I haven't seen either An American Family (I don't recall why I didn't watch any of it when it was on PBS years ago) or The Real World (which I don't think any Canadian broadcaster has picked up), though I have an idea of both. Interestingly, there are precedents for both in the work of Canadian filmmaker Allan King. After Warrendale, his famous (and notorious, since it was suppressed by the CBC, which had financed it) direct cinema documentary on a centre for emotionally disturbed kids, he made A Married Couple, probably his most famous film. For that project, he arranged to film a Toronto couple (and their son and their dog) for some length of time, and then edited the hours of footage that resulted down to a feature-length film that showed quite widely. Alan Rosenthal interviewed King, along with his cinemato- grapher Richard Leiterman and editor Arla Saare, and included their discussions as a dossier on A Married Couple in his book, The New Documentary in Action. There are obviously correspondences between King's project and the series on the Louds. The feature that King made after A Married Couple, however, which relates to The Real World, is less well-known. Come On Children (as in the chorus of Bob Dylan's "Percy's Song") documents and forms part of something of a social experiment. For the purposes of the film, King created something of a commune. He selected a group of young people -- all strangers to each other, I believe -- and installed them in a rural house, planning to film whatever ensued. Well, teenagers being what they were like in the early 1970s (having been one at that time myself, I write with at least a little authority), they didn't prove as conventionally dramatic as the Edwardses of A Married Couple had. I'm not sure of the details, but Come On Children, which was completed in 1972, barely circulated at all. In retrospect, and perhaps predictably, it's an interesting film, though as much for the question of documentary ethics and practices as for any- thing having to do with the purported subject of youth culture and the utopian goals of the counterculture. As a sidebar, because this doesn't have as much to do directly with The Real World, King returned to a variation on this method some ten years later for a video production titled Who's In Charge? He convened a conference of unemployed people and several professional "consultants," and recorded the discussion that followed in different types of group sessions. Presumed to be a program about unemployment and the unemployed, it was at least as much about the interaction of people working in groups and the power relations involved in such a process. We set up a study collection of King's films and television programs. (I hasten to add that our holdings don't circulate, though they're available for consultation.) Allan has made noises over the past couple of years about making films like Warrendale and A Married Couple (which made his reputation, even though they haven't made his income for many years) available on video, though I haven't heard anything lately on the matter. Blaine Allan [log in to unmask] Film Studies Queen's University Kingston, Ontario Canada K7L 3N6