Money Marathon Taking Its Toll on PBS Producers

You’re an independent producer with a terrific idea for a public TV program or series.

You submit your proposal to PBS.

PBS loves it.

PBS agrees to put it on the air.

One catch: This brilliant project of yours, the one that will bring you fame, praise and creative fulfillment? You have to raise the money to make it.

Why? This is not rich commercial TV, which underwrites the budgets of projects that get approved. This is the cockeyed, cash-poor world of public TV, where the primary burden of fund-raising is almost always on the producer.

“It builds strong minds and strong bodies,” Gail Christian, PBS director of news and special projects, said from her Washington office.

It also builds frustration. That’s true whether the person knocking on doors for money is an obscure neophyte or a name producer with a glittering reputation.

Ask acclaimed documentarian Frederick Wiseman, who has publicly complained how hard it is to get even his programs on PBS because of money problems.

Ask journalist-film maker Stanley Karnow, who says that about half the seven years he spent on his celebrated PBS series “Vietnam: A Television History” went to fund-raising and that he and executive producer Drew Pearson spent two years seeking money to finance their fine documentary, “The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image,” which aired recently on PBS.

How many others will have “the stamina to attempt such ventures?” Karnow wonders.

“Pearson and I made the sacrifice for a variety of reasons,” he said recently. “But will talented young film makers do the same? I doubt it. Indeed, I’m not sure I want to run another PBS marathon.”

Still on his first lap is Jonathan Kwitny, former ace investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who is out stumping for dollars to save “The Kwitny Report,” his refreshingly bold and hard-edged weekly half hour (2:30 p.m. Saturdays on KCET Channel 28) that is unlike any other program on TV.

Despite that--perhaps even because of that--it’s in trouble.

“The Kwitny Report” will leave the national PBS network after June 17 (but it will continue on Channel 28, where it began this year on a 13-week delay), a casualty of cancellation by its PBS sponsoring station. After airing and underwriting “The Kwitny Report” for three years, New York public TV station WNYC recently decided to bow out.

That decision jeopardizes a series termed “exemplary” by Christian.

“What’s particularly valuable about Kwitny is the investigative nature of the program,” the PBS executive said. “We have discussion and analysis programs, but we don’t have another program that tries to break a story.”

“The Kwitny Report” usually opens with a videotape package that is followed by a panel discussion. It is unslick, unscrubbed and inelegant, reflecting its small budget and Kwitny’s inexperience in front of the camera. There are bumps here that need smoothing.

Yet the program’s cheekiness, relentlessly probing and off-center point of view (Kwitny always includes opinions rebutting his own, however) more than overcome its shortcomings.

Kwitny, who left the Wall Street Journal in 1986 after 17 years, aims to report significant stories “not reported or misreported by the general press,” he said in Los Angeles, where he had come in search of funding. “There are occasions when the accepted wisdom handed down by the government and corporations is wrong.”

“The Kwitny Report” has a non-Establishment, generally left-of-center point of view (further separating it from the overwhelming bulk of TV’s public-affairs programs), but is hardly doctrinaire--witness its two-parter noting the failure of communism in Poland.

His series is not neutral, Kwitny acknowledges. “But we are balanced and we are fair,” he said. “Whichever shoe fits, we’ll wear it.”

“Whichever shoe fits,” however, may be a hard sell to potential investors, especially in a general broadcast environment where safe and familiar are valued over the daring and unconventional.

It’s a system that breeds conservatism. “You will not get any money from someone unless he has some vested interest in giving you money,” said Karnow, who added that he and Pearson are still $140,000 in debt from their Philippines series.

“Corporations will say, ‘Why should we fund something that’s controversial when we can give money to fund the ballet on public television and show everybody how great we are?’ ”

Why did WNYC discard “The Kwitny Report”?

Budgetary reasons, says Chloe Aaron, the station’s recently arrived vice president of television.

Political reasons, says Kwitny, who accuses Aaron of “hostile reaction . . . to the content of the series”--and to two episodes in particular.

One of these attributed terrorism to Jonas Savimbi, leader of the U.S.-backed rebel movement in Angola and “one more blood-stained autocrat on the U.S. taxpayers’ payroll,” Kwitny charged in his introduction.

The other episode in question charged the Reagan Administration with undermining grand jury and congressional probes of alleged drug and drug smuggling by U.S.-supported Contras fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Obviously, “The Kwitny Report” is not “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.”

To those who believe that public TV should be always steady and predictable, “The Kwitny Report” is a horrifyingly ugly and disruptive intruder. To those who believe that public TV’s mandate is to include alternative programs that challenge viewers and clear their sinuses, “The Kwitny Report” is invigorating and deserves permanence.

So much so that PBS, which rarely provides funds for non-prime-time programming, is itself “discussing” giving Kwitny $100,000, Christian said. “We hope to have ‘The Kwitny Report’ back on the air before the end of the year,” she said.

Even that, along with the $75,000 salary that Kwitny says WNYC must still pay him under his contract, would hardly match his proposed $690,000 budget for a season’s worth of programs (WNYC has estimated the cost to be even higher, at more than $1 million).

In the ungrand tradition of public TV, therefore, Kwitny is hitting the bricks himself, hoping for a single underwriter, but more realistically seeking increments of $20,000 from many sources. “I’ve got two already,” he said. “And some others have said they’re very interested.”

Christian has promised Kwitny that his series will join “Washington Week in Review” and “Wall Street Week” as a PBS mainstay, “if you remain in the schedule.” That is to say, if he collects enough money to remain in the schedule.