TV Academy Spotlight Is Focused on the Future

Following the hoopla surrounding the Emmy Awards presentation, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences returns its focus to the other issues facing the organization in 1988: the construction of a new academy headquarters, the recent opening of its new television library and the formation of a new committee to track the fast-changing world of television and explore ways for the academy to keep up with it.

Doug Duitsman, a Warner Bros. publicity executive who became president of the academy last October, said in an interview that ground is soon to be broken on a new development to which the academy will relocate. The academy, currently housed on West Olive Avenue in Burbank, will become tenants in a North Hollywood complex at the intersection of Lankershim and Magnolia boulevards when it is completed in two years, Duitsman said.

Duitsman said the building should provide a more spacious headquarters for its new library, which opened four months ago at the Burbank headquarters. The academy has already spent $50,000 on the as-yet-unnamed library, and needs to raise $7 million to complete it.

Duitsman added that unlike UCLA’s 15-year-old Film and Television Archives, which houses films and videotapes, the academy’s library would be the TV industry’s answer to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’ 58-year-old Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, which provides books, clipping, photos and other printed material to researchers.

“The Herrick Library is all for it--they get so many calls for TV material, and they don’t have it,” Duitsman said.

Although UCLA’s Library of Theater Arts, the American Film Institute and other Los Angeles libraries have small television departments, “We need one central location,” Duitsman said, adding that the academy hopes to stop the drain of archival material from Hollywood to university communications libraries nationwide.

In other preparations for the future, the academy recently named independent producer and former NBC president Grant Tinker as chairman of its future study committee to bring together industry professionals to consider the relationship of the networks, cable TV, videocassettes and other viewing alternatives 10 or 20 years down the line.

“With cable coming up so quickly, the structure of our academy will have to be entirely different,” Duitsman said.