Liane Brandon knew she was going to have to forge her own path when a film distributor offered her a contract for her documentary for only one year. It was 1972, and Brandon’s films, such as ANYTHING YOU WANT TO BE and BETTY TELLS HER STORY, explored the limited choices women had in contemporary society. Her films had been well received and she couldn’t understand why she was being offered such a poor deal. So she asked.

"The distributor didn’t want to sign a contract for more than a year because he didn’t think the women’s movement would be there in a year," she recalled with a laugh. She can laugh now because the distributor is long gone. Meanwhile New Day Films, the co-operative distribution company Brandon co-founded with other independent documentary makers that same year, is still going strong.

Liane Brandon, co-director of UMass Educational TV and pioneering woman documentary filmmaker. Photo Credit: Jennifer Taylor.

Brandon’s stories of the era might sound incredible to filmmakers who came of age years later, but she recalls seeing a film catalog for one company carrying independent documentaries that featured a somewhat pornographic picture on the cover. Asked that distributor, "Why else would anyone want to see films by women?"

"When I first started making films there were hardly any women filmmakers around," said Brandon. "Nobody made films about women’s lives or the issues women faced. We were considered enormously unusual, to put it mildly."

These days Brandon has turned her attention from film to video. She is involved in an ambitious television project that hasn’t gotten much notice outside of the western Massachusetts communities that have seen shows produced by UMass Educational TV, but that’s about to change. Brandon’s career shift came less by design than by her decision to take up a challenge.

She had just finished several years producing and then distributing her 1988 film about citizen activists, HOW TO PREVENT A NUCLEAR WAR, when she was offered a teaching opportunity at UMass Amherst. "We had a little TV studio and nothing much had been done with it in years," she said.

It was suggested that she could produce educational programs that would utilize the resources of the school and be of interest to the local community. So she and Jay Carey, the associate dean for academic affairs, became co-directors of UMass Educational TV. Scott Perry, a former graduate student at the school, was hired as project coordinator, and the trio set out to see if low-budget local cable programming could attract an audience with quality educational offerings.

"The first thing we did was a whole ton of pilots," recalled Brandon. She promised herself that she would only continue if she could be proud of the resulting programs. "If this stuff looks bad, I don’t want to do it."

Although they had fun experimenting with different formats, even convincing the dean of the education school to go on camera reading children’s bedtime stories, they soon realized that the biggest danger would be overextending themselves. "We felt we couldn’t do them all and keep up the quality," she explained.

Instead, with a tiny budget they set out to produce two limited run series each academic year. "It’s probably what most other production companies spend on office supplies," she said. "That’s why it’s such a challenge to me, because I’ve always worked with larger budgets."

As challenges go, this pales next to one she faced as a young woman working as a lifeguard in New Jersey, when the local aquacade needed someone to dive into the water through a ring of fire. When none of her staff was willing to do it, she did it herself, figuring she couldn’t ask anyone to do something she wasn’t willing to do herself. "I did take that off the resume when they recruited me to teach at UMass," she said, figuring it didn’t set the right academic tone for a serious filmmaker. Since she was granted tenure, it has returned to her credits.

Sharing responsibilities, Brandon, Carey and Perry set to work. Among the shows they’ve done since launching in 1995 are FINE PRINT, interviewing authors on the UMass faculty; FRESH INK, with local high school students performing their own poetry on locations around town; and TRY THIS AT HOME: COOKING!, a cooking show geared for children, hosted by Cynthia Caldwell and a puppet named Carl. A second "Try This at Home" series, focusing on nature in the backyard, will premiere this spring.

Brandon’s years toiling in the field of documentaries paid off, with the shows having a slick, professional look, yet taking a fresh approach to matters often overlooked by commercial television. "Educators rarely have a say in the making of television," noted Brandon, pointing out that even the best series usually bring in academics only as outside consultants. Here students and interns get hands-on experience in the whole process from coming up with ideas for shows through production, post-production, and even promotion.

"The payoff for the students is that they get to see their stuff on TV," said Brandon. As for the future educators who will be following a different career path, they’ve learned "how television is made, how all the decisions are made. It doesn’t just happen."

The school was pleased when the local cable company agreed to run the shows and even happier when viewers started to respond. Then other cable companies expressed interest and the shows were running in communities along the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, from the Vermont border in the north down to the Connecticut state line. This year Media One, the company carrying the shows in most of those communities, is in the midst of a merger with AT&T, so Brandon and her crew decided to take a year off from production to figure out what to do next.

"We want to rethink how we want to redistribute our films," said Brandon. At this writing they are negotiating with three different distributors interested in the rights to at least some of the UMass productions. "I don’t think we’ll ever be a profit center, but we’re very valuable outreach," explained Brandon, "If we had to pay for the publicity, I don’t think we could do it."

While Brandon, Carey, and Perry consider their next moves, Brandon’s already satisfied that she’s shown that professional broadcast quality programming can be produced on a limited budget, and that both distributors and viewers will pay attention to shows that spark an interest, regardless of the source.

Said Brandon, "This is a unique niche that seems to have struck a chord with people."

Daniel M. Kimmel is the Boston Correspondent for Variety Magazine