Sam’s Cafe: A Media Inversion

This tape documents the activities of and media response to the Sam’s Cafe Three (David Schier, Marc Keyser, and Terri Keyser), a group that created several dramatic publicity stunts in order to demonstrate that the new way of protesting effectively should be by utilizing the media itself. The group sent out fake utility collection notices to 20,000 people in the Bay area with the return address of a local TV station and also sent excrement to local news media offices. Sam’s Cafe member Marc Keyser explains, “This is a work of art and it’s a sample of the inversion of mass media. Now this has begun and it stopped. Next time when the inversion of mass media begins, it will not stop.” It is an exciting and humorous look at a moment in time when the one-way flow of information through television was under heavy critique and the new technologies of portable video cameras and cable television seemed to offer an alternative.