"But leclisse...hardly anyone knows about the Loud family. Why in Gods name would you be posting such a trivial early seventies television program? So what if An American Family was the very first reality show ever, Lance Loud was the first openly gay person in the history of American television, and the program foreshadowed the ever-so-slow degradation of consumer based American society. That's boring!"
"Whatever..."
Here's An American Family. Welcome to the American Dream!
LoveAndSqualor's editorial note: We posted the first three episodes a while back, and then had some trouble uploading the rest of them to Megavideo. They're all streaming now, along with links for downloading.
The VHS rip quality is godawful, but it's still substantially better than the other versions out there. We will upgrade when we can (apparently, the library at NYU has a set of DVDs sourced from the masters, so if anyone has access and could make us a copy, we would be very very appreciative...)
leclisse note: This is a complete re-working of our older post, pre-Cinema Verite. I cannot believe what a crappy Lance Loud HBO got for the part. They (HBO) made the horrid mistake of giving the bad actor a David Cassidy hair-do too, and Lance would have never been caught dead with a David Cassidy hair-do. Did they not bother to watch the original program? Other than the Lance mis-step and the poor dialogue handed to James Gandolfini, Cinema Verite was a very interesting program. Tim Robbins and the oh-so-beautiful Diane Lane were the perfect Bill and Pat Loud.
For all you young retards out there in RetardLand that thought The Real Life was the first reality show...well...you were sadly mistaken. We have An American Family to thank, or curse.
From subci.com:
An American Family was television's first reality show, shot documentary style in 1971 and first aired in the United States on PBS in 1973. The show was twelve episodes long, edited down from about 300 hours of footage, and chronicled the experience of a nuclear family, the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, during a period of time when parents Bill and Pat Loud separated (in a infamous and powerful on-camera sequence) and Pat filed for divorce.
The Louds had five children. One of them, Lance, was a gay 20-year-old man who occasionally wore lipstick and women's clothes and took his mother to a drag show in the second episode of the series. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel during its Warholesque heydey and this is captured in the second episode (Holly Woodlawn was his neighbor and appears in several scenes, along with Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and other famous drag queens of the time). Scholars sometimes mention that Lance came out of the closet on TV, but this is technically incorrect — he was simply gay without announcement or drama; his family says that they had known for quite a while. As such, Lance was the first openly gay character on television and has become something of a gay icon.
On airing, the show drew over 10 million viewers — phenomenal viewership for PBS in 1973 (or even presently) — and drew considerable controversy. The series was widely discussed in the media in 1973, and the Loud family appeared on the cover of the March 12, 1973 issue of Newsweek magazine.
In 1983, PBS broadcast AMERICAN FAMILY REVISITED, and in 2003 PBS broadcast A DEATH IN AN AMERICAN FAMILY, shot in 2001, visiting Lance and his family again at Lance's request. Lance was 50 years old, had gone through 20 years of addiction to crystal meth, and was HIV positive and dying of hepatitis C. In the winter of 2001, a few months after 9/11, Lance Loud was gone. Far from a conventional "happy ending", watching the entire arc of this brilliant masterpiece from start to finish is unforgettable: Lance's downfall from a young, vibrant and magnetically alive kid in 1973, to a man reaching middle age in 1983 (with shorter hair but still cheerful) to the incredibly painful final images of him in 2001(at the age of 50), walking with a cane, losing teeth, looking like a non-survivor of a concentration camp ... it is a truly shattering experience.
Technical Information:
Show Title: An American Family
Year: 1973
Country: USA
Source: VHS rip
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .avi
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 368x272
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG 4 @ ~848 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: English- MP3 Stereo @ 99 kb/s
Subtitles: None
Episode: 01
Size: 355 MB
Length: 0:58:33
Episode 01 Megaupload Link
Episode: 02
Size: 346 MB
Length: 0:59:10
Episode 02 Megaupload Link
Episode: 03
Size: 332 MB
Length: 0:58:18
Episode 03 Megaupload Link
Episode: 04
Size: 370 MB
Length: 0:58:53
Episode 04 Megaupload Link
Episode: 05
Size: 369 MB
Length: 0:58:41
Episode 05 Megaupload Link
Episode: 06
Size: 332 MB
Length: 0:58:04
Episode 06 Megaupload Link
Episode: 07
Size: 336 MB
Length: 0:58:26
Episode 07 Megaupload Link
Episode: 08
Size: 364 MB
Length: 0:59:03
Episode 08 Megaupload Link
Episode:09
Size: 288 MB
Length: 0:58:48
Episode 09 Megaupload Link
Episode: 10
Size: 414 MB
Length: 0:58:21
Episode 10 Megaupload Link
Episode: 11
Size: 353 MB
Length: 0:58:27
Episode 11 Megaupload Link
Episode: 12
Size: 349 MB
Length: 0:58:33
Episode 12 Megaupload Link
Technical Information:
Show Title: An American Family
Episode: Revisited: The Louds 10 Years Later
Year: 1983
Country: USA
Source: VHS rip
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .avi
Size: 297 MB
Length: 0:55:38
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 384x288
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG 4 @ ~747 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: English- MP3 Stereo @ 104 kb/s
Subtitles: None
The Louds 10 Years Later Megaupload Link
Technical Information:
Show Title: An American Family
Episode: Lance Loud: A Death in an American Family
Year: 2003
Country: USA
Source: VHS rip
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .avi
Size: 405 MB
Length: 0:56:57
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 384x288
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG 4 @ ~994 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: English- MP3 Stereo @ 104 kb/s
Subtitles: None
A Death in an American Family Megaupload Link
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Complete Series Megaupload Links