Forgive the year-long radio silence here, but I’ve been busy finishing the manuscript. And I now have good news to report: the press editors replied with very positive feedback and very helpful (and manageable) revision suggestions. After I implement the fixes, the peer review process will follow, so let’s hope those folks (especially infamous Reviewer #2) like it just as much. #knockonwood #nojinx
Meanwhile, I’ve settled on the full book title I’d like to go with: Beyond Our Control: South Bend’s TV Brats.
Credit is owed to my genius film historian husband Christopher Sieving for the subtitle idea (so if you hate it, it’s all his fault). And to make clear that it doesn’t mean BOCers were either ungrateful little punks or sausages, here’s what I wrote in the introduction to explain it:
- The dividend generated from adults safeguarding and centering youth creativity and initiative is at the heart of every chapter, and it underlies the book’s title. The company’s name, Beyond Our Control, is a thesis in itself. BOC was about control: wrestling it from television, handing it to teenagers, containing the fallout when they lost it, and learning from both the wins and the wobbles. Adolescents rightly feel like so many of life’s benefits are just beyond their reach, but BOC bestowed agency in letting them portray grown-up absurdities to the adult world. The model Dave Williams designed also put them just outside of the full grasp of their enablers: sneaking onto WNDU what an adult group likely couldn’t, skirting many of Junior Achievement’s rules, and running around South Bend with a camera and nominal supervision.
That logic carries into the subtitle: South Bend’s TV Brats. The label plays on the famous “movie brats” tag, which was coined in 1979 by Michael Pye and Lynda Myles about a cohort of insurgent young Hollywood filmmakers.(1) Rather than working their way up through the studio system as their forebears did, the movie brats went to film school or took command of cameras on their own before revolutionizing a stagnant industry with genre masterpieces like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, popular hits like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, and arthouse gems like Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. What BOCers achieved was, in some ways, even more radical, with its much younger members working in a medium with far tighter constraints and narrower horizons. In another neat symmetry, Pye and Myles called studio lots that the movie brats invaded “a playground.” So was WNDU.
“TV brats” also points toward BOC’s method, parody as impish media criticism. Like the movie brats who learned as much of their craft in movie theaters as on sets, BOCers learned television by watching it and then taking its tools into their own hands. Pye and Myles said of the movie brats, “they know the past of cinema like scholars; they grew with it and through it. In their world anything can refer back to movies.” Swap in television, and you have BOC. They were also inspired by movie brat films and even parodied them, as in 1978’s “Son of Jed,” a Taxi Driver send-up with a Beverly Hillbillies twist, and 1979’s “Jaws of Fury,” an epic mash-up of Jaws and Brian De Palma’s The Fury with some of De Palma’s Carrie sprinkled in.(2) The result was part entertainment, part formal revolution, just like their Hollywood counterparts forged. But another major difference is recognition: Coppola and company became venerated in film history, while BOC’s collection of TV makers remains unheralded, their surviving work buried on YouTube. Yet Beyond Our Control’s impact endures in everything from the media its alumni subsequently made to the media literacy, humor, and intellectual prowess carried forth anywhere they went after being in the company.
[1] Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979).
[2] BOC 1977-78, “Son of Jed,” posted September 15, 2009, by David Simkins, YouTube, 6:22, https://youtu.be/Z_qBbabfyJc; BOC 1978-79 “Jaws of Fury,” posted June 26, 2025, by Steve Wyant, YouTube, 23:15, https://youtu.be/n5IQQNJqR4g.