This week’s Made Possible By… takes you back to the dawn of public television, an era quite different from today. “We didn’t have to worry about sponsors, we didn’t have to worry about ratings at the time,” says Alvin Perlmutter. “It was an open field, and we were open-field runners. Every once in a while we’d make a touchdown, every once in a while we’d fumble, and do something we wish we hadn’t done, but you learn along the way, and if you aren’t in a position to make mistakes, then you’re not going to come up with something worthwhile.”
Perlmutter is an award-winning documentary producer who was instrumental in creating some of public television’s most defining programs, including The Great American Dream Machine, Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth and many programs with Bill Moyers. He’s interviewed here by Sasha Schechter, a producer for WLIW and WNET in New York City.
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