Marion Stokes had a strange habit. While most people just watched TV and forgot about it, she thought something bad was happening. In 1975, she bought a Betamax video recorder and began taping shows. She recorded bits of sitcoms, nature programs, and news. What started small turned into a project that took over her whole life.
Everything changed on November 4, 1979. That day, news about the Iran Hostage Crisis started playing on TV, according to Atlas Obscura. Stokes pressed record on her machine. Her son Michael Metelits said later in a film about her life called Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project that “she hit record and she never stopped.” From that moment until she died in 2012, Stokes taped TV all day and all night. She captured news shows, ads, talk shows, and everything else on different channels.
