.png)
3 weeks ago
2
On April 22, 1990, viewers tuned into MTV were introduced to the future of information dissemination, though they had no way of knowing it at the time. On a Sunday night, with almost no advance publicity and no context provided by the network then known for music videos rather than “Jersey Shore” and “Teen Mom,” MTV dropped a 30-minute current affairs program called “Buzz.”
As would be the case for its subsequent episodes — 13 of them before MTV pulled the plug on the experiment — the premiere only aired once with no repeats, so if you didn’t watch it or tape it as it aired, you were out of luck. During its brief run, the series acquired a devoted cult following (among that cult were the members of U2, who would eventually hire “Buzz” co-creator Mark Pellington to collaborate on multiple projects) and earned rave reviews, but by the 2000s, it had fallen into obscurity. The series doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, or a list of episodes on IMDb.
In its moment, however, “Buzz” was seen alongside David Lynch and Mark Frost’s “Twin Peaks” as one of the shows redefining the parameters of television as an art form, and its form foretold aspects of visual grammar now in common use on YouTube and TikTok. Ostensibly a news show, “Buzz” covered stories and perspectives the established media ignored — and covered them in a fast-paced, almost avant-garde style that couldn’t have been more different from the format that had been in place since the days of Edward R. Murrow.
The series came into existence when MTV executives paired ABC news producer Jon Klein with on-air promo creator Pellington. Klein came from the establishment but was looking for a way to shake up what he saw as a tired system, while Pellington was a self-taught experimental filmmaker on his way to a successful career helming music videos (Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” among them) and features like “Arlington Road” and “The Mothman Prophecies.”
Both men were iconoclasts who took MTV’s money and ran with it, adopting a collage approach to the news in which information was conveyed to the audience without the intermediary of an anchor or host, often with cuts that allowed shots to play out for only a fraction of a second. Pellington and Klein collected information and footage from bureaus around the world and showcased perspectives ranging from nonprofessionals sending in footage from camcorders to icons from art and literature like William S. Burroughs, Syd Mead, Jenny Holzer, and William Gibson.
Each episode took a theme — cultural stereotypes, the future, war — and ran with it, jamming enough information into any given minute to make even the most frenetic TikTok video look like an Andrei Tarkovsky film. Yet while the fast cutting — Pellington and Klein were known to argue whether a shot should go on for two frames or three — would indicate that the series was made for short attention spans, somehow the content was organized in a way that allowed the viewer to truly process and contemplate it.
“Every frame was curated,” Pellington told IndieWire in a recent interview by way of explaining why the show worked as well as it did. “There was an emotional purpose to it. I think I liked to cut fast because I was confused by the world.” Indeed, looking at “Buzz” now, one is struck by what a transitional period it captured, documenting not only a world changing after the fall of the Berlin Wall but a technological shift from an analog era to the age of digital.
While “Buzz” itself disappeared from the media landscape decades ago, there’s now an ideal way to rediscover it: “This Is Buzz,” a new documentary Pellington directed that takes a deep dive into the history, making, and reception of “Buzz” and uses it as a springboard to examine larger issues having to do with media literacy and the way we consume information. The documentary will have its public premiere this weekend at the Montclair Film Festival on its way to a U.S. theatrical release from Anchor Bay, who Pellington is working with to create forms of exhibition that mirror the audacity of “Buzz.”
“We have ideas for immersive experiences,” Pellington said. “Like remix the show live, use VHS decks with feeds from Handycam outputs, and other analog artifacts.” Pellington and his collaborators, including executive producer (and former IndieWire editor) Eric Kohn are also discussing ways they can use a volume stage to incorporate not only multiple images but live music and contributions from modern collage artists to expand the boundaries of “This Is Buzz” itself.
That said, the 102-minute “This Is Buzz” stands on its own as one of the best documentaries of 2025, a movie about the late 1980s and early 1990s that’s also — without forcing the parallels — very much a movie about today that raises questions about both the past and the future of TV news. It’s a topic that’s been on Pellington’s mind throughout the nearly five years he’s been working on “This Is Buzz.”
“John came out of broadcast network news, and how much longer is that going to be around?” Pellington asked. “Not long.” Unfortunately, Pellington also sees the form of the music video, where he made a name for himself as an innovator after applying its techniques to “Buzz,” as similarly doomed. “I think we might look back in 10 years at music videos as a form that died, and that makes me sad.”
Yet the tone of “This Is Buzz” is not one of elegy but celebration and inspiration, as it captures Klein, Pellington, and partners in crime like composers tomandandy at a moment when they took their medium and ran with it. “‘Buzz’ was very reckless, and as freeform as the music videos were,” Pellington said, adding that the decision to make the documentary grew organically out of discussions with Film Threat founder Chris Gore (an early subject on “Buzz”) during COVID rather than out of any desire to traffic in nostalgia.
“He said, ‘You should do ‘Buzz’ again,” Pellington said. “I thought that was kind of crazy, but then I thought, maybe I could do a documentary on ‘Buzz.’ I had noticed over the years that everything had become more like ‘Buzz’ — like, there are attacks in Syria and everybody knows what’s going on instantly with this global news compression and internet culture. The world kind of caught up to what we were doing in terms of technology and globalism.”
Over the next several years, Pellington and producer Liza Hughes (who worked on the original show) put the documentary together piece by piece, conducting interviews with Klein, people who worked at MTV or on the show, and fans and critics like U2 and Gore. His one fear was that licensing the rights to the original series would be cost-prohibitive, given that they were owned by corporate behemoth Viacom. When he found out that he could use 50 minutes of footage for just $10,000, though, Pellington was off and running.
In keeping with the DIY spirit of “Buzz,” Pellington kept his team lean and mean, relying on a core group of collaborators that included Kohn and co-producer Ian Tellechea, editor Mairi Utno, composers and sound designers Andy Snavley and Andy Milburn, and Fred Salkind, who was responsible for the documentary’s visual effects and motion graphics. The end result of their work is a rallying cry for filmmakers pushing against calcified thinking and conventional wisdom — and unsurprisingly, Pellington says that working on the documentary put him back in touch with the fearless twentysomething maverick inside of him.
“It reinvigorated me in a good way,” Pellington said of reworking his old footage during the COVID lockdown. “It really made me feel no different than when I was 25. I’m just going to keep experimenting.”
“This Is Buzz” will premiere at the Montclair Film Festival on Saturday, October 18 with an encore presentation on Sunday, October 19. Pellington will participate in Q&As following both screenings.
