In 1995, television executive Dean Valentine visited the newly-formed Survivors of the Shoah History Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg to memorialize the oral histories of holocaust survivors. He was so moved by these first-person accounts and wondered why the same effort was not being done to preserve the history of the television medium.
He pitched the idea to Richard Frank, then president of the Television Academy. The first interview captured as part of a pilot project was with founder and Chairman of ABC, Leonard H. Goldenson on May 14, 1996, and The Archive of American Television was born. Almost 30 years later and nearly 1,000 interviews later, The Interviews: An Oral History of Television, continues to collect, preserve, and make accessible the stories of TV’s changemakers, one voice at a time, as a program of The Television Academy Foundation.
