A View of Student Life--and Death

It was another party-hearty Friday night in this one-square-mile stucco student ghetto. Kids were in the street. Hip-hop music was blaring. Alcohol was flooding brains and punching holes in the dams of modesty and caution.

Greg Shields and Sevan Matossian knew the scene well. For more than a year, they’d documented it on their cable access show, Isla Vista Television. A sometimes raunchy, always lively depiction of street fauna, IVTV was so popular that students from adjacent UC Santa Barbara packed Giovanni’s pizza parlor on Wednesday nights to tune in.

On this night in February, Matossian and Shields were ambling toward Del Playa Drive, the community’s main street, when they suddenly saw the smoke. Probably just another couch fire, thought Matossian. Burning couches are a common sight in IV and not worth filming. But remembering the documentarian’s prime directive--you never regret filming too much--Sevan switched on his camera.

For the next nine minutes, he recorded the aftermath of a bloody rampage that would claim as many lives as the Kent State shooting in 1970. Bodies lay in the street. Four people would ultimately die. The smoke came from a busted-up car that apparently caused the carnage. People ran through the street, shouting and slugging it out with the alleged driver, a troubled student named David Attias, whose father is television director Daniel Attias.

“It was a gnarly scene,” said Shields, 25. “It was hard to comprehend [that] it was real.”

The tragedy not only focused national attention on Isla Vista, it thrust into the limelight the two young filmmakers who record the weekend party scene. It also fed a lively debate here over whether they are historians of an important, if sometimes seedy, corner of American life or exploiters of it.

About one thing there’s no argument. It’s been an exhilarating and bumpy ride for the two young men who captured the footage of a lifetime. CNN bought their tape and repeatedly played its disturbing images nationwide. A Santa Monica production company is now negotiating to produce a national version of the show to be called UTV, University Television.

But the tragedy also scarred the filmmakers, a pair of skinny, earnest young men who are Mutt and Jeff different in height. They have had to weather complaints on campus and around Isla Vista that they sensationalized the tragedy and made money off it. Just as hard has been finding ways to live with the images they captured that night.

After it was all over, they went back to Shields’ apartment and collapsed numbly on the couch. “I felt like I was going to puke,” said Matossian.

Both men are former UC Santa Barbara students, and both are as much a part of the landscape they chart as the battered foreign cars parked everywhere. Shields, tall and rangy, works as a waiter. Matossian, who earns a living caring for disabled adults, lives in a 22-year-old Chevy camper with three Great Danes and $8,000 worth of video equipment.

They travel most places the way the students they film do--on foot or by bicycle.

And that, say advocates, is what makes them different from others who pretend to capture the lives of young people.

“What I like about them is they’re just real guys,” said Peter Hyoguchi, who is working with them on the UTV project. Unlike those who make MTV-type shows about youth culture, Matossian and Shields “are two of the kids.”

How much so is apparent at a glance. On a recent morning, Matossian was distressed to learn that the free clothes box had been removed. “That’s where I get all my clothes,” he fumed.

Dressed in a T-shirt, a faded pair of pants, ragged sandals and a blue watch cap, it was clear he wasn’t kidding.

These aren’t the trappings of the artists as roughhewn rebels but as paupers.

“Every bit of money I have goes into food or [video] equipment,” Matossian said.

Their search for the soul of IV evolved accidentally, according to Matossian, 25. A former film studies student, he bought a camera with money saved from his job and went into the streets to record whatever he found. “There was no vision behind it or thought of putting it on TV,” he said.

One night he met Shields, a biology graduate from Napa who had a talent for chat. They teamed up, with Shields working the mike and holding a small light in the other hand while Matossian manned the camera. The first episode of IVTV, in October 1999, grew out of a verbal exchange with police one night. Thinking he’d captured something worth showing others, he went to the local cable company and asked to put it on the air.

The next morning, Matossian got 200 e-mails, all saying virtually the same thing: The show stinks.

He wasn’t discouraged. “If we got 200 e-mails, it means a lot of people watched.”

Since then, IVTV has developed a devoted following. “It’s a popular show,” said Curtis Brainard, the managing editor of the campus paper, the Daily Nexus. “The majority of students sit down on Wednesday night to catch what happened the weekend before.”

Fifteen shows have aired so far locally. It also shows on cable access in Berkeley and Sacramento. IVTV’s purpose is stated bluntly at the beginning of each episode: to “record and display the unusual culture of Isla Vista . . . with raw authenticity.”

Typical scenes show Shields interviewing students about such things as what it takes to persuade a girl to get romantic. “It would be nice if once they were employed or had a vehicle of their own,” replied one girl.

Other scenes show a goat drinking a beer and a young man eating a noise violation ticket and washing it down with beer. Then there are the images of drunken coeds baring their breasts, a la cheesy late-night ads for videos of “Girls Gone Wild in Tahiti.”

That kind of material has drawn criticism both on and off campus. “A fairly sizable group feels it casts a negative shadow of what goes on in IV,” said Brainard.

“What they capture is people behaving the way they do because they’re in front of the camera,” said David Edelman, a spokesman for Cox Communications, which airs the show to 67,000 households from Carpinteria to Goleta.

‘Ethnographer of the Place in Which He Lives’

Edelman likes Shields and Matossian, but they’ve had several run-ins. Several weeks ago, Cox pulled an episode because it showed a simulated sex act.

“The content of the show looked at first glance to be obscene,” said Edelman. Although regulations allow cable companies to air indecent cable access material, it does not allow obscenity. In this case, after company lawyers in Atlanta reviewed the tape, it ultimately was aired.

Matossian said his goal is to show IV realistically, not to cater to prurient interests. “People often say you’re not depicting IV realistically,” Matossian said. “We thought about doing a show about cooking macaroni, but it wouldn’t hold attention.”

Janet Walker, associate professor of film studies at UC Santa Barbara, agrees. “I respect the work of Sevan Matossian,” she said. “He is an ethnographer of the place in which he lives.”

“If you want to see true young people on TV, these guys are delivering it,” said Hyoguchi.

The tragedy of Feb. 23 left a lasting impression. As Matossian filmed the carnage, he had to face the anger of some in the crowd who thought he was intruding. A policeman asked him to turn off the tape. Another man yelled at him, Walker said.

“Don’t you think this deserves to be documented?” he replied.

The next morning, police went to Matossian’s van to claim the tape, which he willingly turned over.

A preliminary hearing of the murder and manslaughter charges against Attias is scheduled June 28.

Matossian won’t say how much CNN paid for a copy of the tape. But in the days after it aired, the two men were deluged by media calls, beginning at 6 a.m. Even Geraldo called.

“We were asked to do a lot of TV interviews, which we didn’t do,” said Matossian.

Although CNN aired the tape many times in the days after the tragedy, only a small portion was broadcast. The full tape has been seen only once, in Walker’s documentary film class.

At first, students were resistant to inviting Matossian and Shields. Feelings were particularly strong in this class. Some students were friends of Attias. Others had friends among the victims.

Finally, the invitation was extended about two weeks after the tragedy, and Matossian appeared before 150 students. They asked why the tape was made. Why was it sold? Why didn’t the filmmakers turn off the camera and help people?

Walker said the students were not angry so much as they were probing motives as aspiring filmmakers themselves. Matossian saw it differently. “I felt hostility,” he said.

Matossian talked for an hour.

Then he played the tape. Walker was impressed. Rather than the chaos depicted on CNN, the entire tape conveyed a much different impression. “It didn’t dwell on mangled bodies,” she said. It was “an empty, desolate scene,” showing the faces of students in pain and of others helping their stricken friends.

“Sevan has been subjected to a lot of vile comments,” Walker said. But far from exploiting a community’s pain, she believes, the tape told a more profound story about people behaving compassionately in a tragedy.

Full Video Shown in Filmmaking Class

As for his being an intruder, she said, Matossian had earned the right to be there by spending hundreds of hours behind the lens. “If anyone had the right to film it, he did,” said Walker.

After the class was over, “30 to 40 people lined up to give us hugs,” said Matossian. Some cried.

“I feel like I went through something with Sevan and Greg and 150 students that I’ll never forget,” said Walker.

IVTV has officially gone on hiatus for the summer. Matossian said he’s not sure they’ll bring it back another year after everything that’s happened.

Both he and Shields still hope to turn their interest in film into a career. In the meantime, Matossian has saved some money. He could afford to rent an apartment, but then he couldn’t buy video equipment. He just bought a new Sony camera.

“If we could make a living doing this, it would be cool. Hopefully we won’t get stuck doing wedding videos,” said Matossian. Then he paused. “But if a family member needs us, we’ll do it.”