Oral Distractions

"I’m probably more middle of the road than most people I went to film school with," says Dan Orozco, host of Butter City, the hottest talk show to cover filmmaking since Siskel and Ebert ruled the airwaves, "I like movies that I can eat a whole thing of popcorn and drink a whole can of soda to. I think Truffaut called those ‘oral distractions’ because he hated movie theaters that sold that stuff."

Forgoing François’ sniffing disregard, "oral distraction" applies in an entirely complimentary way to Butter City, a weekly half-hour program that airs 10 pm Sunday nights on three TV frequencies: TPT Channel 17 (13 if you have cable), MTN Channel 16, and SPNN Channel 17. The generally one-on-one broadcast’s guest list is made up entirely of people in or from the state of Minnesota who are in some way connected with movie making or movie exhibition. The year-old program is the brainchild of producer Myron Berdahl, a corporate analyst and screenwriter, and aficionado of films ever since he served in the Navy on the USS Nimitz, where the 1980 time-travel adventure The Final Countdown was shot. Myron explains the show’s title and theme this way: "When you go to the theater what are you usually armed with? A barrelful of buttered popcorn, right? You’re leaving reality behind and going into this new realm, this new city — Butter City!"

I interviewed Myron, along with host Dan, director Heinz Iwen and the rest of the crew at the SPNN studios in downtown St. Paul, where they were getting set to make two back-to-back episodes. Myron, taking a rare breather from his distracting, and slightly militaristic, producing duties, went on to explain, "The title was going to be either Butter City or Twin Cities Art Talk. When you go through the TV guide, and you see Twin Cities Art Talk or Butter City, which would you choose to watch?" This leads to two impetuses behind his creation: to not only give local filmmakers a chance to get more publicity and tell their stories, but to also add some spark to the frequently dry realms of public television and, especially, cable access, whose biggest diversion from erudite forums so far has been the booze-laced Drinking With Ian.

Heinz, who has worked for fifteen years as a freelance director and editor — or, as he likes to call himself, "video mercenary" — for SPNN and other outlets, points out that community-based television can have its real-life dramas, especially when it comes to obscenity and bluenoses forever on the lookout for it. "Wednesday evening I work on a Vietnamese news show. To break it up, they get these music videos from Vietnam. I got a long e-mail from a lady who described, in detail, how, in one video, a male dancer’s hand brushed across the breast of a female dancer for 3.4 seconds. 3.4 seconds! What, was she timing this?"

However this concerned citizen measured the beastly act, she nearly caused that program to go off the air, thanks to the threat of a $25,000 fine from the FCC. Such could be the fate of Butter City if they are not careful, as they so far have been, about cleaning up foul language and other unsightly elements of sex and violence from clips that guests bring to share. That applied to those from my own films, which were featured on an episode I taped a few weeks prior, and which were pockmarked with more audio excisions than a 50 Cent video. I also inadvertently dated the broadcast by making reference to a couple of future projects.

"I don’t mention time or say ‘boy, it’s hot out today’ or talk about next week’s or last week’s show," explains Dan, who was hired by Myron based on his four years of hosting Cinema Lounge at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, "Each show exists in a vacuum in and of itself so that it can be replayed anytime. The other thing I don’t do is mention where we are. Sometimes I’ll say ‘local filmmakers’ or ‘Midwest’ or ‘Minnesota’, but I really try to make it universally appealing."

The set for Butter City, though modest by the standards of even two-chair chat shows, should appeal to anyone remotely appreciative of cinema. An old-fashioned 16 mm projector looms like a sentinel over where Dan sits, a monitor for playing clips dominates the center, and a manual typewriter is perched snugly by the guest chair. From this Raymond Chandleresque mechanism’s spool dangles a sheet of paper, which bears the first few lines of a script Myron, himself, wrote. This may be the same one that he dispatched to Ellen Burstyn at the Toronto Film Festival and to which he hoped she would lend a "mystical aura."