Reed Magazine: Humancasting (3/5)

On March 28, 1979, Reactor Two at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant suffered a partial meltdown. Spencer was living in Washington, D.C., producing environmental documentaries, and when he heard that a large anti-nuclear demonstration was planned at the U.S. Capitol, he and his colleagues realized the protest could be meaningful live television.

“I had read somewhere about a new satellite TV system at PBS,” Spencer recalls, “and a law that specified that any excess channel capacity on that satellite could be used by independent nonprofits. So we went in, plunked down our 501(c)(3) business card and asked for time to cover the demonstration. The guy said ‘OK, I guess you qualify,’ and all of a sudden we had the first national live TV broadcast not controlled by the networks.”

The protest drew thousands of people, including concerned celebrities and famous musicians. The live broadcast on PBS went off without a hitch and surprised everyone by garnering good ratings and national media attention.

“We lucked out,” Spencer says. “That launched my broadcast career—by chance, really. But we were the hot new thing, and we began producing live events for PBS.

It wasn’t long before he began pushing the form, and his luck held. On Thanksgiving Day in 1980 he was producing a live PBS special called America at Thanksgiving. The program, hosted by Art Buchwald, originated from six holiday dinners, ranging from a Midwest farm family to sharecroppers in the South, from a motorcycle gang gathering to an Air Force base mess hall. The plan was for Buchwald to interview each of these groups, but at one point the leader of the bikers started talking directly (the live feed meant they could see and hear each other) to one of the Air Force officers. Buchwald let them go, and soon the others joined in—and the first of Spencer’s groundbreaking and ether-spanning “spacebridges” was born.

“We hadn’t really thought that people would start talking two-way,” Spencer says with a quiet laugh, “but they did, and it was good stuff. Later I was making an edited version of the program with my future wife, Evelyn Messinger [they were married in 1983], and she said ‘This is amazing. Think what you could do with this! Imagine if you could link Russians and Americans’—this was when the cold war was still on—‘you could overcome political boundaries, get real people who are so-called enemies to talk.’ We envisioned a program and took it to PBS, but we couldn’t get them to fund us. They didn’t think it would work. But we wound up producing programs like that all through the 1980s.”

In 1982 Spencer and Messinger co-founded Internews, a nonprofit media production company. They spoke with Gosteleradio, then the official Soviet radio and TV committee, and proposed a two-way satellite link that would allow Soviet and American scientists to discuss the effects of nuclear winter. Through a combination of skilled negotiation—and the fact that the Soviets believed the three-person Internews was much bigger than it was—the program came together and produced landmark agreement on both sides: nuclear winter would ravage the planet. It drew a national audience in the U.S.

VIS À VIS was a series of two public television specials, each of which featured a one-on-one encounter between an American and a foreign counterpart via a high-speed digital video link. Over a four-day period, the participants explored each other’s lives, work and cultural differences through conversations and video diaries. VIS À VIS: BEYOND THE VEIL, chronicled an intense and moving series of conversations between two teachers, Deborah Whitely in the United States and Sima Daad in Iran. They saw each other and their video diaries on television sets, while they explored some of the profound differences which have kept their countries at odds for almost 20 years.

“Suddenly,” Spencer said in a 2001 online profile by Kaitlin Quistgaard, “we realized we were not just making TV, we were shaping the relationships between these two countries.”

By 1987 the relationship among Spencer, Messinger, and the Soviets was strong enough that Internews was able to coax members of the U.S. Congress and deputies of the Supreme Soviet to talk with each other live via satellite. Spencer co-produced the resulting series, Capital to Capital, with ABC News and won two Emmy Awards. Within two years, Spencer, a decade removed from making grassroots videos that he knew didn’t have a chance of being broadcast, was a senior producer for ABC News PrimeTime Live. Big budgets, big news stars, big stories—and after three years, big frustrations.