BEFORE: This documentary ran on PBS a while back, on a program called "Independent Lens", apparently it got a theatrical release before that, but only made about $50,000 - sure, there's not a big market for docs out there, I get that. But the subject matter intrigues me, because for over 15 years, part of my job was to record TV, to do market research on commercials that used animation. The task required me to record a lot of TV that I didn't even want to watch - kiddie cartoons, sports I didn't care about, Lifetime movies, I had to cover it all so that I could SEE it all, and oddly, paying more attention to the ad breaks, the spaces in-between. What does that DO to a person? So I'm in a unique spot, I want to learn about this Marion Stokes because I might be able to gain or give some insight. We'll see, I guess.
Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy AND Ronald Reagan carry over from "MLK/FBI". I already know, this film has so many archive footage appearances of politicians, newscasters and celebrities, that it could go almost ANYWHERE in the chain. This is the proverbial "Time-hole that leads EVERYWHERE", as per "Time Bandits". There's a very specific reason I'm putting it here, and it's not thematic - tomorrow's documentary has VERY few credits on the IMDB, and I suspect that whoever entered that data missed a LOT, but I know for sure there's at least one person in this documentary's footage who appears in that film, so out of necessity, this one has to go here. I'd love to save it because it could get me out of another linking jam in the future, but I also need it to get me out of THIS linking jam, between today and tomorrow.
THE PLOT: For over 30 years, Marion Stokes obsessively and privately recorded American TV news, 24 hours a day, filling 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing wars, talk shows and commercials that show us how television shaped the world of today.
AFTER: There is a fascinating story here, but it's a bit hard to hear the signal over all the noise - most of this film is assembled from archive news clips, and even then, it's a bit unclear whether those clips are from the tapes recorded by Marion Stokes, or if somebody used clips from another source, a professional news archive, in order to simulate what's on her tapes. Sure, news is news, and random news clips from one source will probably look like random news clips from another source, but since this film is ABOUT Marion Stokes' obsessive taping of TV, I had hopes that I'd get to see a bit of what she accomplished (if that is the correct word...) and now I just don't know.
Here's what we do know - like MLK, Marion Butler (later Stokes) was tracked by the F.B.I., because she and her first partner (husband? boyfriend?) were active in Socialist organizations. That's a bit odd for a black couple, honestly, because you tend to associate the African-American cause with liberalism, but in more of a Black Panther kind of way rather than a Red Scare kind of way. One methodology wanted to tear down the system and replace it with anarchy, the other with a very rigid structure that was often a disguise for totalitarianism. Socialism tended to need SOMEBODY in charge to redistribute the wealth properly, and that person in charge would eventually get corrupt from all that power, so it's very easy for a dictator to run a socialist country, we've seen it happen time and time again, and have we ever seen true Socialism NOT go down that road? Stokes and her husband travelled to Mexico with their young son, hoping to get paperwork to emigrate to Cuba, but the paperwork never arrived. She returned to Philadelphia with their son, and he didn't.
Gradually she drifted toward public access TV, and an involvement with an ecumenical center called Wellspring, which sponsored the TV show "Input" in order to present a number of different political viewpoints and spark discussions between people of different racial backgrounds and faiths. This seemed to be on the up-and-up, but who can say? A relationship formed between her and her white co-star on the program, John Stokes, though he was married at the time. This relationship may have also been on the up-and-up, but again, who can say? It was still the 1970's, and inter-racial relationships were still a bit uncommon and perhaps misunderstood, but then again, perhaps the two people who were calling for inter-racial peace and harmony were just practicing what they were preaching.
It was during the Iran hostage crisis in the Carter administration that Marion began recording the TV news, she felt that she could document HOW the news was presented in different ways, and that this was somehow important. This coincided with the advent of VHS/Betamax technology, and also with "Nightline", a late-night news program hosted by Ted Koppel that focused on the Iran hostages for its first broadcast year. The rise of CNN and the 24-hour news cycle came a long a couple years later, and by then Marion was taping around the clock, 4 or 8 channels at a time, in order to document ALL the viewpoints out there. Considering how much of a split we have now between, say, FOX News and MSNBC, we now know that the same news story can be presented in two (or more) very different ways, so Marion was correct, though she may have been just a few decades early.
I don't tape TV obsessively any more, because I'm no longer being paid to do that - instead I watch movies obsessively, and find ways to obsessively document that process. That's what broken people do, people with OCD or otherwise looking for something to fill the void and keep them from focusing on the pain in their lives, I get that. Marion was also a hoarder, saving piles of newspapers and (obviously) piles and piles of VHS tapes, always falling behind on the labelling process, and as for WATCHING what she recorded? I can tell you right now, she didn't have time to WATCH TV, because she was way too busy TAPING TV. I know, that doesn't make any sense, but that's the nature of a collector. Whether it's TV shows, comic books, autographs, coins, stamps, beer, vintage photos, it doesn't matter. The true nature of a collector is to be so busy adding to and maintaining that collection that one simply doesn't have time to ENJOY the collection. Trust me on this, it's a form of sickness. Marion, for example, enjoyed reading books about hoarders, and how they tended to be smarter than average people - and she had quite a few books on this subject, those books themselves were therefore part of the problem.
(I wonder sometimes about the TV show "Hoarders", and its spin-off's "Hoarding: Buried Alive" and "Animal Hoarders". Out in the world, are the people who watch this show also hoarders themselves, and are they watching the show because they're fans of hoarding, or do people tend to watch the show as a cautionary tale, as if to say, "THIS is what could happen to me, unless I change my ways and not slip any further into hoarding?" The subjects on that show also tend to be broken people, who went through a break-up or the loss of a family member, and then found some solace in having more STUFF, so I wonder if the fans of the show have similar problems with self-awareness. Plus I figure there's at least a few people out there who tape the show obsessively, and ironically now have a massive storage problem due to their large collection of those VHS tapes or DVDs containing episodes of "Hoarders". And they're too close to the problem to appreciate that irony.)
As with many hoarders, the storage problem tends to not get solved during that "collector's" lifetime - it then falls to their family members to deal with the items left behind. I'm going to go through this myself in a few months if my parents manage to transition to some form of assisted living. I've still got some stuff stored in their house, and I'll have to make a special trip to get that stuff, and then figure out what to do with all THEIR stuff - and they have a lot of stuff in that house, some of which came from two other houses, my grandparents' houses. It's a massive nightmare headed my way, and I've already researched places one town over that do close-outs, somebody comes with a truck and walks through the house, figuring out what's of value, what can be sold in their store, what can be given away and what needs to be thrown away.
In the case of Marion Stokes, her family loaded her 70,000 VHS tapes into storage pods and they were all shipped to San Francisco, where the Internet Archive is going to spend a few years digitizing all that content (much of which was, WHOOPSIE, not saved over the years by the major and minor news outlets) and then tagging it so the news stories will be searchable online. Who knows, maybe some smart people can go through it all and analyze the bias in news stories, and then pinpoint the EXACT moment that our country started going down the tubes. At least then, we'll have somebody to blame.
For me personally, I have to keep reminding myself that the medium is NOT the message - it's important while I'm cataloguing my comics and obsessively researching movie cast lists to, you know, take a little time to ENJOY the messages entailed, if possible. Slow down, savor that comic book. Go see "The Suicide Squad" because it looks like it's a whole lot of fun. Remember FUN? That what things used to be when we were kids, when we weren't busy trying to chase the almighty dollar so we could keep buying a whole bunch of content that we're never going to have time to ingest. Don't just watch that TV show or movie to "get it off the list", try to appreciate it for what it IS, for what bliss it can bring me now, however intangible. There will be plenty of time for record-keeping later, remember, all that stuff you own is somebody else's problem, after you die - try to take some comfort in that.
Bottom line, Marion Stokes' goal was to record all the news in order to teach us all about bias in broadcasting, and protect us from "fake news" - ideally we should view her archive objectively so that we can learn from it, and in that sense she was a visionary, slightly ahead of her time. But also, she was a nutty hoarder with OCD who somehow had the resources to finance and feed her obsessive ways, from the Iran Hostage crisis to the Sandy Hook shootings. Maybe both things are somehow true, or the real truth lies somewhere in-between. Either way, the takeaway is that we've all got a limited amount of time on this planet, and we should be thinking about how we want to spend that time - are we making things better or worse, and are we even able to tell?
Also starring Michael Metelits, Melvin Metelits, Frank Hollman, Anna Lofton, Roger MacDonald, Anthony Massimini, Richard Stevens, Anne Stokes Hochberg, Mizzy Stokes, and the voices of Tom Keenan, Lynn Spigel
with archive footage of Marion Stokes, Christiane Amanpour (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), George W. Bush (ditto), Richard Branson (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Tom Brokaw (last seen in "Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President"), Jimmy Carter (ditto), Rosalynn Carter (ditto), Bob Dylan (ditto), Ted Kennedy (ditto), Ayatollah Khomeini (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Yoko Ono (ditto), Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran (ditto), Johnny Carson (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Phil Donahue (ditto), Peter Jennings (ditto), Fidel Castro (last seen in "The Irishman"), Julia Child, Bill Clinton (last seen in "Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump"), Hillary Clinton (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Michelle Obama (ditto), Ray Combs (last seen in "Overboard" (1987)), Kellyanne Conway (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Bill Cosby (last seen in "Malcolm X"), Jesse Jackson (ditto), Magic Johnson (ditto), Rodney King (ditto), Sam Donaldson (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Michael Dukakis (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds (last seen in "Whitney"), Madonna (ditto), Nancy Reagan (ditto), Saddam Hussein (ditto), Albert Einstein, Jane Fonda (last seen in "Dolly Parton: Here I Am"), Barbara Walters (ditto), Al Gore (last seen in "Zappa"), Ted Koppel (ditto), Bryant Gumbel (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Steve Jobs (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), DeForest Kelley (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Nichelle Nichols (ditto), William Shatner (ditto), Leonard Nimoy (last seen in "Sound City"), Carroll O'Connor (last seen in "Cleopatra"), Sinead O'Connor, Jane Pauley (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Oprah Winfrey (ditto), Phylicia Rashad (last heard in "Soul"), Frank Reynolds, Lionel Richie (last seen in "Hitsville: The Making of Motown"), Pete Rose, Pete Seeger (last seen in "Echo in the Canyon"), Jeff Sessions (last seen in "Vice" 2018)), O.J. Simpson (last seen in "The Towering Inferno"), Will Smith (last heard in "Spies in Disguise"), Ted Turner (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Kurt Waldheim, and the voice of Dick Clark (last heard in "Echo in the Canyon").
RATING: 5 out of 10 climate-controlled storage units
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