COVER STORY : Media for the Masses : Public-Access TV Gives Everyone a Chance to Be a Star--In Their Own Universe

Rose Brown inspects vegetables for a living, but frankly, she’d rather host a television show.

Yvonne Swearingen cleans houses, but she’d like to be on video too.

For these Lakewood residents and dozens of others, such a fantasy is well within reach, thanks to public-access television, the low-budget dream factory of cable television. After a few hours of free training, anyone in the Long Beach area or other parts of Southeast Los Angeles County can have his own television show on a cable system’s community channel.

Who cares if even your mother thinks you lack talent? You can still be in pictures--broadcast into the homes of thousands of local cable subscribers.

“It’s fabulous,” said Brown, a food inspector for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who plans to produce a talk show. “I can do as much as I want and there’s no pressure to make money at it. And if people don’t like it, they can turn me off.”

Almost anything goes on the air. Views from the far left, the far right. Fundamentalist Christians, atheists, meditators, amateur music video makers--all get their shot. Along with the free or low-cost training, most area residents get free use of late-model video production equipment, limited professional assistance and, most important, free air time.

The result is a cornucopia of small-budget or no-budget shows. Air time also is available to local government, which has gotten into the act by televising city council and planning commission hearings.

Residents are not allowed to pitch products, but otherwise, “as long as it’s not lewd or obscene and people are willing to produce it, they can,” said Benjamin Harvey, who oversees video productions for Bellflower. “The cable company doesn’t really do a whole lot of censoring.”

Nor does the cable company demand sophisticated technique. Many locally produced programs have the look and insight of a home video.

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The tape kept rolling on one show after a magician skewered his hand with scissors. The wound bled during the rest of his routine. The producers of a story-telling program for children made the mistake of using young readers who could barely read. A “how-to” art demonstration became a “how-not-to” exercise when a portrait of a show’s host looked nothing like the real thing. The host of a medical show got so enthused while talking about heart disease that he forgot to let his guest speak.

The set for the typical public-access talk show is simple--a few chairs, a table or two and a few hand props. The backdrop for many Long Beach talk shows is blue because the engineer doesn’t have the equipment to light the set in any other color. The same four artificial plants get rearranged in different patterns from show to show.

The talk shows rarely have a problem booking guests, who range from musicians trying to record their first album to local residents who have lived lives worth talking about. Long Beach studio technicians recall one talk show that would bring on a political activist who always appeared with a clear plastic briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. They don’t remember the point the man was trying to make. Then there was the theorist who warned that the sitcom “Get Smart” and the movie “Star Wars” were elements of a conspiracy to control viewers’ minds.

For guest and host alike, the shows are often a bully pulpit for ideas, fantasies or feelings that usually get little attention, let alone a spotlight.

Sundays on Long Beach cable channel 33, you can see “Cambodia Today,” which informs the large Long Beach Cambodian community about events back home. On Mondays, you can catch the latest in senior citizen talent on “Bob’s World.” Thursdays offer “Flights into the Unknown,” which makes the case for healing with voodoo, using magic wands and reading Tarot cards. Friday is the day for “Women’s Sports Info,” which features video clips of local women’s sporting events.

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In Pico Rivera, tune in to the crowning of the town’s beauty queen. In Lynwood, witness the anti-gang crusade of a mother who lost two sons in drive-by shootings. In Artesia, catch up with the latest news from the Azores--in Portuguese. In Hawaiian Gardens, relive a moment of civic pride by watching a replay of the appearance of Councilwoman Kathleen Navejas on the network talk show, “Donohue.” In Lakewood, see a local video version of Disney’s animated feature, “Beauty and the Beast.”

Most cable companies offer public access as part of their negotiated agreement with a city for the right to operate the local cable franchise. In most Southeast-area cities, public access was first offered in the early to mid-1980s.

The quality of the equipment and professional assistance varies from city to city. In some places, the service has never taken off. Montebello, for instance, has only one regular local show, a religious program.

But cities such as Lynwood, Lakewood and Long Beach offer a full schedule of programs made by a growing population of producers. Lakewood, in fact, has a plethora of community channels, with separate broadcast bands reserved for the Long Beach school district, Cal State Long Beach, Cerritos College, local churches, the YMCA, city government, a community bulletin board and the city recreation department.

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In Lakewood, a quiet bedroom community of 74,000, the path to the airwaves begins in a 15-hour production class held on five evenings in the city’s community television studio. Brown, the food inspector, and 10 other students took the March class to learn how to operate cameras, soundboards and editing equipment.

The class, which is offered only at night, was an exercise in stamina for Brown, 36, who must rise at 3 a.m. for her job peering into bins of zucchini and radicchio.

The Pittsburgh native considers herself a repressed stand-up comic. She was pigeonholed by her family as smart and level-headed, not creative or artistic. Then, in her 20s, she said, “I blossomed, but by that time I was working for the United States Department of Agriculture.”

Still searching for a creative niche, she glanced through a list of classes offered through the city and noticed the video production course.

To graduate, Brown and her classmates served as the production team for a talk show, “Class Act.” Brown ran one of the cameras.

Another camera was in the hands of Swearingen, 28, who owns a small housecleaning business and never pursued her dream of being an actress. She wants to be an on-camera narrator for education videos.

Graduates of the class include Jeremy Turek, 16, a junior at Gahr High School in Cerritos. He has been producing shows for four years as part of a three-generation family act with his father, Albert, 38, and grandparents Al and Mary Turek.

Al, 72, and Mary, 71, sometimes spend several days a week at the Lakewood television studio producing “Swinging Seniors,” which showcases their band and other musicians, and “Having Fun With a Pencil,” a how-to art show.

Jeremy has decided he’s ready for the big time: a regular network series. With friends and family members, he’s producing a pilot for a children’s adventure show set in the year 2055. The teen-age superheroes would use wits and song, but no violence, as they travel back in time to retrieve artifacts needed in their own futuristic, but strange and barren world.

When it comes to bizarre, 2055 has nothing on 1994 and “Flights into the Unknown,” a show produced for public-access television in Long Beach by Joe Hovard, a retired elementary school principal.

The guests of host Jack P. Wetherell have included a proponent of radionics, a form of “positive voodoo.” The idea of radionics is to take something from a person, such as a lock of hair or a fingernail clipping, and project healing energy over the object, Wetherell said. This energy would then benefit the person who donated the object.

Wetherell, 56, earns a living by preventing the buildup of mineral deposits in water cooling systems. He once published a technical paper, “Recent Developments in the Operation of Industrial Cooling Tower Systems with Zero Blowdown.”

But he’d rather talk about his handmade, jewel-encrusted magic wand or his Tarot cards illustrated with photographs of chromosomes. He tells listeners how he went into hock to convert his home into a giant energy matrix that amplifies the positive energy of crystals.

He sees his entry into cable television as something of a mission.

“I believe Earth is entering a higher vibration,” Wetherell said. “It may not seem so because of the dark that is coming out. But that dark is just the resistance. I want to contribute to an increase in knowledge of the universe to the mass consciousness.”

The show’s guests have included a channeler, an astrologer, a crystal dealer and a palm reader.

During a recent taping, Hovard had ample help from volunteer camera operators and technicians such as Bob Bush, a retired singer and dancer.

Bush has his own show but finds time to help other producers. And they assist him with “Bob’s World,” which usually features senior entertainers.

Long Beach Community Television is a little like a social club.

“The atheists work on the shows of the fundamentalists; the fundamentalists help with the shows of the atheists,” said Lillian Avalos, the director of Long Beach Community Television. Every producer has a secret or not-so-secret ambition. Several aspire to careers in public or network television. Some want to save souls or share vital truths.

Andrea Benson’s show, “The Story Lady,” lets her fulfill a simple ambition: being a grandma. Her grown daughters have no children, so every Tuesday at 5 p.m., the Long Beach herbal-remedy saleswoman hypothetically adopts an audience of television children.

She dons an old-fashioned wig and a matronly gown, and when the cameras roll, she starts reading children’s books. Recordings of classical music play in the background.

The camera work is simple. Sometimes it’s on Benson, sometimes on the page of the book, sometimes on studio props that accompany the story--a toy plane, a stuffed animal, a Christmas ornament.

Benson never does more than one take, even when she misreads words. If a story is running long, she’ll condense it on the fly, improvising her own tale to match the pictures on the pages as she turns them rapidly.

She gets most of her props at garage sales and never spends more than $2. Her wig cost a buck. She sprayed it with touches of silver.

No one knows how many viewers are actually watching all of this.

Wetherell, host of “Flights into the Unknown,” concedes: “I don’t watch TV at all. Once in a while I watch a football game.”

“I think I have four people who watch my show, maybe seven,” said Gloria McMillan, who produces a talk show in Long Beach. “There is no way to know.”

Nor do politicians know how many constituents are watching televised city council meetings. But many, taking no chances, started paying more attention to their clothes and manners.

“I became more conscious of what would look good on cable,” Whittier Councilman Allan P. Zolnekoff said. “There were recommendations from our city staff on what we should wear. Cable exaggerates blues and colors and you have to watch out for plaids and checkers, or black-and-white busy patterns that make you look like a used-car salesman on TV.

“It was nerve-racking because we weren’t just speaking to the five people in the audience and the press, but potentially thousands.”

Some of the councilman’s constituents were not nearly so shy. The public hearing portions of meetings began to get longer about the time the video cameras arrived.

“What’s really weird is that sometimes we’ll take a break in the middle of a public hearing and when we resume the hearing, there will be more people than before waiting to talk,” said Whittier councilwoman Helen McKenna-Rahder. “They saw us on television and rushed down to the meeting because they wanted to have their say.”

In Hawaiian Gardens, a resident walked up to the camera operators before he started speaking and ordered them to videotape him only on his good side.

Bellflower Councilman Ken Cleveland recently proposed pulling the plug on televised council meetings until after the April municipal elections. He said he was tired of incumbents, their challengers and gadflies who play to the camera, make lengthy speeches and drag the council meetings out until 2 a.m. Cleveland’s motion was voted down.

Grandstanding for the cameras often backfires, said Whittier’s Zolnekoff.

“What seems to work on TV is to get in and out and make your point. It tends to be tedious if a person goes on and on. And if you say something silly, it’s not only going to be broadcast live, but it’s going to be replayed three or four times.”

Those involved in public-access television believe they have an underrated product.

Recent noteworthy episodes of the Long Beach show “Graffiti” featured a Holocaust survivor discussing the movie “Schindler’s List” and a contingent of skinheads talking about their beliefs, said Peter Anninos, a professional production assistant who helps produce many Long Beach-based shows.

He said the treatment of the skinhead issue was more serious than that offered by the network talk show “Geraldo,” which degenerated into a fistfight involving the host, the skinheads and their critics.

“A lot of people have a lot of good things to say,” Anninos said of the public-access producers. “They give their time and they give of themselves. And they do it with no compensation. Very often, they succeed in providing a valuable community service.”

Rose Brown, freshly graduated from her production training in Lakewood, figures she’ll do a talk show that will include everything from movie reviews to advice on how to select the best fruits and vegetables.

But at present, she wouldn’t even be able to see her own show. “I don’t have cable,” she said. “I have to run and get it now.”

Community correspondent John D. Wagner contributed to this story.

Tuning In

Community channels in the Long Beach and Southeast areas:

PUBLIC ACCESS CITY GOVT. CITY CHANNEL NO. CHANNEL NO. CABLE COMPANY Artesia 3 3 Insight Cablevision Cerritos -- 3 Apollo Cablevision Compton 3 36 Continental Cablevision Downey 28 53 Continental Cablevision Hawaiian Gardens 1 47 Continental Cablevision La Habra Heights -- 3 Century Cablevision Lakewood 12 31 Colony Cable Long Beach 33 21 Long Beach Community Television Montebello -- 56 Crown Cable Norwalk 55 56 Crown Cable Pico Rivera 33 33 TCI Cablevision Signal Hill 33 51 Long Beach Community Television Whittier -- 6 Sammons Communications Unincorporated Whittier County Whittier 33 -- Community Television

Compiled by John D. Wagner