(3.03.10) JUST ADDED: Dosa Truck will be at Cinefamily from 6pm-on!

The original guerrilla TV pioneers return! See Lily Tomlin, Bill Murray, Steven Spielberg, Abbie Hoffman and a host of other personalities as the TVTV guys invade the 1975 Academy Awards, the Superbowl, presidential conventions and anywhere else they can bring their radical comedy. Join us for a one night only show of rare footage with the original members in person…

March 4, 8:00pm

A Night With TVTV
Co-presented by Arthur Magazine
Buy advance tickets here: $12

Before The Daily Show sent their “reporters” out into the world for satirical newscoverage, before Christopher Guest and This is Spinal Tap utilized cinema verité’s natural deadpan to devastating comic effect, and before American Movie and Heavy Metal Parking Lot popularized the comic documentary form—there was TVTV. Radical, hilarious and influential, “Top Value Television” was an ad hoc collective of documentarians whose pioneering use of portable, low-tech video gear allowed them unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to everything from presidential conventions to the Super Bowl.

Their philosophy,articulated in co-founding member Michael Shamberg’s 1971 manifesto Guerrilla Television (wikipedia, Amazon), was to “demonstrate the potential of decentralized video technology” as a means to break free from the ideological stranglehold broadcast technology had on American culture—forecasting the media free-for-all that’s rapidly becoming our day-to-day lives.

Tonight, the Cinefamily, Cinema Eye and Arthur Magazine celebrate the TVTV spirit, and the top-notch documentary filmmaking they produced, with a panel discussion/reunion of TVTV members, a video “primer” of past works, and a screening of Lord Of The Universe, an expose of 16-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji and “Millennium ’73,” a three-day national gathering of his followers at the Houston Astrodome.

This evening marks the first time that all principal members of TVTV have been reunited at a retrospective event—do not miss it!

Buy advance tickets here: $12