{"id":538,"date":"2026-07-17T21:32:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T01:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/?p=538"},"modified":"2026-07-18T00:44:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T04:44:18","slug":"the-book-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/2026\/07\/17\/the-book-title\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book Title"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Forgive the year-long radio silence here, but I&#8217;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&#8217;s hope those folks (especially infamous Reviewer #2) like it just as much. #knockonwood #nojinx <br><br>Meanwhile, I&#8217;ve settled on the full book title I&#8217;d like to go with: <em>Beyond Our Control: South Bend&#8217;s TV Brats<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Credit is owed to my genius film historian husband Christopher Sieving for the subtitle idea (so if you hate it, it&#8217;s all his fault). And to make clear that it doesn&#8217;t mean BOCers were either ungrateful little punks or sausages, here&#8217;s what I wrote in the introduction to explain it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group shift-block\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The dividend generated from adults safeguarding and centering youth creativity and initiative is at the heart of every chapter, and it underlies the book\u2019s title. The company\u2019s name, <em>Beyond Our Control<\/em>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019t, skirting many of Junior Achievement\u2019s rules, and running around South Bend with a camera and nominal supervision.<br><br>That logic carries into the subtitle: <em>South Bend\u2019s TV Brats<\/em>. The label plays on the famous \u201cmovie brats\u201d tag, which was coined in 1979 by Michael Pye and Lynda Myles about a cohort of insurgent young Hollywood filmmakers.<sup>(1) <\/sup>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\u2019s <em>The Godfather<\/em>, popular hits like Steven Spielberg\u2019s <em>Jaws<\/em>, and arthouse gems like Martin Scorsese\u2019s <em>Taxi Driver<\/em>. 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 \u201ca playground.\u201d So was WNDU.<br><br>\u201cTV brats\u201d also points toward BOC&#8217;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, \u201cthey know the past of cinema like scholars; they grew with it and through it. In their world anything can refer back to movies.\u201d Swap in television, and you have BOC. They were also inspired by movie brat films and even parodied them, as in 1978\u2019s \u201cSon of Jed,\u201d a <em>Taxi Driver<\/em> send-up with a <em>Beverly Hillbillies<\/em> twist, and 1979\u2019s \u201cJaws of Fury,\u201d an epic mash-up of <em>Jaws<\/em> and Brian De Palma\u2019s <em>The Fury<\/em> with some of De Palma\u2019s <em>Carrie<\/em> sprinkled in.<sup>(2) <\/sup>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\u2019s collection of TV makers remains unheralded, their surviving work buried on YouTube. Yet <em>Beyond Our Control<\/em>\u2019s 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\" \/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" id=\"_ftn1\"><sup>[1]<\/sup><\/a> Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, <em>The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood<\/em> (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"#_ftnref4\" id=\"_ftn4\"><sup>[2]<\/sup><\/a> BOC 1977-78, \u201cSon of Jed,\u201d posted September 15, 2009, by David Simkins, YouTube, 6:22, <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/Z_qBbabfyJc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/youtu.be\/Z_qBbabfyJc<\/a>; BOC 1978-79&nbsp; \u201cJaws of Fury,\u201d posted June 26, 2025, by Steve Wyant, YouTube, 23:15, <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/n5IQQNJqR4g\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/youtu.be\/n5IQQNJqR4g<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forgive the year-long radio silence here, but I&#8217;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&#8217;s hope those folks (especially infamous Reviewer [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":559,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-info"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/559"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":562,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538\/revisions\/562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/boc-project\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}