Celebrating heroes in the fight for independent media.
Connecting filmmakers with media reformers.
DEMANDING A JUST MEDIA.
Andrew Schwartzman's Speech
The following speech was delivered by Andrew Jay Schwartzman, upon receiving the Just Media Lifetime Achievement Award at the fourth annual Media That Matters Film Festival Awards Ceremony on May 19, 2004.
Thank you very much.
First of all, Mom, can you hear me?
My mother said, "You have to speak loud because I can't hear the people speaking and I want to hear you." All right! Let's hear it for my mother! I can’t do schtick like Seth Herzog just did, but I know if I invoke my mother I will start out OK.
It really is thrilling to be able to share the evening with all these special people. Especially Malkia, about whom I'd heard so much and didn’t meet until this evening. She’s another hard act to follow…
Seth is right, the idea of "lifetime achievement" means that I no longer aspire to old farthood but I am now officially an old fart. The bad news for you is that this means I get a few extra minutes to fulminate. I hope I won’t be too boring.
I do want to point out that "lifetime achievement" does imply that it's for something I've done. But achievement is a team sport. I've had the never-ending support and encouragement of my beloved spouse Linda every day for the last twenty-four and a half years. I've had the never-ending support and encouragement of my beloved mother every day for the first eighteen years of my life, and periodically thereafter as needed. And I've had sisterly support and encouragement, and occasional needling, from my sister Jori who's also here. My brother Paul is at the Cannes Film Festival, which I guess is a sort of one-upsmanship on me. I spoke to him about an hour ago to thank him.
I also need to thank the funders, including Becky Lentz, Gara LaMarche, the folks at the MacArthur Foundation, and Vince Stehle. There are very few funders who understand that media diversity cannot happen by itself, that if it was not for some aggressive effort to maintain and protect the public's rights, the corporatization that we've been experiencing would be much much worse, and whatever opportunities we have for the future would be gone. And we're deeply appreciative to them.
And I have mentors, I want to mention in particular two, for different reasons. One is Everett Parker, whose class at Fordham University I just taught a few weeks ago. He's ninety-one and teaches two classes every semester. And calls me up almost weekly to bawl me out because we're not working hard enough. A new book has just been published about Dr. Parker's work with the United Church of Christ in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963, where he established the right of the public to challenge TV license renewals. It's a very important historic work, and it would be a great documentary for someone who wants to do one. There's lots of video footage you can edit into it. I'm dying to see that done. It's important history that links the civil rights movement and the first amendment to the efforts of today. And the fact that forty years later Everett is still going at it is very important.
That brings me to the second mentor, Charlie Halpern, who I saw last week in Washington. Many people here would know him as having run the Nathan Cummings Foundation for a long time, but he's also been the Johnny Appleseed of public interest law. He started CUNY Law School here, an institution dedicated to public interest law. About thirty-five years ago, Charlie was working at the Center for Law and Social policy, the first public interest law firm. In 1970 he said, "You know, if you want to really change things, it's going to be a marathon, not a sprint." I thought to myself, "Well, that's a pretty cheesy metaphor." It is cheesy, but it is not a metaphor. This work really is a marathon. It requires endurance. It requires attention. It requires discipline.
The point that I want to make for the filmmakers and artists here is that your right to do your work is not going to protect itself. Nobody is going to make it possible for you to do these things. Activists are essential; people like my colleagues, the two wonderful and talented people that work with me, and my clients, including people like Aliza Dichter and Tony Riddle – who was a member of the award jury, thank you – and Elizabeth Peters, recently of AIVF. These people have understood that filmmakers have to do more than what too many filmmakers do, which is obsessively focus on their own film and own their project and on beating on everyone they can for funding and credits, and whatever else it takes. You have to recognize that to perform your art and to pass it on to the people you care about coming along – your audience – you have to do something about protecting those rights. Media concentration is just as much of a challenge as the cost of equipment, buying film stock, dealing with intellectual property rights and licenses and permissions, it's part of what your job has to be. Media That Matters, and AIVF very early on, have been in the struggle, understanding the importance of this. It's no longer possible to let a few people do it for everyone.
There's an element of subversion that I also need to stress. I'm standing behind an HBO logo on the lectern. Chuck D, I spent an hour or so with one of your colleagues on the suit side of Air America the other day. He was pointing out to me that your best stations outside of New York are Clear Channel stations. Clear Channel likes Air America because there's an audience. Sundance Channel, which has been wonderful to me and wonderful to this venture, is a joint venture, not just of Robert Redford but also of Viacom and Vivendi-Universal, now NBC Vivendi-Universal. You need to take advantage of the opportunities in these large corporations to use their distribution mechanisms to discuss concentration, to discuss the dangers of having too few people making decisions.
Finally, I want to speak to the importance of preserving the freedom of the Internet. There is a tendency to believe that the Internet is just there, that information wants to be free, and it's going to solve all of our problems. Well, no it isn't, not if we allow the Internet to become a closed network, like the cable television systems that have suppressed diversity and speech. And that's one of the big fights ahead of us. For those who think the future lies in the delivery of broadband and TCP/IP, it's only going to work if we can keep the Internet open. This isn't just my battle, this is not just our battle as citizens. This is our battle as members of the human race that want to use the Internet for transnational democratic purposes. It also has to be the battle of the people who seek to use it as a delivery mechanism for their work. If the Internet is closed off, if it becomes a tollgate system as cable television is, we will have lost one of the great opportunities of the twenty first century.
So I think it's very important for awareness of these issues to expand. That's why I think this festival is so terrific. And that's why I think the goals reflected here, and the reaching out that takes place as a result of it, is really important. It makes me very, very pleased to be able to get this award.
Thank you.