PRODUCER PLANS TO COVER DIVERSE TOPICS IN TV DOCUMENTARIES : ‘HUMAN JOURNEY’ TO AIR ON PUBLIC ACCESS STATIONS

“Ready?” asked Gloria Bogdan as she stood poised and smiling, microphone in hand, and waited for the video camera to begin filming.

“I’m Gloria and welcome to ‘The Human Journey,’ ” she began for the fifth time that day.

Despite the heat and the frequent interruptions of airplanes droning overhead, Bogdan remained composed as she filmed a daylong string of interviews for a documentary on circus life. Her subjects, members of the Anaheim-based All-American Circus, were rehearsing for a performance at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa. Her circus film is one of 200 documentaries Bogdan plans to direct and produce titled “The Human Journey.” She said the programs would begin airing later this summer on public access cable television stations in Orange County.

Bogdan’s plans for a massive documentary series, which she calls “an insight into the 360 degrees of being human,” is an outgrowth of her graduate work in anthropology at Cal State Fullerton. She earned her undergraduate degree in religious studies there in 1985.

Both the university and Santa Ana’s Bowers Museum, where Bogdan works as an assistant to chief curator Armand Labbe, have encouraged her efforts.

Bogdan’s plans for “The Human Journey” include documentaries on such diverse topics as antique dolls, pre-Colombian art, Japanese theater, a discussion of pesticides with labor leader Cesar Chavez, northern Chinese cooking, parapsychology, archeology, metal etching, dentistry, institutional investing and Hawaiian tree snails.

About 25 of the proposed documentaries will deal with such religious topics as faith healing, Jewish holidays, metaphysical meditation, Thai Buddhism, Islam, cults, Western ethics and morality.

Bogdan said she chose to include a circus documentary because “circus performers are a special group of people. I thought it would be interesting to look at what is behind the scenes of the circus--how the performers live, how they educate their children.”

Bogdan has worked hard to get funding. Each documentary costs about $200 in film supplies alone. Bogdan has received donations from individuals through Cal State Fullerton’s Foundation Assn. and through the Religious Studies Student Assn.

Bogdan said she has secured agreements to air “The Human Journey” series with Group W Cable and with Cal State Fullerton’s University Channel, and she is also talking to other Orange County public access channels. As part of the franchise agreement with each city, the cable companies are required to provide public-access programming. Group W Cable’s public-access Channel 38 has about 22,000 subscribers in Fullerton and Placentia, while the University Channel (Channel 33) has 70,000 subscribers in Anaheim, Villa Park, Placentia and Fullerton.

Earnest Gourdine, director of television and media support for the University Channel, finds “The Human Journey” well-tailored to the station’s educational focus. “This particular program is pitched a little higher than the typical talk show,” Gourdine said.

Bogdan and her assistant, Colin Kingston, 23, have been using Group W’s equipment free at the public-access taping facility on the Cal State Fullerton campus. The equipment is available to anyone completing Group W’s 10-week training course in editing and camera work.

Recently, however, Group W Cable announced a plan to consolidate its operations by withdrawing its public-access taping equipment from Cal State Fullerton. Although the move has delayed Bogdan’s production schedule, it has not halted “The Human Journey.” Instead of working at the university, Bogdan and Kingston are using Group W Cable’s central facility at 1501 Commonwealth Ave. in Fullerton for editing.

All participants in the project work on a volunteer basis. Many are university students enrolled in communications, anthropology, religious studies, theater, dance, business and pre-law courses. “We get people from all disciplines,” Bogdan said. “I look for patient, intelligent people because making these films is so stressful.”

The documentaries run 30 minutes each, sometimes longer, and require two to three weeks to tape and edit. With 200 segments planned, the series could keep Bogdan and Kingston busy for some time to come. “We hope to keep going forever, and we will keep working as long as we have funding,” Bogdan said. “We could never run out of ideas because there are so many things going on in the world.”

Bogdan and Kingston met at the Bowers Museum, where Kingston is coordinator for the museum’s tours and membership. Kingston, a 1985 Cal State Fullerton communications graduate, takes care of the technical aspects of filming the documentaries.

Since filming began three months ago, four segments of “The Human Journey” films have been completed, including two about Hinduism and one on William Lee, director of Bowers Museum.

It is no coincidence that Bodgan is so comfortable in front of a camera. Born in Honolulu “about 50 years ago,” she began performing in dance classes when whe was 2. Her father was employed by a special theater and drama arts division of the U.S. Army and was transferred to several posts throughout the United States and Puerto Rico while she was growing up. “Wherever we lived I always got involved,” Bogdan recalled with a smile. “Theater, music, dance, singing, film--you name it, I wanted to do it.” Her flair for entertaining eventually led her to Hollywood in the early 1960s. Later she opted for a career as a licensed vocational nurse. She became an ordained nondenominational minister through the Love and Light church in Anaheim.

Bogdan returned to the entertainment field as a volunteer hostess on a public-access channel in Orange County in 1985 and began working on her proposal for “The Human Journey” in November of that year. She secured the backing of Cal State Fullerton professors Ben Hubbard and James Sartucci to launch the project.

“The importance of the program is to make the community aware of a number of individuals and activities and points of view that are conducive to a positive outlook on the human condition,” said Sartucci, a professor of linguistics and religious studies.

Hubbard, an assistant professor of religious studies, concurred. “The basic concept of the program is just the kind of thing public-access cable should be doing. It enables us to interview people of vision in a non-commercial environment.”