. Westin was retained, though with a coequal executive editor, Frederick Bohen, a 31-year-old ex-member of the White House staff.

An assistant dean at Princeton before going to Washington, Bohen had never worked as a journalist or film maker, but was considered the tough administrator and idea man needed to complement Westin's production experience.

The key decision of the new command was to cut the show back from two hours to roughly 90 minutes and to forgo, most weeks, the magazine format. Generally, each future broadcast will have a single theme (this Sunday's: a study of whites' reaction to integration). There will be no more of what Westin calls "instant topicality." Westin is now producing background programs on issues that he anticipates will again become crucial--the crisis on the campuses and the power of the military-industrial complex, for example. When finished, the shows will go into a bank to await a news peg.

Cavorting Cops. Accentuating a trend of last year and striving to provide something different from the commercial competition, Westin will film most of his documentaries in cinema-verite style. As Birth and Death Producer Arthur Barren puts it: "I guess it's significant that my hero is Fellini instead of Edward R. Murrow." For one upcoming show, Westin has given handheld cameras to seven artists and told them to produce their own 20-minute film on "the American scene." Black Militant LeRoi Jones plans to concentrate on Negro self-education and self-defense; Wendell Niles, a film maker in the employ of Right-Winger H. L. Hunt, will do a short featuring Hunt and John Wayne. Documentary Maker Ricky Leacock (Don't Look Back) has just filmed "3,000 police chiefs and then-wives cavorting on Waikiki Beach." PBL's major coup of the season could be its commissioning of Jean-Luc Godard to do his first U.S. film: the title is One American Movie, and the French master was looking at rushes in Paris last week.

"This year," Westin sums up, "we go for broke." But the foundation decision on whether or not to fund a third season for PBL will probably be made after about the first six weeks. Fred Friendly, who will be one of the prime decision makers, says he is "beginning the new season with an open mind and an open heart." Speculation is that come next May, PBL will be absorbed into Ford-financed National Educational Television. But Westin and Bohen have not given up. "We could have just played out the string this season," says Bohen, "but we're playing to give the judges a hard choice."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.