I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was very much an only child who was raised by the television and movies, and I grew up in New York. We weren't, like, rich people, but we were middle-class people and my parents supported this love I had for entertainment.
Just watching TV as a kid, for a long time I thought, as a young kid, obviously when I was, like, 4 or 5, I thought that people lived in the television.
I grew up on the golden age of children's TV.
I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
When you watch the sitcoms that were the big hits when I was growing up, TV was still just TV. It was allowed to just be TV. There were three channels that were competing for the whole family and you couldn't take your business elsewhere.
It's interesting: I went 25 years without watching a single television show. I was one of those people, because I was so inside how a television show was made, if I would turn on somebody else's show, I would sit there and analyze it, like, 'Oh, so they had four hours in this location and had to get out and the number of set-ups, etc.'
I started working in the mid-to-late Seventies, when television was not what it is now.
I did not, like my children and people today, grow up with television as part of my life.
When I grew up, we didn't have a TV, and I think more families today have ambitions of getting out of their environment, such as sending their children to university.
We didn't really have television when I was a kid. Around 30, I discovered films and started systematically catching up. I collect interesting documentaries and films, and watch a few nights a week.