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Michael Shamberg (center)in 1972

TVTV (short for Top Value Television) was a pioneering video collective founded in the early 1970s by Michael Shamberg, (author of the "do-it-yourself" video production manual Guerrilla Television), Skip Blumberg and other "guerrilla video" makers, using then-revolutionary 1/2" Sony Portapak video equipment, and later embracing the 3/4" video format, to make a series of pioneering social documentaries such as Four More Years (1972), covering the Republican national convention of that year; The World's Largest TV Studio (1972), covering the Democratic national convention of the same year; Adland (1974), an examination of American commercial culture; and later TVTV Looks at the Oscars (1976); TVTV: Superbowl (1976), as well as The TVTV Show (1976), a television special co-produced with NBC television, The Bob Dylan Hard Rain Special (1976), another NBC co-production and Supervision (1976), a multipart PBS series about the birth of television and its cultural impact. Members of the group included Nancy Cain, Allen Rucker, Hudson Marquez, Michael Shamberg and Megan Williams, David Axelrod, Bill Murray, cinematographer Paul Goldsmith, actor and director Harold Ramis and Wendy Appel (aka Wendy Apple). In 1976, experimental filmmaker Wheeler Winston Dixon briefly joined the collective, editing most of the TVTV series Supervision, as well as the group's final effort The TVTV Show. Located in San Francisco during its most influential period, TVTV's many alumni went onto careers of their own with the disbanding of the group in 1979, after a move to Los Angeles that brought the group more into the orbit of conventional filmmaking. Bill Murray went on to become an international film star; Michael Shamberg a film producer, most notably with his company Jersey Films, in collaboration with Stacey Sher and Danny DeVito; Allen Rucker became a writer and author; Wheeler Winston Dixon became an author and university professor; Harold Ramis went on to a long career as a mainstream film director, writer and actor. One of the world's most influential video "communes," TVTV's influence is felt to this day on the many "guerrilla videos" on YouTube and other websites, as people now routinely use videography to get their message out to larger audiences.

• TVTV Bio at Electonic Arts Intermix
• TVTV Productions Available for Rental
• History of TVTV