North Hollywood : TV Archive to House Clips of the Greats

Trying to preserve video dialogues with industry legends including David Brinkley, Johnny Carson and Oprah Winfrey, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences is establishing an Archive of American Television.

The project will document conversations with television producers, stars, executive directors and writers. A $50,000 pilot program of four or five interviews will begin within 60 days.

“We expect that this archive will win the immediate emotional, intellectual and financial support of the entire industry,” said academy President Richard H. Frank. “The world has already lost too many television greats whose conversations would have been magnificent to preserve.”

The honorary chairmen of the Archive of American Television Committee, producers Grant Tinker and David L. Wolper, are trying to raise an initial $1 million to fund the project’s development beyond the pilot phase. The project is inspired by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation’s videotaping of memories and conversations with Holocaust survivors.

The TV archive’s interviews will be preserved in a multimedia database in the academy’s Lankershim Boulevard location in North Hollywood. The information will be available to the public in schools and libraries via the Internet, CD-ROMS and other media.

There are already hundreds of legends on the wish list for archive conversations, among them living Television Academy Hall of Fame honorees, including Milton Berle, Bill Cosby, Mary Tyler Moore and Barbara Walters.