Freeform Radio: The Movie

Last weekend, Tim K. Smith’s documentary Sex
and Broadcasting premiered at the DOC NYC festival in New York. The
movie isn’t actually about sex—it takes its name from Lorenzo
Milam’s
book on the art of creative radio. (*) Instead the picture’s
about WFMU, a legendarily
freewheeling station in New Jersey. FMU offers some of the most
strange and eclectic programming available anywhere in the country,
and it manages to sustain itself without any commercials,
underwriting, or government subsidies, and without being attached
to a university that might help pay the bills. (It used to be owned
by Upsala College, but the school went bankrupt nearly two decades
ago. Improbably, the station survived. [**])

It’s a good movie (***), shifting back and forth between the
outlet’s wild programs and the nuts-and-bolts work required to keep
such a relentlessly uncommercial operation on the air. The station
underwent a major financial crisis while Smith was filming, and
that provides much of the picture’s narrative spine; in the
meantime, a host of smaller daily mini-crises come and go.

The movie will be screened one more time before the festival
ends, at 9:45 Thursday
evening. Here’s the trailer:

* Milam’s book doesn’t have much to say about sex either. He
claims to have given it that name at the behest of his Great Aunt
Beulah, who “convinced me that…the word Sex in the title would
double its sales, and quadruple its readership.”

** Some of the film’s best footage comes from the days right
after the college went under, when the station was the only
occupied building on an abandoned campus. One DJ reminisces, not
very nostalgically, about the shady characters who’d come to Upsala
to shoot their guns because they figured there wouldn’t be anyone
around.

*** Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the movie,
wearing my
radio historian hat, and while my comments wound up on the
cutting room floor they were still kind enough to give me a line in
the credits. That may make this the single smallest conflict of the
interests in the history of disclosure statements, but I guess I
should mention it.