Ultimate Soap Opera

In many ways An American Family is a soap opera. The father, William Loud, 50, is a handsome, successful businessman in flossy Santa Barbara, Calif. The mother, Pat, 45, is equally handsome, with a touch of sophistication her husband lacks. Their five children--Lance, 20; Kevin, 18; Grant, 17; Delilah, 16; and Michele, 14--are bright, good-looking and almost unanimously articulate.

Since no soap opera is complete without anguish, the Loud family has its troubles. Eldest son Lance has migrated to New York to join the gay community. As the twelve episodes of Family unfold on the TV screen, Bill's business runs into serious financial problems. Finally, toward the middle of the series, Pat and Bill decide to get a divorce.

Yet if An American Family, whose first episode premiered on the Public Broadcasting System last week--and which will run on consecutive Thursdays through March--is a soap opera, it is surely the ultimate soap opera. For the Louds are real people. They allowed themselves to be photographed for seven months--from late May through December 1971--by various teams from New York. All in all, to produce twelve hours for the TV viewer, some 300 hours were filmed at a total cost of more than $1,200,000, which was underwritten by the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The show was the idea of Producer Craig Gilbert. He took three months and discarded about 50 candidates before deciding on the Louds, but he quickly disclaims any intention of shooting a "typical" American family. Still, he says, "any family living in America in 1971 was subject to certain cultural pressures that were universal."

Shocked. The television audience may or may not agree--and in any case may not care. An American Family is extraordinarily interesting to watch. But the Louds, collectively and individually, have been shocked by the film. "I think they have dealt badly with our honor and trust," complains Pat. Craig Gilbert "left out all the joyous, happy hours of communication and fun." "It's a caricature," says Lance, who is already writing his own version of the filming. "My father is perpetrated as a stagger-on drunk and I'm shown as a swish-on."

In truth, the Louds are in some ways far from typical. For one thing, Bill Loud owns his own business, which sells replacement parts for strip-mining equipment, and his family is a whole lot richer than all but a small percentage of Americans. For another, the Louds permitted the filming. But anyone who has ever raised children, or who can remember his own childhood, will feel a shock of recognition seeing Gilbert's film. "It was a terrific family in many ways," says Alan Raymond, who shot most of the scenes. "Both Pat and Bill tried to be good parents."

How did the camera itself affect the Louds? No one knows for sure, though a likely guess is that various forms of self-consciousness toned down the family's language and the drama on occasion. As to the divorce, Photographer Raymond thinks that it was inevitable, and the family so far has not disagreed.

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