INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS SEEK SEPARATE FUND

In a concerted effort to gain greater access to public television, the country’s independent film and video producers are mounting a campaign aimed at convincing Congress to set up and fund a “national independent program service.” The proposed service would produce, package, promote, acquire and distribute work by the independents for public broadcasting and other markets.

Spearheaded by the San Francisco-based Assn. of California Independent Public Television Producers, the proposal calls for a financing pool separate from the Program Fund created in 1980 within the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the agency charged with channeling federal funds to public television and radio.

Under the provisions of the Program Fund, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was to earmark “a substantial amount” of money for independent producers each year.

“We are disappointed with the performance of CPB,” said Robert Richter, president of the New York-based Assn. of Independent Video and Filmmakers (AIVF), the 4,000-member organization that plans to lead the Congressional lobbying effort for the new program service. Richter said his association was acting on behalf of the 10,000 independents nationwide, who this month were sent a mail appeal to help fund the current campaign.

“We have been looking for a way to register our great concern, and now we think we’ve found it,” Richter said in a telephone interview. Noting that Congressional hearings on CPB’s policies and practices, including its funding of public television programming, are scheduled to be held sometime this fall, Richter said the independents’ aim is to have the new program service amended into the Public Telecommunications Financing Act of 1978 that is expected to be reauthorized by Congress next spring.

The independents, to the extent they have been unified, previously have expressed the view that too little of CPB’s annual program funds for independents--an annual average of 40% of its total program funds--reaches the “smaller” independent and minority producers. Richter said that many meetings and attempts at reaching “agreements and compromises” between CPB and representatives of the independent film-making community have failed to produce significant changes in funding practices.

During the Program Fund’s first full year of operation, 1981, $8.4 million of its total $19.8 million was granted to independent producers, according to CPB officials. During the current 1987 funding year, $12.2 of a total of $28.1 went to independents, according to CPB figures.

Richter, AIVF and the independents behind the latest effort to gain more funds and access do not argue with the amount of funding earmarked by CPB. But they do differ with the agency in the interpretation of the word “independent.”

Increasingly, they have maintained, large blocks of funding have been provided by CPB to producers of major public television series, such as the “American Playhouse” drama series and the “Frontline” documentary series produced at major stations, such as New York’s WNET and Boston’s WGBH, respectively; CPB considers such producers “independent.” And they cite the discontinuation in recent years of such series as “Non-Fiction Television,” “Crisis to Crisis” and “Matters of Life and Death,” which were established specifically as vehicles for the often unconventional, frequently controversial work of independents.

Richter, who referred to CPB and public television station officials, as well as the producers who have become associated with major station series, as “the Establishment,” said this week that public television audiences increasingly are being “deprieved” of diversity and controversy, as a result of CPB’s funding policies and practices.

“Independents are by nature more independent, and are willing to take more risks. . . . We are on the cutting edge,” continued Richter, whose own work frequently has been seen on public television. In acknowledging this, he added: “I shouldn’t be part of such a tiny minority (of independents).”

An associate director of CPB’s Program Fund, Jennifer Lawson, said by phone from Washington, D.C., that the agency is aware of the concerns and the plans of the independents behind the current Congressional effort. Noting that “we obviously differ” over the interpretation of what constitutes an independent producer, Lawson acknowledged that a third party may be required to settle the long-term conflict.