COVER STORY : Commercial Appeal : Public-Access TV Was Born as a Marketplace of Ideas. But 25 Years Later, It’s More Marketing Than Philosophy.

On one channel, two women bare their tattoos for a captivated talk-show host. On another, an out-of-work twentysomething moons a South Bay mayor. Flip on down the dial, and a chiropractor peddles a sure-fire cure for whiplash.

A trash-TV nightmare? Nope. Such fare is probably available on your tube right now. And it’s not coming from Geraldo Rivera and Montel Williams, but from your next-door neighbors. The shoulder of the “information superhighway,” it turns out, is dotted with the billboards and Burma Shave signs of public-access cable TV.

Billed 25 years ago as an “electronic soapbox” that would put mass media in the hands of the masses and invigorate democracy, public access has become something not quite as heady: A latter-day Schwab’s drugstore for aspiring talk-show hosts, “Wayne’s World” wanna-bes and hawking hairdressers.

In recent years, the strictly non-commercial world of public-access TV has proven susceptible to creeping commercialism, especially in entertainment-savvy Southern California. And while the medium has long been ridiculed for its self-indulgent content and amateur productions, community programming is getting a bit more sophisticated.

There is Terry Anfuso, a fitness instructor from Rolling Hills Estates who hopes to join the growing ranks of talk-show hosts such as Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue. Her half-hour show, “Terry’s Topics,” has aired for four years on various public-access channels in the South Bay and Westside while Anfuso has tried to cross over to network TV or syndication.

“They say people want to watch the sensational things,” said Anfuso, whose show has tackled such issues as belly-dancing, female boxing and celebrity look-alikes. “I would like to make it big; to do the show big-time.”

In true Oprah style, Anfuso recently booked two young women with tattoos and body piercings. During a Tuesday night taping at a studio in Rolling Hills Estates, she gingerly queried the women as they revealed tattoos of animals and flowers on their backs and legs. “Did getting your nipple pierced hurt?” Anfuso asks. (Yes.) “Will a suntan fade the tattoos?” (Yes, again.)

Meanwhile, Anfuso’s director, Edd Linskey, gave instructions to three amateur cameramen from a small control room. “Focus, (camera) three, focus,” he says into the microphone. “No, no . . . don’t cut off her head. Higher.”

Linskey, who has done production work on Hollywood TV shows and now works full time at Dimension Cable in Rolling Hills Estates, acknowledges that some hope public access will be a springboard to something better.

“Terry’s trying to find her niche,” he said during a break in taping. “She definitely would like to go national. That’s been her dream for a long time.”

Others are even bolder about using public access as a public-relations tool. Entrepreneurs have used the medium to run barely disguised infomercials for chiropractic, hairstyling and dentistry services.

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The Los Angeles County Chiropractic Society, a trade association, uses public-access facilities throughout the metropolitan area to produce the series “Chiropractic Today and Beyond,” featuring member doctors. At the end of each show, viewers are advised to call an 800-number to get more information. Callers are then referred to a practitioner in their area.

For such users, the chief advantage to public access is that it costs nothing. In most cases, even the training and materials are free. The tab is picked up by cable companies, who collect their revenue from--you guessed it--their customers.

Public-access channels are governed by franchise agreements between cable companies and each city or town. Most communities require users and producers to get training, but otherwise they take a hands-off approach to production and distribution of videotapes. The lack of oversight has made it easier for users to edge closer to commercialization.

In most communities, as long as a program is not explicitly obscene or commercial, public-access administrators must air it unedited. Censoring a program, administrators say, would violate cable franchise agreements and the 1st Amendment, though some programmers admit they practice a form of censorship by putting undesirable shows on very late at night.

Public-access promotion is “really a gray area,” said Patty King, production supervisor at MultiVision Cable, which serves Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach. “Some people are not aware of the freedom on public access. Others are, and they’ll take advantage of it . . .. If you’re slick about it, you can get away with it.”

Of course, not everyone who uses public access has a product to plug or a career to advance. Skip E. Lowe is a retired stand-up comic who uses a Beverly Hills facility to produce a talk show with aging stars such as Shelley Winters, Stella Stevens and Virginia O’Brien. He has been doing the show for 14 years with no compensation other than his own self-fulfillment.

“Why do I do it? I like to keep myself busy,” Lowe said. “I’m enjoying what I’m doing, even though I’m not getting paid for it.”

Lowe said he spends 30 to 40 hours a week working on his show, mostly lining up guests and sending tapes to various public-access channels in Southern California, New York and elsewhere. He often arranges guest appearances by going to Hollywood parties and chatting up celebrities who have seen his show.

“I’m basically a one-man operation,” Lowe said. “I’ve had many people try to syndicate, but they want me to sign everything over to them, and I can’t do that. I work too hard on this for that.”

Other, less-devoted amateurs simply appreciate the chance to blow off steam on camera. While experts say off-the-cuff programming rarely makes for good TV, it does match the original intention of public access.

Jeff Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, recalls an area public-access show on which the host expressed disappointment that few people read books anymore. “So he used to sit in the studio and read a book. But not out loud,” Cole said.

“To me, that’s most of public access--cheap, easy, sort of odd,” he said.

Public access “gives each and every citizen the opportunity to express ideas through mass communications,” said Michael Smith, Torrance cable-television administrator. “It’s free speech. We’re operating the facility content-neutral.”

Yet that approach is precisely what enables some users to bend the system for personal gain. Because programmers have severely limited power to censor, creative producers can beam a pitch to a large TV audience.

This, however, is not how cable companies pitched public access in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Early operators were eager to negotiate franchise agreements with sometimes reluctant cities and towns. So to sweeten the pot, the companies agreed to devote one or more channels to public, educational or government (PEG) access, with no cost to the user.

Communities often use government-access channels to air city council meetings and local promotional pieces. In Hawthorne, for example, Mayor Larry Guidi hosts a government-access show, “A Taste of Hawthorne,” featuring local restaurants. Some communities separate government and public access on different channels, some don’t.

“The idea was that cable companies would compensate the city for the use of the taxpayers’ (electronic) right of way,” said Susan Herman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Telecommunication. “The companies would provide public-benefit services, like free (hook-ups) for schools, hospitals and so on. They would also provide access for governments and the public.”

Unlike network broadcasters, public-access channels are governed not by the media companies or the Federal Communications Commission but by franchise agreements with each town. The resulting lack of broad oversight has made it easier for ingenious users to edge closer to commercialization.

Cole, the UCLA professor, reports that the selling of public access happens more often in the Los Angeles area, mainly because it is the home of major entertainment companies. Users will produce a tape in a facility near their homes--the Torrance studio, for example--and then “bicycle” or export the tape to towns where it stands a chance of being seen by a channel-surfing media executive.

This is the type of opportunity that Torrance resident and UCLA graduate Brian Ormsby relishes. Ormsby, 24, and his housemate, Brad Dodge, 25, are the hosts of “Too Much Free Time,” an hourlong talk and variety show bicycled all over the South Bay, Westside and San Fernando Valley. They estimate their potential audience is 670,000 households.

Ormsby said that “Too Much Free Time” trades on the trend toward “real-life TV” pioneered by such shows as MTV’s “Real World” and popularized by the fictional “Wayne’s World.” Political correctness is evidently shelved during taping. One show featured a chat with lesbian strippers. Another featured Ormsby saluting outgoing Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert by dropping his trousers and baring his backside for the camera.

But it’s not just a post-college prank. Ormsby said he would like to take the program national and is looking for sponsors--a ploy which, if effective, would bar the program’s distribution on public access.

“We’re hoping to make it big and make a lot of money,” said Ormsby, who says he lost his job at a car-rental company last year after a manager saw the show, found it offensive and told him to stop doing it. He refused and now is unemployed. Dodge is a waiter.

“We’re trying to syndicate the program ourselves,” Ormsby said.

Yet many question whether public access is seen by enough people to be an effective crossover tool. Even the free-advertising benefit is overrated, some say, because viewers skip over public-access stations.

“Nobody watches public access, because a lot of the programs are not well done and are rather boring,” said Torrance resident Steven Morris, who produced an eight-part lecture series promoting atheism.

Some programmers disagree, however, arguing that public access will become even more important as cable companies offer hundreds of channels and desperately seek all kinds of programming, whether they are amateur, professional or somewhere in between.

Herman, Los Angeles’ chief spokeswoman on cable issues, points out that the 14 franchise areas served by her department cover most of the county and reach 520,000 households. The public-access facilities churn out an average of 720 original half-hour shows every month, Herman said.

The question isn’t whether public access is being used, but how. Even its staunchest supporters admit that the direction the medium has taken over the years isn’t exactly what its inventors had in mind.

“Public access,” said UCLA’s Cole, “is an extraordinary resource that hasn’t been used very effectively. That doesn’t argue against it. It’s there to be used, stupidly or effectively.”

On the Cover

Torrance resident Brad Dodge, 25, left, and his housemate, Brian Ormsby, 24, are the hosts of “Too Much Free Time,” an hourlong talk and variety show that is filmed free at the Torrance public-access channel and exported throughout the South Bay, the Westside and the San Fernando Valley. The duo, like many others with shows on public access, hope to make it to commercial television some day.

South Bay Public-Access Channels

CITY CHANNEL CABLE SYSTEM Carson 26 Continental El Segundo 59 Paragon Gardena 22 Paragon Harbor City (L.A.) 41 Copley-Colony Harbor Gateway (L.A.) 41 Copley-Colony Hawthorne 59 Paragon Hermosa Beach 3 MultiVision Lawndale 59 Paragon Lomita 41 Copley-Colony Manhattan Beach 3 MultiVision Palos Verdes Estates 33 Dimension Rancho Palos Verdes 33 Dimension Redondo Beach 8 Century Rolling Hills 33 Dimension Rolling Hills Estates 33 Dimension San Pedro (L.A.) 33 Dimension Torrance 59 Paragon Wilmington (L.A.) 41 Copley-Colony