TV Museum Finds Niche

The Museum of Television & Radio suffered from some growing pains during its first two years in its palatial West Coast home in Beverly Hills.

Until the museum opened, most Angelenos knew only that the museum would host an annual festival.

“It was different coming here once a year doing a TV festival and being here on an ongoing basis,” said President Robert Batscha. It took awhile, he said, to educate people on all the museum has to offer. “It is now part of the community,” he said.

A month from its third anniversary, Batscha said the museum is “really on a roll now.”

People are discovering that it’s the place to go for screenings of such diverse vintage fare as the current Woody Allen on television exhibition and the recent presentation of the 1957 musical “Cinderella.”

“They are also discovering that it is a place to go for seminars,” Batscha said. “The seminars are now about 85% sold-out.”

Batscha estimated that the museum has 4,000 to 5,000 members. At this point, the museum doesn’t actively solicit members.

“We are finding, as a lot of organizations are, that direct mail doesn’t really work anymore. But we are finding that attendance is up this year over 20% over the last year and that is growing.”

Screenings of the Rat Pack concert, “Cinderella” and the Woody Allen exhibition have done particularly well for the museum. The institution’s programming geared for children and families is also catching on.

“The difficulty with the museum is that we can attract everybody, [but] nobody has that kind of budget [to reach everybody],” he said. “So we are sort of focusing on attracting an audience that is slightly more inclined to see this kind of material. They tend to be a little bit younger, more educated.”

The museum is holding its 16th annual William S. Paley Television Festival, which on Tuesday kicked off a two-week stint at the Directors Guild Theatre.

The festival fare ranges from a 1962 British TV concert by Frank Sinatra to a salute to Carl Reiner and “The Twilight Zone.” It also celebrates such current hits as “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “NewsRadio,” “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and “Felicity.”

The festival began in L.A. before the museum was built. Batscha said the museum has continued to hold the festival because “television should have a festival. It should have a place for a concentrated period of time where excellence is shown and the creative community has a festival environment and the opportunity to interact with an audience.”

The festival also has a spirit all its own. “What amazes me is that in its 16th year, many people look forward for it to come and anticipate it and see it as a very special event, which is indeed what we try to sustain.”

The creative community also enjoys participating and interacting with the fans. “I think people are a little put out when we don’t ask them right away,” Batscha said. “It’s an honor to be selected. They sort of appreciate that it isn’t a competition.”

Although the festival initially stressed dramas and specials from the Golden Age of television, Batscha said the event hasn’t really changed much over the last 16 years. This year the festival will also revisit previous festival favorites, “L.A. Law” and “thirtysomething.”

“We felt that . . . there comes a time when it is worthwhile bringing [shows] back as a reunion and a looking at the show again,” Batscha said. “I think you are going to see a lot more of that over the years. Even if the shows were in the festival 10 years ago, they continue to have a life and meaning in the history of television.”