I am about to cost some of you a helluva lot of time. I mean like many, many hours of your life.
For some years now, the Archive of American Television has been videotaping oral histories of important people in the field of TV. They've logged thousands of hours of these interviews and now they're making them available on the Internet, over on the Google Video site. Hundreds are already posted with more to come. Wanna watch several hours of Joe Barbera being interrogated by Leonard Maltin? It's there. What's more, the interviews seem to be raw, unedited footage with false starts, delays, technical errors and everything included for those of you who like that kind of thing.
This page tells about the project but the best way to find these interviews and watch 'em seems to be to go to the Google Video page and do this search. Most of the interviews seem to be in several parts and in some cases, they seem to have not posted all the parts yet. For example, right now they have Part 5 and Part 6 of their Dick Van Dyke interview up but not the earlier pieces. More uploads, as I mentioned, are promised.
Here, just to get you started, are a couple of more direct links…
- Carl Reiner (eight parts)
- Sid Caesar (six parts)
- Buffalo Bob Smith (six parts)
- Dick Clark (three parts)
- Joe Barbera (seven parts, one of which doesn't seem to be up yet)
- James Garner (six parts)
- Florence Henderson (ten parts!!!)
Before you emotionally commit to any of this, remember that some of these interviews run more than four hours and there's a load of dull, repetitive material in them…but there's also a ton of show biz history so go exploring. I've just barely started my browsing so I'm not certain what's in some of them.