Public Access

🤩 Public Access (documentary), dir. David Shadrack Smith, 2026, USA, 108 min.
Sunday, June 21, 2026, 3:30 PM, Castro Theatre
🌉 Bay Area premiere

Public Access
(photo: Anne-Marcelle Ngabirano)

Frameline blurb: What’s this documentary about? It’s about two hours — and so much more. Decades before influencers, content creators, and YouTubers came to rule our screens and dictate trends, one of America’s greatest free-speech experiments was born: public-access television. A counterpoint to commercial mainstream media, public-access television allowed the general public to create programming free from censorship. As this Sundance standout illustrates, any one (or anything) could be a star.

David Shadrack Smith’s riveting documentary traces the evolution of one such underground free-for-all: Manhattan Cable Television. New York City’s community-made programming reshaped local pop culture, music, and art, and allowed free-speech pioneers, including the makers of the groundbreaking queer series The Emerald City, to take control of their own media representation. But this unrestricted creativity and unfettered access also sparked heated debates about First Amendment rights, making Public Access — and the many wild, weird, and transgressive shows on display — incredibly timely.

My take: I have had relatively little contact with Public Access, largely because I didn’t have cable TV until 1993. From 1985 to 1987, I lived in San Jose, California, home of the very first urban cable TV system, but, twenty-plus years after they started it, they still hadn’t gotten around to wiring my neighborhood. Most of what I missed was dross, but clearly there were a few gems hidden in the steady stream of everything from amateurish and boring to dreadful and distasteful.

This new documentary Public Access tracks the beginnings and the evolution of public access programming, particularly in Manhattan, where it all started. We see the vanity projects, people just pointing a camera at themselves for half an hour and then taking the tape to the cable office, to the more serious content, and of course inevitably the sexual content, including the battles all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court over what limits the cable company could place on public access shows. It’s well done, interesting in almost every detail, and, as the Frameline blurb says, quite timely as we make our way through a period of renewed efforts to censor disfavored viewpoints, especially LGBTQ+ voices. Must see.

One little detail that surprised me: one of the interviews is with Alex Bennett, whom I knew as the morning radio host on Live 105 in the 1990s, but he previously worked on the (in)famous adult public access show Midnight Blue.

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