Norman Lear
Norman Lear
Norman Milton Lear is an American television writer and producer who produced such 1970s sitcoms as All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times, and Maude. As a political activist, he founded the advocacy organization People for the American Way in 1981 and has supported First Amendment rights and progressive causes...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Producer
Date of Birth27 July 1922
CityNew Haven, CT
CountryUnited States of America
When something is over, it is over...
Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don't collect all these tiny successes, the big ones don't really mean anything.
We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.
It seems to me that any full grown, mature adult would have a desire to be responsible, to help where he can in a world that needs so very much, that threatens us so very much.
We did an episode on Good Times which came out of a newspaper article about the incidence of hypertension in black males being higher than whites, and increasing. So we did a show in which James, the father on Good Times, had hypertension.
The American people may not be the best-educated, but they're very wise at heart.
It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared - we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring - the more they cared, the harder they laughed.
So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.
The evidence seems clear that those business which actively serve their many constitutencies in creative, morally thoughtful ways also, over the long run, serve their shareholders best. Companies do, infact, do well by doing good.
But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.
When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain.
Life is about having a good time, and it was a good time. We did some things well and some things poorly, but that was always the case.
Nobody doubts my partisanship, but a lot of the activity is nonpartisan.
Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.