WATCHING a taping of A Fistful of Popcorn from behind the light stands, monitors and video cameras positioned around its living room set is like nonchalantly attempting to overhear an animated conversation from across the room.
   A fireplace, Oriental rug and floor-to-ceiling bookcase double as props. The panelists banter back and forth across the coffee table, and except for the early hour of this Saturday morning taping and the caffeinated beverages in the place of cocktails, it could just as easily be a dinner get-together.

Above, producers Chuck and Gretchen Creesy look over a camera before last Saturday's taping of A Fistful of Popcorn at their Princeton home. Staff photo by Frank Wojciechowski

   "This is a show where we sit and talk about films as you would if you were at a party," says Janet Stern, one of the four panelists on this public-access movie review program taped at the Princeton home of its producers, Chuck and Gretchen Creesy, and aired on TV30 in town. In fact, in some ways the hour-long show is more entertaining if you've already seen the movies being previewed, instead of the other way around.
   Before the Creesys give the signal to start, Ms. Stern and the other regulars, Robert Brown, Marilyn Campbell and Carol Welsch, do a last-minute check of which person is discussing which film, and glance at their printouts from movie Web sites, but there isn't a single script in sight. All four on-air personalities contend "spontaneity" is the straw that stirs the drink and are wary of rehearsing or plotting out too much.
   "In 90 shows, we've never had a moment where someone had nothing to say," says Ms. Stern.
   In fact, the only scripted part is the opening, when the moderator, for this episode Ms. Campbell, literally grabs "a fistful of popcorn" to begin the show. Following a brief introduction, each of the other panelists give a plot synopsis for one of the three films being de-constructed this time — Under the Sand, With a Friend Like Harry and The Circle.
   When the show moves to discussing the relative merits of each film in detail, the repartee between the four is polished and seemingly effortless. With the exception of a brief "Who's on first?" stop-and-start midway through the taping, the entire hour comes off without a hitch.
   On camera, it's a casual party vibe, but behind it, the Creesys — the producers, directors and camera operators — are focused, headsets on, maneuvering the cameras back and forth, panning in and out. After three-and-a-half years of creating a new episode every other week, they have it perfected to a science — all the way down to the fresh bowl of popcorn on the table.
   It's this combination of comfort and concentration that helped A Fistful of Popcorn win the award for "best entertainment talk show by nonprofessionals" on public-access TV in the 2001 Hometown Video Festival sponsored by the Alliance for Community Media. The Creesys will be recognized at the festival's awards ceremony July 12 in Washington, D.C., for their winning segment, "Silent Passion," an August 2000 show featuring film historian Bruce Lawton.
   In addition to airing on TV30, the show runs on RCN's Channel 8, WZBN Channel 25 in Hamilton, and during the school year, on the Princeton University campus cable network. Because theme music writer David Stern (Ms. Stern's brother) lives in Cambridge, Mass., A Fistful of Popcorn appears on Cambridge Community TV10, part of a cable system with more than 100,000 subscribers.

Above, moderator Marilyn Campbell and the all-important bowl of popcorn. Staff photo by Frank Wojciechowski

   THE SHOW HAS COME A LONG WAY since its creators, both with extensive experience working with the printed word, first entered the TV world about four years ago, just as the mostly volunteer TV30 was getting off the ground.
   "We saw an advertisement that TV30 was going to give production classes," says Gretchen Creesy. "We signed up and we were accepted into the class, and the idea was that if you took the class, you were supposed to make a show."
   After honing their camera and editing skills by filming various events around town, the couple decided in January 1998 to create some content of their own. They immediately thought of their frequent film conversations at parties with their colleagues from the Princeton University Press, where both were employed at the time.
   "At any party where all of us got together," says Ms. Creesy, "we would end up talking about movies. It just seemed to us that a movie review show would be a somewhat easy thing to do and also interesting."
   In January 1998, after some arm-twisting, they enlisted Mr. Brown, Ms. Campbell, Ms. Stern and Michelle McKenna (who left the show two years ago), all then PUP employees with the exception of Ms. Campbell, a former PUP employee.
   The trick, says Chuck Creesy, the former editor of Princeton Alumni Weekly and the only one still employed by PUP (as director of computing and publishing technologies), was finding a way to package pop culture for an academic audience.
   "You're dealing with a community where many people don't want to admit they watch TV," says Mr. Creesy, "so you want a popular subject but you want to tackle it with some intellectual depth to appeal to the academic nature (of Princeton)."
   The four panelists tend to stick to "independent films" favored by the Princeton Garden Theater and the Montgomery Cinemas, and discussions include dollops of literature, history and political science. Ms. Campbell is the film historian, and Ms. Stern also provides an encyclopedic film knowledge of her own, while Mr. Brown is the show's resident Web expert and fountain of knowledge, and Ms. Welsch offers a "woman-on-the-street" perspective.
   In this episode, the asides range from a parent's perspective on a lead character's behavior toward children in With a Friend Like Harry to a discussion on how the theocracy in Iran affects that country's film industry, and banned-in-Iran films like The Circle. It's worlds away from the typical "Two thumbs up" movie reviews.
   Just as the four hosts hardly ever agree on a movie's virtues and vices, in the beginning, getting the show's two-person production staff to work smoothly with one another was a challenge — one the Creesys seem to have solved.

From left, panelists Carol Welsch, Janet Stern and Robert Brown on the couch in the living room set of A Fistful of Popcorn. Staff photo by Frank Wojciechowski

   "What makes it work is that we take turns doing the editing," says Ms. Creesy, who was recently named editor of the Princeton University Library Chronicle. "We originally started out doing it together, and then we'd argue about what we were doing, so it works so much better when we trade off."
   Following the six-hour taping process for each episode — two hours to set up, two hours to shoot, two hours to clean it all up — it's on to the editing process, which takes a minimum of 12 hours, or one hour per five minutes of finished tape. This makes for a lot of nights and weekends holed away in the TV30 studios at the Arts Council building on Witherspoon Street.
   Because of his proficiency with the Internet, Mr. Creesy uses his high-bandwidth connection to gather high-quality movie footage from studio Web sites to splice into the show — although sometimes a studio will provide a preview copy or he'll just borrow footage from a TV show like Charlie Rose. "In some ways, putting together the illustrations is the most fun aspect," he says.
   Mr. Creesy hopes to one day make A Fistful of Popcorn available to the world — and to his mother in Washington State — via the Web, and to get the show on other public-access stations in Central Jersey.
   Still, the couple is surprised by how involved they've become.
   "This has sort of taken on a life of its own," says Ms. Creesy. "I don't think we ever expected to be doing this for four years, but the plan was that we'd get it established and turn it over to somebody else."
   Unfortunately, few volunteers have the Creesys' zeal. Despite the show's demands, and their own movie-watching addictions, the couple is discussing creating a local TV news magazine, says Mr. Creesy, who is also on the board of the Joint Princeton Cable Television Committee. In line with his desire to spend his retirement as a documentary filmmaker, the couple has been doing documentary work on the side for the Howell Living History Farm in Titusville.
   "It's true that we don't do a lot of things we'd otherwise do," says Ms. Creesy, "like working in the yard, which I would do, or just going out on little day trips or something like that..."
   "And we don't go into New York as much as we used to," adds Mr. Creesy.
   "This is what we do for fun," his wife jokes.
   After the taping, the panelists bounce around ideas for movies to review for the next program, eventually settling on Sexy Beast, a thriller starring Ben Kingsley, and despite a seemingly unanimous distaste for Steven Spielberg, A.I.
   All the while, the Creesys weave in and out, pulling up the crisscrossing cords from the rug and packing away the video cameras for another day.

A Fistful of Popcorn airs on TV30 in Princeton Mon., Thurs. and Sat. 8 p.m. Episode 90, featuring Under the Sand, With a Friend Like Harry and The Circle, will air the week of July 15.