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| Vol. 24, No. 15 | February 16, 1999 |
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| Vol. 24, No. 15 | February 16, 1999 |
BY A. DUNLAP-SMITH
Eric Myerson is at Columbia for two reasons: its rigorous academic program and the City-reasons common to many of his peers. But unlike many of his peers, Myerson doesn't see Columbia's New York address as an opportunity to experience the excitement of living in one of the world's biggest and most exciting cities. From L.A., Myerson is already familiar with big, exciting cities. No, his reason for being here is much more specific. New York City fulfills a need.
"I have to be in a media capital," Myerson says, "I'd already done L.A., so this is where I had to be to pursue my interest."
Between "Bowzer in the House of Doom," video segments of a pet rat roaming in his parents' house that he shot at the age of eight, until "Pot of Gold," which won the Golden Gate Award in '98 from the San Francisco Film Society, Myerson has accumulated a list of honors and screenings for his video and film work that someone twice his age would be proud of. Yet, knowing that Columbia doesn't offer college-level courses that would allow him to shoot, he came to Morningside Heights anyway-for what he and increasing numbers of undergraduates who want to work behind cameras have found here is CTV.
Deep in Mudd
Somewhere at the end of a labyrinthine journey through Mudd, which station members half-joking say takes the uninitiated a compass and a topographical map to find, is the studio and control room of Columbia's completely student-run television station, CTV. The studio is an abandoned chemistry lab; its sinks and stone counters running along the far wall. A handmade wrack holds the station's cables and wires. A few large theatre lights covered by blue and orange gels hang from a metal beam, pointing into a corner where a drum kit is set up in front of a large black dropcloth.
The control room, separated from the studio by a more-or-less sound-proofed wall punctuated with a rectangular window, is a museum to the information age. Audio-visual equipment, from a '70s vintage Commodore video monitor to a couple of up-to-date 1/2" editing systems, is clustered along the walls of the narrow space-a brief history of consumer electronics.
As a whole the scene is surprisingly spare. Yet here is where some 100 members of this student club perform some remarkable work. Here College senior Brian Lenard and a couple of friends tape "Blood, Breasts & Beasts," his B-movie review show. "Furnald," the campus soap opera, a series that CTV station manager Brendan Colthurst (C'00) estimates has as many as 100 people working on it, is mastered here. So is the station's longest-running series, "The Not-So-Late Show," a funny variety program with a popular sidekick called Omar, and "Sensitive Zones," a call-in show devoted to the discussion of sex and related topics. The station also puts on the fall's Lit. Hum. review, which provides it the chance to sell some advertising time to the campus bookstore, for example, to augment their budget as well as to benefit the student body.
CTV now produces 15 programs, in fact, which air on cable station 12. These show between 8 p.m. and midnight, Monday through Thursday to a closed circuit audience in eight Columbia dorms. CTV board members Colthurst and Noah Davis (CC'99), last year's station manager, claim that no other college station produces as many programs, and this despite the station's $9,000 budget. (In comparison, the CTV managers say some university television station have annual budgets of $200,000.
"It takes an incredible amount of money to get even a college-level broadcast to look just amateurish," Davis says.
CTVers are justifiably proud of their ability to make the most out of what they have, and it hasn't gone unnoticed. At the November '97 National Association of College Broadcasters conference in Providence, Rhode Island, the station came away with two awards. "The Not-So-Late Show" won for best comedy series, and "Grass Roots" took the top prize for best music video program. No other college station in the country won twice.
The station was honored in another way last October when Brazil's Cruzeiro do Sul University sponsored Colthurst and Davis at its three-day conference in São Paulo on the state of university TV in the Americas. Colthurst and Davis, as the sole North Americans there, spoke about the workings of a collegiate station in the U.S. to a large live audience of Latin American TV producers and executives and a potential television audience of some 10 million.
At home, the chemistry department asked the station to produce a commemorative video for Havemeyer Hall's centennial, which it completed last fall. And the development office at music video giant MTV requested tapes of "CTV Hockey," a video game called by color and play-by-play announcers, for a possible deal. Opportunistic managers at Columbia also hope to pique MTV's interest in the comedies "Repo Man" and "The Not-So-Late Show" by slipping copies of those programs along with "CTV Hockey" in the packets sent downtown.
As for interest in the station among Columbia students, it is piqued. The fall recruitment meeting at the studio in Mudd was for the first time held to a standing-room audience of an estimated 60-70 undergraduates. The CTV managers report that the station's video and sound equipment is fully booked. Among their worries now is how to answer the rising demand of increasingly video and film-savvy students like Myerson who want to produce and to watch the station's programming.
Help is already arriving on campus in the form of a larger studio in Lerner Hall that will connect directly to the new student center's main auditorium, simplifying the broadcast of events there. It's also coming with the University's recent switch of cable operators, sparking the hope that all dorms at Columbia and Barnard may one day soon receive CTV programming.
"The station is an incredible resource with so much potential to benefit Columbia," Colthurst says. "[CTV] would love to broadcast Columbia football and basketball games and CCSC meetings and provide campus and community news, which could help build school unity and even be a marketing benefit to the University."
Lofty as those aspirations are, guided by the kind of talented and ambitious students who have brought the station this far, it may not be long before the whole campus is asking, Where's my CTV?