1973 PBS series ‘An American Family’ matters to new HBO film ‘Cinema Verite’

Forty long years ago this spring, the public television station in New York, WNET, hired a film crew to move in with the upper-middle-class William C. Loud family of Santa Barbara, Calif., to intimately record the daily routines and mini-dramas of Bill, a mining entrepreneur, his wife, Pat, and their five children. The idea was to show, in the purest documentary style possible, what a 20th-century family looked like.

The filming lasted several months — long enough for the Louds to get used to the camera’s presence and become far more honest than anyone could have predicted — and reportedly amassed more footage than was ever shot of World War II. That was then edited into the 12-episode series “An American Family,” a sensational hit for PBS stations, which aired it in early 1973. It remains one of television’s most memorable and emotionally conflicted events.

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By the ninth episode, Pat had filed for divorce and asked Bill to leave, as three of the couple’s teenagers glumly looked askance. American viewers, hitherto raised on the “Ozzie and Harriet” narrative principle, were at once riveted and deeply disturbed. Rather than criticize the producers (or the editing), they directed their scorn toward the Louds themselves, the brunt of which landed on oldest son Lance, a hippie-era dandy who was seen moving to New York and flouncing all over the West Village before running off to Paris (another film crew in tow), giving viewers their first good look at an actual homosexual.

Reality TV was thus born.

Or that’s the simplest theme conveyed by HBO’s “Cinema Verite” (airing Saturday night), an intriguing but often clumsy new movie about the making of the TV show. Through the magic of dramatization, the film blows the dust off the Louds’ 15 minutes of fame for the purpose of ushering viewers through a hall of media mirrors.

Though advertised as an introduction to Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s rightful TV ancestors, “Cinema Verite” gets too busy too fast, simplifying and overlooking much of what initially made “An American Family” the sociological treasure trove it still is.

Here, actual footage from “An American Family” occasionally merges with “Cinema Verite’s” behind-the-scenes story of how the show came to be. In the lead role of Pat Loud, Diane Lane is easily the film’s strongest asset, bringing back Pat’s giant Jackie O. sunglasses and constant scotch-and-sodas — the same way Pat herself dominated the original series and gave the whole thing a hazy, Joan Didionesque, California ennui.

To watch the original series (which you definitely should if possible — more on that in a moment) is to wonder why the Louds ever agreed to do it in the first place.

“Cinema Verite” offers simple human vanity as explanation — the same reason given nowadays for all those women who proffer themselves at “The Bachelor’s” sacrificial altar — but also journalistic seduction: A New York producer, Craig Gilbert (played here by James Gandolfini), arrives in Santa Barbara in search of a “typical” yet appealingly telegenic family willing to be filmed for several months. He claims to want pure, unfiltered, documentary reality.