LIBRARY PRODUCES TV SHOWS

Watching a cable television show that originates from the public library would hardly make most people’s Top 10 list of favorite leisure activities.

Indeed, if Gallup conducted a poll, you would expect that endeavor to rank in the low 300s, somewhere between watching socks drip dry and flea-dipping a wildcat.

Despite that kind of attitudinal uphill battle, the Buena Park Library has surfaced as an unexpected source of informative and entertaining cable programming in Orange County. For the past 18 months, the library has been creating original shows now carried by three Group W cable systems in north Orange County to about 87,000 subscribers.

“When I initiated this, my goal was not to be a television producer for the county,” said Mary Ellen Ritz, librarian and cable television coordinator for the Buena Park Library channel. “It was more for reading encouragement.”

Although the library got its own cable channel in 1981 under terms of the city’s original cable franchise agreement, before 1984 it carried text information only. Part of the reason Ritz was hired was that library director Colleen McGregor wanted to make greater use of the channel’s possibilities.

Potential “Saturday Night Live” skits notwithstanding, Ritz hasn’t resorted to nine-part documentaries on the Dewey Decimal System or Alistair Cooke-hosted examinations of the long and colorful history of alphabetizing to fill air time.

On the other hand, she’s avoided the entertainment-at-any-price approach of such network TV shows as “That’s Incredible” and refrained from inviting Evel Knievel to leap his motorcycle over a stack of Oxford unabridged dictionaries.

Instead, during the 20 hours a week she devotes to library programming--she spends the other half of each work week as a reference librarian--Ritz works on new segments of “Library Land” and “Book Talk.” Each month, with the aid of library staff and a largely free-lance technical crew, she produces a combination of three new half-hour segments of the two shows.

“Library Land” offers imaginative children’s programs as an alternative to the merchandising-heavy cartoon shows that dominate morning and afternoon hours on commercial television. Ritz frequently enlists local theater troupes, storytellers, mimes and puppeteers in dramatizations of children’s favorites such as “Beauty and the Beast” and other productions.

One regular on “Library Land” is Sandra Heidenrich, a librarian in the Saddleback Unified School District who has appeared as characters including Countess Dracula, in a Halloween story, and Marina Mermaid in another recent storytelling segment.

Ritz has also used some of the library’s younger patrons on the show.

“We tape kids doing book reviews. Generally, they pick books they like. They don’t ever come up with a book they didn’t like,” Ritz said. “They’ll do things like: ‘I like this book because . . .’ or ‘I think you should read this book because. . . .’ ”

Not exactly a literary version of Siskel and Ebert, she admitted, “but it’s a lot of fun. It’s just for kids.”

For “Book Talk,” which is aimed at older youths and adults, Ritz also serves as host of a show that provides a forum for Southern California authors.

“I like the idea of a library-sponsored show with a real live librarian on it who talks about books, rather than some paid interviewer who has had all the research done for him and hasn’t read any of the books,” she said. The scope of “Book Talk” may soon be expanding to include writers from outside the Southland, thanks to a small item on the show recently in Publisher’s Weekly. Ritz said she has since been approached by major publishing houses interested in getting their authors on the show during national promotional tours.

Even though interviews on cable channels have nowhere near the impact of an appearance on the major talk shows, Ritz said authors and publishers are seeing cable as an increasingly attractive medium. “Especially for first-time authors,” she added.

Ritz is now experimenting with ways to make the show more visually interesting than the usual “talking heads” format of in-studio author interviews. One method is on-location interviews, and an upcoming segment of “Book Talk” will be shot at a local science-fiction writer’s home.

“He has a whole collection (of science-fiction memorabilia) right there in his house. He has the original monster suit from ‘The Creature From the Black Lagoon.’ Everybody wants to go on this shoot. So that’s something we can do with Orange County authors,” she said.

Library channels such as Buena Park’s are a rarity throughout the country, numbering perhaps only a few dozen. Most cable systems that carry library-oriented programs show them on public access or local origination channels.

On Orange County cable, the Buena Park Library channel is unique in having its own, ongoing source of funding: the Buena Park Foundation. The foundation was also established in the city’s franchising agreement with Group W and is financed with a percentage of Group W’s franchise fees. “We’re not using any taxpayer money,” Ritz said. The foundation’s sole purpose is to pay for local programming by individuals or groups; Ritz receives about $1,000 a month for new programs.

Although her shows could conceivably be of countywide interest, the difficulties of getting programs on multiple cable systems have prevented Ritz from distributing the shows to other areas. “Library Land,” however, is carried by Community Cablevision in Irvine as part of a programming exchange between the two systems.

(Since the merger last fall of Group W’s Buena Park facilities and its Fullerton-Placentia system, the library’s original programming is no longer seen in Buena Park on Library Channel 1 but is now carried weekdays from 3 to 6 p.m. on KNOC Channel 12, the local programming channel serving all three cities. The Buena Park Library channel is once again reserved for text information.)

How, you may ask, did a librarian become a video producer?

“I read everything I could get my hands on about video--books, the Video Manager, professional journals about video,” she said. “There were some organizations that helped me, like the Orange County Cable Assn. and the NFLCP (National Federation of Local Cable Programmers).”

Having received her master’s degree in library science from the University of Wisconsin--Madison, Ritz said: “They did prepare you for this in library school, that maybe one day you’d have to run a camera or put together a program. That was the only exposure I’d had to it.

“Then, of course,” she added with a laugh, “most Americans watch TV more than anything else, so from that point of view, everyone is qualified, right?”

Unlike many cable producers who envision the medium simply as a steppingstone to commercial television or films, Ritz insisted that she isn’t an aspiring Johnny Carson and that she’s more interested in the message of books than the medium of television.

“After I graduated, I was head librarian for one summer at the only library on Madeline Island on Lake Superior, a small community of about 150 people,” she said. “I loved it. It was wonderful.”

Now that’s incredible.