Come on down!
Television lovers can now binge watch interviews about its own rich history
Diahann Carroll recalls a date with Marlon Brando that yielded a slap and career advice. Robert Adler tells how he coinvented the TV remote control. Walter Cronkite shares his dismay over learning that White House pressure trimmed a CBS report on Watergate.
Their accounts are part of an extraordinary collection of 4,000plus hours of video Q&As recorded over more than two decades by the Television Academy Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, organizer of the primetime Emmy Awards.
A new website has made the full collection of 895 interviews — and counting — available free to all comers, who can watch complete interviews or search the curated treasure trove by individuals, shows, events, themes and more. Even such minutiae as the origin of TV catchphrases including “Come on down!” from The Price is Right is there.
The Interviews: An Oral History of Television (TelevisionAcademy. com/Interviews) is a browser’s delight. You can listen to producer Chris Carter’s account of making The X-Files, or home in on how he cast Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny.
“The arrangement is key,” said archive director Jenni Matz. “I’ve done research at the Library of Congress where they just point to a box and say, ‘Dig.’ “What we’ve done is we’ve really dug through it for you, and we’ve sifted it and sorted it out and made it acceptable and searchable.” Judd Apatow is an unabashed archive fan.
“I just love it,” the producerwriter (Freaks and Geeks, Girls) said, calling its in-depth, hourslong interviews the “definitive record of people’s careers and their feeling about it and approach to their work.”
The website was the mid-1990s vision of industry leaders including Dean Valentine and Thomas W. Sarnoff, who believed that firstperson accounts of TV as a business, a creative medium and the national town hall deserved to be saved and, ultimately, made readily available to scholars, aspiring industry members or anyone with an interest in what TV is and who makes it.
The archive has its roots in another, deeply sombre one: the Shoah project, a University of Southern California-housed repository of meticulously cross-referenced interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses founded in 1994 by Steven Spielberg.
There is no comparison between ensuring a record of Nazi inhumanity and the story of an industry, Valentine said, but it brought home what the passing of TV’s founders meant.
“With their loss, memories of what happened in the early days of television and the creative ferment would be gone, too,” he said.
He took his idea for a TV archive to Rich Frank, then president of the TV academy, and to Sarnoff, who was foundation chairman. Sarnoff, now 91, had a particular reason to value the medium’s history: his father, David Sarnoff, pioneered the development of TV and created NBC, the first broadcasting network.
In 1996, the foundation taped six “pilot” interviews.
The subjects demonstrate the archive’s wide range from the start: comedian Milton Berle; ABC founder Leonard Goldenson; makeup artist Dick Smith; Elma “Pem” Farnsworth, widow of TV technology inventor Philo Farnsworth; producer Sheldon Leonard; and casting director and network executive Ethel Winant.