DCTV

In downtown New York, below Canal, on Lafayette, stands New York's oldest firehouse. It evokes a 19th century robber baron's palace.

Sometime back in the 1970's, a young video rebel named Jon Alpert convinced the city of New York to sell him the building for a dollar. He has, in the thirty plus years since then, sunk millions of dollars into shoring it up, refurbishing, remodeling, and just keeping it standing. He named it the Downtown Community Television Center: DCTV.

The 1970's were a heyday for community based video organizations in the city. The advent of videotape heralded a new day in television, smaller cameras and easier edit systems made a new kind of television available. Jon mounted television sets in an old postal system truck and brought video to the neighborhood, highlighting issues, bringing visual context to problems surrounding the Firehouse and its neighbors.

Jon started reporting for the Today Show and in the 1970's and 1980's was highly visible as he was the crazy man that NBC sent to places where no one else would or could or should go. He was the first American reporter to return to Viet Nam after its fall to the Communists. His exploits live in the journalistic community as examples of courage, albeit many thought and think of him as foolhardy.

After the heyday of community video centers, they began to fade, until now, in the early years of the 21st Century, I think DCTV is the last remaining bastion. Along the way, Jon started creating long form documentaries, cinema verite style, and collecting Emmys as a result.

For over a year now I have been working with them. Jon Alpert, still a video rebel, asked me to help him find a home for a program called OFF TO WAR. I introduced him to Discovery Times; they bought three episodes, following the Arkansas National Guard from call-upto Iraq. When it's all finished, there will be at least ten episodes, following this particular band of brothers through their whole Iraqi experience.

The young producers of this, Craig and Brent Renaud, are two quiet young men from Arkansas, both with slow, southern smiles and an uncanny ability to allow people to reveal themselves in front of their cameras. Their DOPE SICK LOVE will soon be on HBO and it is painfully truthful in its capturing the world of New York's drug addicted. They are bringing to OFF TO WAR the same ability to peel back surface layers to see what lies beneath.

Brent and Craig Renaud learned the art of film making from Jon. So too did Matt O'Neill, who is bright, smart, business savvy and acts as both a producer and a sort of General Manager for DCTV. He's in Venezuela right now, shooting more for his documentary on Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, an underreported story in our own backyard.

Jon also established DCTV as a teaching organization, particularly for kids from the urban jungle that is New York, for individuals who might have easily been lost in the system.

Two of those individuals, now nineteen, just returned from the Sundance Festival with a Special Jury Award for their short film, BULLETS IN THE HOOD. It is their creative way of dealing with the death of eight of their friends in a two year period from gun violence.

It is a slightly disorganized organization, rough around the edges, a bit unorthodox, ragtag, constantly re-inventing itself and growing. Next will be a Magnet High School for young men and women to learn their basic skills through the medium of video.

The chaos creates art and profound documentaries, gives young people an outlet they would not have otherwise. DCTV provides us with films that make us think and give us insights to places we would not nor could not go. It is an organization that still stands with its fundamental premise intact in a time when others are gone.

Other producers who came out of those community oriented '70's and who moved on to more commercial lives than DCTV's, occasionally look wistfully at the Firehouse as they remember their roots.

While I did not come from those roots, I am intensely proud to be associated with this organization.