INDEPENDENT LENS: “RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT”
PBS, 10:00 p.m. ET
This documentary is about a very different Marion the Librarian – not the sweet small-town Iowa “spinster” of The Music Man, but a wealthy woman of color who lived in the Barclay Hotel in Philadelphia’s chic Rittenhouse Square, was active in social causes, appeared on a local TV current-affairs and arts show, and loved the original Star Trek series because of what she perceived as its socialist utopian vision of the future. In late 1975, when Sony released the first Betamax consumer video recorder, she bought several, and began recording TV shows to keep a record of what it showed, and how it presented the news. Before long, and after switching eventually to VHS, she was recording 24 hours a day, a regimen she maintained from the start of the hostage crisis in Iran in 1979 (which gave birth, in time, to ABC’s Nightline, as well as to CNN) until her death in 2012. Over the decades, she amassed some 7,000 tapes – which was even more than I had collected, as a TV critic, when my house was hit by lightning and burned down in 1989. VHS tapes? Quite flammable. And Betamax tapes were $20 each when they first came out, while the recorders themselves retailed at somewhere around $1,700. So former librarian Marion Stokes was indeed a wealthy woman – and the treasure trove of recorded images she preserved is rich as well. As Recorder points out, you’d presume the local stations and networks would have preserved everything she recorded over the decades – but they didn’t. Check local listings.