"TV MAN: THE SEARCH FOR THE LAST INDEPENDENT DEALER" Documentary

by Steve Kosareff
(Santa Monica, California, USA)

Ever try and return your new television set with two bullet holes in it and expect the warranty to cover the damage?

That’s exactly what a couple did at Poma TV in Ukiah, California. Whether it was due to a night of heavy partying or a domestic dispute—or both—the couple claimed the damage was due not to a gun discharging but the set falling over. "Twice?" co-owner Dave Poma asked the couple who indignantly stuck to their story. Sounds like a no-brainer: the damage to the set was the couple’s fault, but the Bureau of Electronic Repairs thought otherwise and found for the couple. The result: Poma TV had to make an $800 picture tube repair.

The above story is recounted by Poma TV co-owner, Dave Poma, in the demo reel available at http://www.TVMan.tv for the documentary film, "TV MAN: THE SEARCH FOR THE LAST INDEPENDENT DEALER". Independent television set dealers were once the backbone of television retailing, but the advent of big box stores undercutting their prices the past few decades, have shuttered many. How are the remaining indie dealers staying in business? More importantly, why is it important they do? TV MAN seeks to answer these questions through interviews with former and current dealers, distributors and manufacturers, and archival photographs and films, some which are featured in the demo reel.

The film’s director, Steve Kosareff, is a television archivist and author of "Window to the Future: the Golden Age of Advertising and Marketing Television," Chronicle Books, 2005.

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"TV MAN: THE SEARCH FOR THE LAST INDEPENDENT DEALER" Documentary

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Dec 16, 2010
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"TV MAN" Treatment Revision
by: Steve Kosareff

Although I have interest in TV MAN from many distribution companies at the recent American Film Market, several attendees were concerned with the budget. Taking that into account I have reduced it significantly by revising the story which follows:

The meteoric rise and fall of the American television set industry is seen through the eyes of four surviving dealers who have sold sets for over 50 years in the Midwest.

President Obama was a participant this past November at the APEC trade conference of Pacific Rim Nations in Japan. His concerns representing the United States fell on deaf ears. Why did the other attendees not respond favorably?

It may have been that President Obama was thirty years too late.

The United States was once the pre-eminent manufacturer of television sets in the world during the 1950s and 1960s, but by the end of the 1970s it all had but disappeared. How did this occur? The answer lies with the last remaining piece of the American television set industry: the independent retail dealer. TV MAN will go to the former heartland of television set manufacturing, the Midwest, to visit four of the last surviving independent television set dealers to answer why the industry disappeared and what might have been done to avert it. The film will also visit former manufacturing sites to interview people who assembled television sets and the Early Television Museum near Columbus, Ohio, whose members gather once a year in May in celebration of them.

To place American television set manufacturing in its historical perspective, TV MAN will revisit the independent dealers? heyday during the 1950s and 60s. It will enlighten those too young to remember and those too old to forget television?s explosive decades of growth and the magic that was once television. From the post-war black-and-white years through the saturation of color television sets in the 1970s, the film will look at how the giant and seemingly invincible American television set industry (with over 100 manufacturers in the 1950s) provided the platform for thousands of independent dealers to sell millions of sets to an insatiable public.

The film will detail the end of television set manufacturing in the United States as Japanese and other Asian imported television sets invaded the country without legal protection. With the loss of television set manufacturing, independent dealers were forced to face a reality: without free trade protection, they either had to sell foreign product or close their doors. Many shuttered their stores, but the few remaining managed?and still manage?to deal with the loss of American manufactured sets in creative ways, as only the human spirit can when it is challenged.

TV MAN will be an inspiring story of universal triumph in the face of insurmountable odds and a moral lesson for what happens when a country does not protect its citizens? livelihoods.

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