Featuring Bill Murray, Hunter Thompson, Steven Spielberg, Lynn Swan, Goldie Hawn, Abbie Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and more, "TVTV: Video Revolutionaries" is a new documentary about Top Value Television (TVTV), a band of merry video makers who, from 1972 to 1977, took the then brand-new portable video camera and went out to document the world.
In those days, there were only three TV networks, using giant studio cameras, and no one had ever seen a portable camera stuck in their face, let alone one held by what Newsweek called "bra-less, blue-jeaned video freaks." Because the technology was so new, there were no rules about how to use it or what to make. So the new video journalists used it to make format-bending satirical shows about whatever interested them -- from the 1972 Republican Convention to an expose of a 15-year-old guru called "Lord of the Universe" to capturing the Steelers and Cowboys partying hard the night before Super Bowl X.
Directed by TVTV alum Paul Goldsmith, the film is like opening a treasure chest into the 1970s, filled with cultural and political events hosted by now-famous characters who were then just beginning their climb to iconic.