The winning segment, "Silent Passion," which first aired on TV30 last August, featured local film historian Bruce Lawton and the program's four regular panelists, area residents Robert Brown, Marilyn Campbell, Janet Stern, and Carol Welsch. The show explored Lawton's work as a motion picture archivist and consultant specializing in film restoration and preservation. He has helped to restore such silent classics as Charles Chaplin's The Gold Rush and Buster Keaton's The Cameraman. He also presents silent film comedy at the New-York Historical Society on a regular basis and will be teaching film history at the New School this summer.
This is the second year in a row that a program originating at TV30 has been honored by the Hometown Video Festival. Last year the Arts Council of Princeton's Cafe Improv won in the performing arts category. TV30 is a volunteer organization that enables residents to create video productions and televise them on Channel 30A of the RCN cable system. Its programming includes local news and sports events, public lectures, music concerts, live talk shows, original TV dramas, and other topics of interest to the community. The public access station is overseen by the Joint Princeton Cable Television Committee and has its studios in the Arts Council building.
Besides appearing on Princeton's TV30, A Fistful of Popcorn is also carried by RCN's Channel 8, WZBN Channel 25 in Hamilton, Princeton University's campus cable network, and Cambridge (Mass.) Community Television (TV10). The program's regular starting time on TV30 is 8 p.m. Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. The award-winning segments will be rerun daily during the week of May 23-29: "Silent Passion" at 4 and 9 p.m., and Cafe Improv at 2 and 10:30 p.m.
A Fistful of Popcorn traces its start to a party about four years ago attended by most of the present participants, who remarked that whenever they got together what they talked about most was the movies they had just seen. The Creesys, who had recently taken TV30's production course, suggested to the group that they share their cinematic insights with the community via public access television. They have been doing so every two weeks since. The focus is on movies appearing in the Princeton area or videos available at local rental outlets. The aim is to go beyond thumbs up or down judgments and to explore the films in depth, with reference to related movies, literature, history, and culture.
In the beginning, all but one of the participants were on the staff of Princeton University Press. Today only co-producer Chuck Creesy remains with the Press, where he serves as Director of Computing and Publishing Technologies. He was Editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly from 1975 to 1987. Co-producer Gretchen Oberfranc Creesy was recently named Editor of the Princeton University Library Chronicle. Of the show's present reviewers, Robert Brown is Assistant Vice President, Marketing Communications, BFS, Merrill Lynch; Marilyn Campbell is Director of the Prepress Department at Rutgers University Press; Janet Stern is Director of Programming for the Arts Council of Princeton; and Carol Welsch is an attorney with the State of New Jersey.
The Alliance for Community Media is a national, nonprofit membership organization committed to promoting public access to electronic media. It represents access centers and local producers who create over a million hours of TV programming each year. The Hometown Festival is local cable television's largest and most prestigious video competition. This year it had 1,681 entries from 44 states and Canadian provinces.