This is The 90’s:
First you see the cigar, rolling around between his teeth, chewed to a juicy pulp, but rarely lit. Next you notice the voice, which just barely seems to squeeze out from around the edges of his stogie–lazy, slurred, careening from one phrase to the next, rising from a gravel groan to a near falsetto before erupting in a tiny, delighted, high-pitched giggle. Finally you catch the watery, rheumy, unfocused eyes, seemingly dazed from hour after endless hour of watching television.
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It’s what Weinberg’s been doing for almost 20 years–finding a way to get guerrilla TV into your living room, stealing a bit of production power from a tiny, elite minority in New York and Los Angeles. He did it for 12 years on Image Union, his ground-breaking half-hour videofest on Channel 11, and he’s doing it now in The 90’s: giving television to real people, to broadcast real perspectives on real life. “He has become a lightning rod for independent TV around the country,” says Ed Morris, chairman of the television department at Columbia College.
Twelve men are filmed sitting in a large room rapping about sex. They are gay, straight, and bi, and they’ve never met before. The camera settles on a blond man, who says, “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just have sex and not worry about dying? I don’t even have fantasies that are not safe sex anymore.”
A tanned, suspendered, paisley-tied young greedhead cavorts across the screen, singing an ode to consumer culture: “It’s what you have, not who you are. No plain ice cream, I want a Dove Bar.” In the background, a Greek chorus of business suits croons, “Ooooo-ooooh, yup-yup-yuppie.”
“Top Value” is Top Value Television–TVTV–a group Weinberg helped found that used portapaks like the one he’s holding to take control of television. “Never occurred to Sony,” Weinberg says. “Wasn’t the business they were in. They made those things to teach nurses how to be nurses, to teach bricklayers how to be carpenters, to do industrial training for salesmen on how to change tires. Who the fuck knows? It was called the ‘handy-looky’ camera.”
“I’d like to figure out how the kind of stuff that I do and that the people we work with, how that kind of freshness and originality could find a home in commercial TV,” Weinberg says. “It would be good for TV, it would be good for us. It would be good. We need the money and we need the exposure.”
