Chicago Access Network Television (CAN TV)



	Letter-carrier auteur Fans of Halloween masks, long pauses, and all-black parodies of Gilligan’s Island will love Lyle Thadison’s cable-access oeuvre By JAKE AUSTEN Six days a week, through rain and sleet and dark of night, U.S. Postal worker Lyle Thadison walks the streets of Chicago delivering mail. But while his body moves from door to door, his mind is preparing for a Sabbath filled with space travel, monsters, and urban adventures. “I'm only able to dedicate one day out of the week to my TV show,” explains Thadison, “but the entire week I'm formulating and elaborating on ideas while I'm on my route.” Thadison, 46, a native Chicagoan who grew up in the Henry Horner housing com-plex on the Near West Side, has dreamed of being a filmmaker since childhood. Thanks to CAN-TV, Chicago's public access television network, his dream is no longer deferred. >>> “When I was younger I would act out scenes with clothespins and hair curlers,” Thadison recalls. “In school, I would make different figures with clay… One time I played out a scene of a man and a woman kissing and I set the classroom in an uproar.” Inspired to entertain audiences with his creativity, Thadison became drawn to the video camera. As a high school student at Westinghouse, he was always tapped to videotape the school field trips. After high school, he attended Columbia College with the hopes of study-ing film and television, but com-mitments to his family forced him to leave school and join the Postal Service before he made his first film. Throughout the `70s and `80s, he had to satisfy his creative urges by taping an occasional wedding and by self publishing a book of short stories featuring an African American perspective on Twilight Zone-style science fiction. ***** But then in 1996, decades after Thadison left film school, a friend urged him to visit CAN-TV, where he instantly recognized the medium he had been searching for. Since then, he has helmed almost 200 productions, ranging from music shows to gothic soap operas to prison dramas, and compiled a body of work that recalls the pioneering films of Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux was a Chicago-based Pullman porter whose ambitions led him to self-publish novels and eventually become one of the most prolific African American filmmakers, directing more than forty independent movies from the late teens through the 1940s. On the other hand, Thadison also has a lot in common with another author-turned-director, Ed Wood, whose films Glen or Glenda and Plan 9 from Outer Space are infamous for their low budgets and raw amateurism. But what is most important about Thadison's work is the intangible that he shares with both of his predecessors: a spirit of determined individualism that refuses to surrender in spite of the odds or the critic's barbs. For almost a decade, Thadison has produced Thadavison (airing Saturdays at ll pm, on cable channel 19), an anthology show that features a wide array of programming. Most weeks, Thadavision features an urban talent show, alternately called Inner City Showcase and The Romando Batchelor Show. While these programs are always entertaining, and at times bizarre (the diverse talent lineups often juxtapose Mr. Batchelor's saintly mother reading religious poetry with X-rated rappers), the real treats are Thadison's more ambitious projects. Over the years he has also produced chil-dren's shows, all-black satires of mainstream fare like Judge Judy and Gilligan's Island, original pseudo-Shakespearean dramas and several serialized feature-length films. The latter includes Son of Shaft, an action-adventure about the illegitimate son of the famed `70s detective; Jason meets Michael Myers, a horror film pitting the famous stars of the Friday the 13th and Halloween movies (Thadison's project preceded the Freddy vs. Jason film by several years); and BAPS in Space, a sci-fi comedy about the all-female crew of the first African space flight (launched from the fictional country "Iomama"). These productions all share a no-budget aesthetic that smiles upon plastic Halloween masks, long, awkward pauses, and an aversion for second takes. *** One of Thadison's greatest successes was The Black Panther Show, an urban response to the kiddie show Barney and Friends. “As a child on the West Side,” recalls Thadison, “we had a Black Panther headquarters in our neighborhood, and in contrast to the general public's views of the Panthers, I remember them for their food drives, and for taking us kids on field trips to the DuSable Museum. I wanted to revive that positive image of the group.” On the show, Thadison dressed in a rented black jungle-cat costume, reminiscent of a high school sports mascot. In a stark studio, he led children in songs and games and introduced “imaginary trips” (home movies of amusement park visits). With a microphone cord dangling from his mouth, and Darth Vader-like breathing, the Black Panther was at least as strange as his purple dinosaur colleague. But where the Black Panther Show excelled beyond anything on conventional television was in its heart and soul. Every sec-ond of the program was saturated with earnestness, honesty and ambition. The subtext was always that Lyle Thadison was going to get this show done even if he had to do all the writing, acting, camerawork, directing, songwriting (the original patri-otic anthem We're Americans, posits: ‘You might be brown, you might be white, you might be yellow, but everything's gonna be all right”), and even create the cast; “I had invited a number of kids to come down to the show, but they didn't appear, so I had to use my own children.” CAN-TV's Chris Dillon says that Thadison's productions stand out not only for their sin-cerity and sense of humor, but also for their ambition. “Very few of our studio productions use scripted material,” says Dillon. “Lyle is someone who obviously has vision and just needed an opportunity to express it. Cable access, and CAN-TV in particular, really emphasizes getting the equipment into the people's hands, without, in any way, controlling their production. When you give someone as motivated as Lyle this freedom, it results in some really enjoyable, creative work.” Thadison includes his phone number at the end of most cablecasts, and the feedback he gets is usually positive. “I get a lot of anonymous calls, usually with just a few words, `I like your show,' he says. “But after some of the movies sometimes people call me and ask `What the hell was I watching? Why was that on the air?' And the thing that strikes me is that if you watched it from beginning to end and then called me it must have caught your attention.” * Though Thadison would love to get paid for his production work some day, he is extremely satisfied with his current venue. “To be able to produce some-thing for television is one of the greatest things I could hope to do. Having a wide Chicago audi-ence view the work, and interact with me, is the best aspect of being on CAN-TV and I love the creative process. I guess it goes back to when I was younger working with clay. You start off with something, you work with it, you mold it and you hope that it eventually comes into a shape or form that you and your audi-ence like. No budget might limit me but it doesn't stop me; I'm not going to let anything deter me. My perspective is, `I think I can, I think I can,' just like the train says.” Or like the postman's creed says; Be it a mail route or a studio shoot, nothing will keep Lyle Thadison from his appointed rounds. Chicago Journal** March 31, 2005 by Jake Austen, contributing writer back to top Return to Press Coverage
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