MOSAIC "MSr/Artr 1P7S

"Can I have my trousers?"

Awakened at dawn by the bright lights of a film crew, and observing a whirring camera focused on his sleep-blurred face, biologist Frank Conomos showed admir­able early morning presence of mind. The film sequence, in which a team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists literally begins its working day, appears appro­priately early in "Inside the Golden Gate," an hour-long documentary about San Francisco Bay. The film, one of the NOVA series, appeared on the Public Broadcasting System in December 1974. NOVA, now in its second year of na­tional television, is produced at Boston's WGBH-TV with the advice and coopera­tion of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and supported by NSF, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Polaroid Corporation.

Conomos' rude awakening was set in motion several months before when a three-person production team finishing work on an earlier NOVA film ("Search for Life") began to look for the subject of its next film.

"John [Angier, the producer] was busy cutting 'Search for Life' at that time," recalls associate producer Barbara

Holecek. "Cary Lu, the other associate producer on the team, and I started to look—at forensic medicine, the effects of energy problems on Los Angeles, trans­portation, the learning process, the food crisis . . . searching for something to gel.

"We had brought to the office, along with about 20 other books, one on Cali­fornia. Based on one of them, John sug­gested I look up San Francisco Bay, which I did, and I also called a few San Fran­cisco marine biologists I knew of and asked if anyone was doing work on the Bay. It turned out that there was an incredible amount of research going on, and that there had been some major en­vironmental battles fought. The research appeared to be very fragmented in the sense that various individuals and groups were doing unrelated studies and often had little or no knowledge of one an­other's work. But the story was there— all those disparate groups examining the ecosystem, trying to determine how to use or manage or preserve the Bay."

Five months and some $135,000 later the story was on film.

Lights, camera, hipboots. A WGBH-TV film crew gets ready to shoot a sequence on a San Francisco Bay mudflat for the NOVA program "Inside the Golden Gate."

MOSAIC Mar/Apr 1975 3

Storytellers, not scientists

With ith only occasional exceptions, the NOVA filmmakers are non-scientists. Actually, their lack

of scientific credentials is an asset in that they anticipate the viewing public's in­terest and comprehension. The series does have scientific guidance, however, both through the extensive interviewing of scientists before filming and from NOVA's resident science editor, journal­ist Graham Chedd. But it is the film­makers who are the storytellers.

Doing research for a story like "Golden Gate" led along an unpredictable path, with the early interviews producing re­ferrals to other scientists and to other issues. Holecek recalls that the story be­came more and more complex as research progressed.

They finally began to see daylight about halfway through the research when they discovered a group of USGS scien­tists, living and working aboard the small research ship Polaris. These peo­ple, NOVA found, seemed to be the only ones doing a long-term interdisciplinary survey of the Bay. At that point, with

that group to focus on, it seemed "right" to mirror their interest and make a film about the Bay/estuary system and its chances for survival.

The biggest problem still was which story to pursue, because so many things connect with the Bay. Faced with a series of tough value judgments—sewage as a necessary byproduct of city life or as a contaminant of the estuary; fisheries or factories; fresh water to flush the Bay or to grow more food; water use pri­orities in drought years—NOVA finally decided to look primarily at the processes occurring in the estuary itself. Questions of public policy were deliberately raised and left open. They were brought in to show the pressures on the ecosystem.

And so, as the film rolls, television audiences see where river and ocean waters pulse through the Bay—and how scientists detect those flows—and how their confluence creates zones of high biological productivity. They see how the saltier waters nearer the Golden Gate serve as nursery areas for shellfish that eventually wind up in the ocean, and how even rocky beach sediments are home for clams and other sea life. The

On the track of science. Heading out tc • -site where biologist Fred Nichols will br filmed sampling muciflat organisms.

biological tour shows the lands border­ing the water, replete with mussels, mud snails, birds, and the grasses that sustain that particular food chain.

At this point the film has covered, generally, how a stable estuary func­tions. But, asks NOVA, how stable is the estuary? In one sense, suggests the film, more stable than it might be be­cause the "Save the Bay" movement in the 1960's led to a State law that pre­vented further filling in of the margins to create waterfront land.

But potential threats remain, and the remainder of the film looks at them. Among the questions that the audience sees the scientists try to answer are:

• What are the effects of pollutants on the Bay's life?

• What are the natural processes that-clean out the Bay?

• What effects does the massive Cal­ifornia Water Project, which draws off about one-third of the upstream water headed for the Bay, have on

4 MOSAIC Mar/Apr 1975

Scientist as performer. Nichols gets wired for sound.

both biological and physical proc­esses there?

There are no definitive answers yet, and the film ends almost as it began, with the Po/arz's-based scientists relaxing around a table at day's end, talking about their work and speculating about the future of the Bay and the people whose lives touch it.

What makes a NOVA?

In choosing a topic NOVA is guided by three fundamental criteria. They were set down long ago, in the orig­

inal concept paper by NOVA's execu­tive producer Michael Ambrosino:

• The topic's importance to society. Does it change or condition daily life, bear on the important choices we face in a democratic society, challenge our notions about man and the world? Can the audience relate to the subject?

• The topic's importance to science. Does it touch on, and give insight into, the fundamentals of science? Are we involved in its processes?

• Will the subject make good tele­vision? Is there a good story work­ing? Are there articulate spokes­men to call on? How rigorously can we portray the subject and still keep the audience?

How did "Golden Gate" stack up against the three criteria? As the film's narrator pointed out during a breath­taking aerial tour of the Bay, there are six million people living around the Bay, and even if they do tend to take it for granted, "everybody knows you might be anywhere in the world if it wasn't for the Bay." Certainly, the importance of the Bay's survival to those six million is clear: It does affect daily life, and au­diences can relate to the subject. The importance of the topic to science—the physical, chemical, and biological work­ings of an estuary—is made clear by the scientists themselves: They are still largely ignorant about these systems, and through their eyes the viewers can find out a great deal about how they learn about estuaries. Finally, "Inside the Golden Gate" is eminently filmable, focusing on a single region, involving relatively understandable experiments, and with a good story to pursue.

Getting an audience

uccess in public television has neces­sarily been measured in different terms than it has in commercial

television. It began as "educational" television, occupying channels reserved for it mostly in the UHF band (channels 14-83) at a time when almost no one's

television set was built to receive it. Even today, in such major television markets as Los Angeles, Washington, D. C , Cleveland, Atlanta, and Detroit, public television is still broadcast over UHF channels while the commercial networks draw most of the audiences to the VHF spectrum they operate in.

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Public television doesn't aspire to com­pete head-to-head with commercial tele­vision. Its intent is to provide what the others don't—with an obvious nod to­wards programs that have educational value, such as Sesame Street or Bill Moyer's Journal or NOVA. Ironically, aside from its children's shows, public television's biggest successes have been its "commercial-type" dramatic offerings, notably the British imports. And NOVA, though an American production, reflects some of that British influence as well.

The British, with a strong tradition of science journalism and the years to nur­ture it under the aegis of the BBC, are simply the best science filmmakers around. (The BBC's wide-ranging series include "Horizon," "Chronicle," "The World Around U s , " "Tomorrow ' s World," "Microbes and Men," and "The Ascent of Man.") So NOVA regularly mixes British productions, which it pur­chases, with NOVA-produced films. One reason is to keep costs for a whole NOVA season reasonable, since it's much cheaper to buy American rights to

a film (about $14,000) than to make a new one (about $140,000). Also, the mix provides an international standard for the series.

Though it might seem naive to claim that the inclusion of films from a single other country can provide an interna­tional standard, Ambrosino claims that the BBC and NOVA science films are almost alone in what they try to do. " 'English-speaking' producers," he says, "tend to deal with puzzles and scien­tific discovery in story form. Scientific fundamentals and phenomena come out in the story; some actual, some re-enacted—all within the structure of an unfolding story of puzzle, hypothesis, discovery, new puzzle! They show the scientist as a man with a question.

"The 'European' view seems to show the scientist as a man with an answer. They think of their audience as an elite of well-informed, technologically ori­ented folks. Their films are often didac­tic explanations, some dull and some highly imaginative, but nevertheless cool, detached, highly detailed, instructionally

in the ooze. With Nichols standing by in the tybs he works from, the NOVA crew makes final adjustments before the cameras roll.

oriented lessons. They seem not to be interested in fundamentals (science) on the one hand, or tangents (society) on the other; only technology."

Actually, NOVA could almost be billed as "Son of BBC." Ambrosino spent a year's leave from WGBH in 1970-1971 at the BBC, and from that experience developed the philosophy and approach for NOVA. Helped by a small planning grant from the AAAS, he put the final touches on his plan the follow­ing year.

And while the thoroughly American-in-tone WGBH/NOVA productions give no hint of it, two of the three producers are British and previously worked on the BBC's "Horizon" series. But working with them are American associate pro­ducers, film crews, and editors. One of the purposes of NOVA is to train a cadre of young American science film­makers to carry on as the British pro­ducers return home.

A variety show

The fact that there are three differ-ent—and highly individualistic— NOVA teams and that programs

are drawn from a variety of sources is, perhaps surprisingly, a strong asset for NOVA. Unlike most commercial pro­grams, NOVA has no "formula," just a philosophy. The result, for the viewer, is variety quite unusual for a television series. One PBS broadcaster in the Mid­west said that "most viewers seemed to like NOVA because it dealt with differ­ent subjects. One commented that it was the best thing since the old 'Twen­tieth Century' series." Others echoed that observation, ascribing a "surprise quality" to NOVA.

Obviously, then, there is no such thing as a typical NOVA program. Consider what was shown during 1973-1974, NOVA's first year. It began with a look at filmmaking itself in the BBC's "The Making of a Natural History Film." Centered on the remarkably creative group at the Oxford Scientific Film Lab­oratory, it shows the ingenious ways in which animal behavior sequences have to be filmed (a bird feeding its young— seen from the baby bird's viewpoint; re­moving, without harming, a chick em-

6 MOSAIC Mar/Apr 1975

bryo from its outer shell so that its development can be followed; filming the emergence of eggs from a wood wasp's ovipositor; and culminating with the lifecycle of a small fish, the stickle­back).

That film was followed by the NOVA-produced "Where Did the Colorado Go?/ ' a gloomy, rather startling sum­mary of how water resources have been divided up and overcommitted through the years.

In that first season there were five WGBH productions, one joint WGBH/ BBC production, and seven BBC pur­chases. Though no one can say for sure which shows were best received (the PBS rating information is very spotty), the NOVA producers believe the WGBH products were equal to the imports. (BBC must agree. They ran three out of the first four WGBH productions.)

In addition to the "Colorado," which generated a lot of interest among view­ers in the Western States, WGBH also produced: "The Search for Life" (by the "Golden Gate" team), a step-by-step look at how life may have begun on Earth and how it might be detected on Mars; "Strange Sleep," a dramatic re-enactment (acted convincingly by a cast of 80, many of them teaching physicians

in Boston) of the development of an­esthesia; then perhaps the year's biggest success, "The First Signs of Washoe," a film that traces the learning of and use of human sign language by a chim­panzee; and, finally, "The Mystery of Anasazi," showing attempts by archae­ologists to find out what happened to a civilization that thrived in Southwest America until its disappearance 700 years ago. Purchased productions dealt with whales and dolphins; with threatened South American Indian tribes; with the Crab Nebula; with bird navigation; with medical experimentation on humans; with the celebrated case of the midwife toad; and a BBC/WGBH co-production on fusion energy. In all, a weekly series of tantalizing variety.

The variety continues in 1974-1975. New shows include: why birds sing; the use of smell by animals (including man); looking for the quark; human sleep; "Golden Gate"; Cro-Magnon cave painting; the ecology of coral reefs; a history of bombing in warfare; biologi­cal clocks; a re-examination of the ban­

ning of DDT; Lysenkoism and genetics in the U.S.S.R.; profiles of two Ameri­can scientists; life in a Taureg family in the heart of the Sahara; the safeguard­ing of nuclear materials; and the limits of biological productivity in the oceans.

A million viewers

Repeats, as viewers of PBS well know, don't have the second-class status that they do on commercial tele­

vision. Many shows are aired twice a week, and while the ratings that are available indicate that they don't usually draw as many viewers the second time around, a substantial number of addi­tional viewers do pick it up.

How many in all? In terms of audience shares (a common way of describing programming success), NOVA is attract­ing less than ten percent of the sets that are on, though in a few urban areas it actually gets that share on occasion. But a ten-percent or a five-percent share can represent a lot of viewers. Nationwide, that might mean, with repeats, a million viewers for any one show—a tremen­dous audience for a "science film."

As a PBS attraction NOVA has proven itself. It not only fills what many indi­vidual station managers had felt was a serious "science gap" in programming, but it generally ranks in the top five reg­ular PBS shows. Its popularity will be tested in 1975-1976 when, for the first time, stations wanting to show NOVA will have to help underwrite its produc­tion costs.

For its first two years NOVA received major support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB funding runs out this year, so NOVA's future depends on being able to get a share of that portion of support awarded through the new "Station Cooperative" and sup­plementing it with money from other sources.

NOVA also has the distinction of being PBS's best "family" show, because those audience surveys that have been done show NOVA's audience to be about equally divided among men and women, with a good sized teenage proportion. What they get is, as the show's opening says, "each week, a science adventure." A West Coast station observed that its viewers didn't have to remind themselves that they "really should be interested in this show." Once the film rolls, they can't help but be interested. •

MOSAIC Mar/Apr 1975 7

The end result. On film, Nichois takes a mud core for later analysis. As sometimes happens, the mud-sampling sequence wound up on the cutting room floor.