TV’s power directs life of ‘Recorder’
Truth is stranger, and often more interesting and entertaining, than fiction. Documentaries continually prove that adage and none more than “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project” on tonight’s “Independent Lens” (10 p.m., PBS, TV-14, check local listings).
To call its subject “eccentric” is correct, yet barely scratches the surface of a unique woman who straddled that line between informed archivist and obsessive hoarder. She was a fabulously wealthy millionaire to boot, and happened to be a brilliant black woman, born poor, orphaned and neglected.
Starting with the 1979 hostage crisis, Marion Stokes used fledgling VCR technology to record three decades of television, 24 hours a day, amassing more than 70,000 VHS 8-hour tapes.
A librarian by profession and a lifelong political radical, she was fixated on the power of getting down the truth and revealing ways that corporate-controlled media shaped the news and emotionally manipulated its audience.
It’s fascinating that she became obsessed with taping at the same time the new series “Nightline” would begin its coverage dedicated to the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-‘81. It was reported, not as a diplomatic story or a foreign policy event, but as “America held hostage,” involving its audience personally in what was purported to be a national humiliation. The show was instrumental in rousing (or inciting) a nation from a post-Vietnam reluctance to engage militarily abroad, to a jingoistic populous, out for redemption, revenge and blood.
The power of “Nightline” coverage was its singular focus on the hostage drama over hundreds of days. In the mid-1980s, hostage situations in Beirut lasted much longer, but unfolded without the “Nightline” spotlight.
Stokes’ collection also reflects her years as a Philadelphia activist and a producer for a local panel discussion TV show about politics, race relations and the way the media portrays, or ignores, the powerless.
It was there she met her second husband, a blue blood millionaire whose wealth introduced her to a new way of living, far from that of a former librarian,
blacklisted and fired for her Communist affiliation.
She in turn would make him wealthier still with her singular, near-maternal fixation on computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs and her insistence that they buy and hold Apple stock when it was selling for $7 a share.
The film is filled with interviews with her son and the children of her second husband, who all found her exacting and brusque, a perfectionist whose exactitude bordered on cruel. We also meet her interns, assistants and her British chauffeur, who were all counted upon to maintain her elaborate taping system, or suffer the consequences.
A film about a singularly strange woman who spent a lot of time thinking about the power of television, “Recorder” was directed
by Matt Wolf, whose film “Spaceship Earth,” about the Biosphere experiment, is now streaming on Hulu.
› Acorn begins streaming the second season of the Welsh detective series “Hidden,” a critical favorite in the U.K.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
› Dwayne Johnson hosts “The Titan Games” (8 p.m., NBC, TV-PG).
› Chaos consumes a high-rise fire on “9-1-1” (8 p.m., Fox, repeat, TV-14).
› Kaitlyn Bristowe looks back on “The Bachelor: The Greatest Seasons Ever” (8 p.m., ABC, TV-14).
› “Antiques Roadshow” (8 p.m., PBS, TV-G, check local listings) examines vintage treasures in Honolulu.