It’s
a long-time cliché of art history that kitsch eventually turns into a high art.
It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Victorian gingerbread was seen as
the disgusting affectation of a less enlightened time, and it was only in the
past 10 years that Anglo-American brutalist architecture has been reappropriated
as the signifier of a more optimistic era rather than just some gray concrete
shit. If we’re going to extrapolate further, it’s so easy to mistake age for
wisdom, and stupidity for prelapsarian virtue, that I always have to caution
myself against it, to put certain automatic skepticism triggers in place, lest I
be deceived.
But
if you have that crate-digger mentality, a desire to go through the archives
and find past ideas and expressions, you’ll always be tempted to find enlightenment
therein. It’s something I used to do a lot, in the hope that I could somehow
recontextualize and redo what I saw, to make my mind palace into a Joseph Cornell
box. Like most people, as I have aged, immediate and quotidian requirements have
taken precedence, and yet there will always be an allure in the grainy filmstrip,
the library book last checked out in 2003, the potshard.
And
in that context I recently watched 2004’s Public Access Hollywood
(available in its entirety here), and it was an opportunity to revisit
one such strange world, the legendary LA public access channels, widely
regarded as the best in the country, and the strange personalities who inhabit
it.
I’m
not sure how many people under the age of 30 have even watched public access,
but I’m sure many of them know the aesthetic of it – grainy video stock,
ill-fitting polyester, primitive digital effects, and general amateurism and
incoherence. Famously crappy, famously occasionally very weird programming
produced on non-budgets in local cable markets across America, a frequently
parodied (see any number of classic SNL sketches from Wayne’s World to Goth
Talk) format from a pre-Youtube era where the idea of any audiovisual
media beyond the family vacation video being homemade was novel. A clear
lineage to the two ferns that Zach Galifianakis sits between (by god, is even
that reference long-outdated?). Even by my day, public access was viewed as a
strange and quaint thing, something we found through early Youtube clips. The
last memory I have of even watching it on an actual tee vee was in my early
20s, in the margarita-and-marijuana haze between viewings of Project Runway
with my gay housemates.
The
first viral public access clip I remember was The Spirit of Truth, in
which a borderline street preacher randomly cites Bible passages without
quoting them from what looks like a telephone book while insulting callers,
against a backdrop of Yosemite while Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” plays.
Across America, his quotes were dropped in the same way Antwone Dodson’s would
be a decade later. He’s not in Public Access Hollywood – a little too
ephemeral.

So
who is in the documentary? The focus is on the mainstays, who, while perhaps,
less intense in their insanity, are their own variety of eccentric. There’s
David Liebe Hart’s Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Program,
starring his puppet Chip the Black Boy, with crack-is-wack messaging and songs
about helpful aliens. More intentionally weird, there’s Dan Kapelovitz and the
team behind Three Geniuses, slashing the media form of television to
bits, and commenting on the rebirth and “re-death” of psychedelia, a stage of
weirdo anti-humor somewhere in its evolution between Andy Kaufman and Devo
on one end and Gen Z Dada on the other. Or the bro version, Zuma Dogg shouting
shit on Sunset in his Oakleys and ‘90s condom beanie, a kind of demonic Ashton
Kutcher. For more informative content, there’s Dr. Susan Block’s sexual
education program, a cavalcade of bizarre proto-sex-positive theater, dressed
in vinyl and spanking her guests. Mediating it all, the sort of cultural
arbiter was Michael Devine of Hollywood and Devine, whose variety show
featuring the lovely freaks and weirdos of Los Angeles feels like a chopped and
screwed version of Letterman. And the one who garners the most screen time and
most pathos, there is Francine Dancer, chubby and dancing in her lingerie while
maintaining that she would never do something so classless as to dance nude, confined
to a wheelchair when she’s not dancing. No fixed address, much beloved within
her niche community but at best an absurdist artifact outside it.

I
think you get the idea. Cranks who interrupt municipal council meetings
worldwide, desperate souls, who, above all else, want other people to listen
and understand, pranksters and ironists in it for the lulz who could probably
cite Baudrillard and Debord off-camera, or at the very least Tony Wilson and
Malcolm McLaren, and the dreamers in rattrap apartments who still believe they
can make it in real Hollywood, despite their often-dire circumstances. This
studio was their home, and you kind of love it for them.
But
what the makers of Public Access Hollywood didn’t know was that in 2004,
they were already at the end of an era.
One
thing they acknowledge is that by that point, reality TV had already become an
institution. From its inception point in the late ‘90s, it had spread to become
the standard for the cable networks, deliciously cheap to produce and packed
with mass appeal. Like the public access stars, it provided an ostensibly
(adverb doing some heavy lifting there) authentic appeal, and a lurid
opportunity to see one’s fellow man at his ugliest and most depraved.
And
what they further probably couldn’t have anticipated was that the ecosystem of
public access television, one which claimed to bypass the gatekeepers of
audiovisual entertainment, was about to expand to the whole damn world with the
rise of Youtube (the irony being that that is the very platform where I watched
the documentary).
It
logically follows that this is something that the drive towards algorithmic
correctness inevitably destroys, not only preventing us the audience from
seeing the wilder and weirder side of things and trying to get us to watch
preapproved slop, but also incentivizing creators into producing things more
algo-friendly (with the occasional oddities like Elsagate videos representing a
genuine flaw in the system, fucked up as they are). Sure, previous forms of
media were beholden to a hooting and hollering public, but the algorithm seems
even worse.
Which
might be why, despite the similar hypothetical freedom, few of the public
access stars would find a home on this new platform. And beyond that more
coldly rational lack of economic incentive, there’s also a deluge of competing
content, rather than a particular zone of permitted bizarre. In a world where
everyone is a weirdo, and you can turn on or shut off their weird at will, it’s
irrelevant. But when you turn on the television and randomly flip to public
access, it’s something different entirely.
“I
miss TV… Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder
than the programs. I miss the phrases ‘Order before midnight tonight’ and ‘Save
up to fifty percent and more.’ I miss being told things were filmed before a
live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter
jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss ‘Sermonette’ and
‘Evensong’ and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s
transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at
something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in
front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to
airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’…
The
man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and
planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease
on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’
Orin’s
way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of
looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With
television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted.”
-
David Foster Wallace, The Book You Should Read Even Though People Will Call
You a Lit Bro
But
concomitant with the rise of Youtube was the rise of another media machine –
Adult Swim. Here, the aesthetics of public access, along with industrial video,
low-end public broadcasting, and every other ephemeral form of media from the
cable-and-VHS era would be recycled into the lysergic mandalas of Tim and Eric
et al. We could view the original vomit of the era on Youtube, and we could
view the avant-garde pisstakes on Adult Swim. Indeed, Heidecker, Wareheim, and
Co. had the wisdom and foresight to bring some of the LA public access idols to
the national stage. I’m guessing a lot of the readership will be more likely to
know David Liebe Hart in this capacity. All the food is poison. Keep your meat
ice-cold.
But
his story seems to be one of the few successes here, and even that success is
pretty circumscribed.
Maybe
they would have always been fated to obscurity, but maybe they could have been fortunate
enough to breach containment and find their improbable sliver of success. I’m
reminded of another LA icon, Angelyne, the bleach-blonde daughter of Polish
Holocaust survivors known more for her billboard poses – an early stab at
guerrilla marketing – than any of her purported entertainment talent. It would
be hard to imagine her transposed to today without a couple seasons on Bravo,
or at least a horny Twitch following.
Part
of the reason the documentary works in 2025 is that it plays at this historical
disconnect, and part of the reason it would have worked upon release 20 years
ago is that it plays on the very fundamental feels of the desperate attempts to
keep a dream alive. One of the oldest of LA cliches is that of a graveyard of aspirations,
a place where the ideology of individual merit runs headlong into bitter
reality. And every year, we hear new stories that reinforce the trope, whether
lasciviously documented for TMZ, or as the backstories for stalkers and mass
shooters.
I
put in some hours, but the fate of most of the performers in Public Access
Hollywood is difficult to suss out in casual searches. David Liebe Hart’s
latest credit involves Lloyd Kaufman of Troma / Toxic Avenger fame, so he’s
continuing to participate in weird media. Dan Kapelovitz still seems to be
invested in making fucked up shit, and for that he is to be saluted. The latest
project in his IMDB profile is 120 Days of Sodom… Literally, a cut-up of
Pasolini’s Salo with a 120 day runtime (feel free to watch it streaming,
it’s ongoing), and he seems to be pursuing a side passion for left-wing
electoral candidacy (seeing someone else tragically ahead of his time?). Zuma
Dogg still seems to be doing pranks in his sunglasses, to a tiny audience.
Susan Block simultaneously had a career as a sex therapist and regular on Real
Sex on HBO – raise your hand if you remember furtively watching that in the
basement, only to be deeply deeply disappointed – and still has the Susan Block
Institute, but the website looks like something from 1998, which seems awfully
appropriate for a woman seemingly designed for that very 1990s precise balance
of lewd, subversive sociosexual commentary. Michael Devine seems to have died
from cancer in 2006. And Francine Dancer is still out and about in Hollywood,
occasionally popping up on someone’s Instagram, still smiling.
But
all of that being said, I ran into quite a few dead ends. Whole swaths seem to
be likely dead media, and I doubt I could find much more than the minima I’ve
already found, unless I were to chase down moldering basement VHS collections
and chase the performers for follow-ups (something I’d totally do if I wasn’t
doing this whole thing on top of a full-time job plus freelance writing for
actual cash money). Honestly, more than anything else, I just wanted to find
signs of life, and maybe it was parasocial, maybe it was morbidly curious, but
I wanted confirmation that they were OK.
Maybe
I held hope because in their own way, these were truly the last bohemians,
scraping by on the fringes of Hollywood. They said fuck it, did their own
thing, on the public commons, with minimal regard as to market incentive. The
things that followed inevitably come off as moneymakers, aping authenticity as
part of their branding. Reality television, of course, or the monstrous
sponsored-content machine that Youtube has become. Even those weirdo Adult Swim
shows, as much as I love them, are shaped by the requirements of the
advertisers, and Tim and Eric’s legendary, absurdist late ‘00s Absolut ad
series were at the end of the day still Absolut ads.
So
what we get is real folk art from a lost world. And the documentary, 20 years
on, its cri de coeur.