 My name's Luigi Scarcelli. We got a great show for you tonight. I have a gentleman here with me via Zoom. I think he's out in California. Is that correct? Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. Oceanside, California. Yeah, that's the weather is there. I bet it's a lot better than it is here. Sheldon Atfeld. Sheldon, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for being on my show. I appreciate it. Oh, my pleasure. Sure, sure. So Sheldon has a long and storied career in Hollywood, but you were born in Chicago. Is that correct? That's correct. My parents didn't like the weather in Chicago. And so when I was four, we moved to California and I found that we were living in the midst of Hollywood and on the corner of Willoughby and Vine Street in Hollywood and everybody on that block worked at the studios. So everybody was in show business there and I was five years old and that's what started me thinking about show business and I worked from there. Sure. When I was 13, I thought I was going to be an actor and I was hired to do a short piece of a television show and after my little part was over, I walked into the booth where the director was directing the rest of the show and I watched what was going on. And then I walked when he had a break, I walked over and I said, you know, if you moved that camera over there and this light over here, I think you'd get a better picture. And he turned around and he said, listen, if you want to do a show, get your own show. And he threw me out of the office and that's what started me to become a producer and director. And so what was interesting about that, he was saying that not to you to really get you excited about doing your own show, but it was kind of a get out of here. You think you got, you know, but you took that as an opportunity to and how this is when you were a younger person, right? I was 13, 13 years old. And so you thought well, so you know, it got to a point where what I learned early was it is not going to be successful with just a ball and a bat. You need to own the ballpark. So what happened was I walked out of there and I bumped into a guy named, what was his name? He was one of the guys that lived on Willoughby Avenue and he and I teamed up and we came up with a children's show called Let's Play Like. And what we did was gather half a dozen young children, seven, eight, nine years old, and we would tell them a story and then we would take a break and told them, okay, you're going to be the king, you're going to be the queen and so on. And now go back and from the story we told you earlier, let's do the show. And they did the production from what they remembered in the first part of the show. And that was a pretty popular show for a long time on what was then the early PBS programming. And that got me really interested in how television works and what we can accomplish and so on and so forth. Flash forward to the creation of the silent network. In 1979 I was invited to see a production of Equus that was being done by students at Cal State, Cal State Northridge College. And so I went to see the show because I liked, I know Equus was on Broadway at that time so I wanted to see the show anyway. And I walked into the theater and there were nothing but people signing, using American sign language. And I found out that the entire cast was deaf. Everybody in the show was deaf. And they performed so brilliantly. And the show was so good that I told the mother of the yajinu in the play, I want to take this show to a real theater. So I leased the Panadres Theater in Hollywood. And I opened Equus with the same cast, all deaf people with voices that were provided behind the scenes so that hearing people in the audience could hear it. And everything else was done in sign language. And we did very well. The show went well. The actors were thrilled. And then one of the big theaters out of downtown Los Angeles, the director came and watched Equus. And he said, when I asked him what he thought, he said, you know, I need that actor and I need that actor and I need that actor. So he stole most of my actors. And he was doing another show in his theater that needed deaf people. It was part of the character. And that show was called Children of a Lesser God. And so he took my cast and they went to Broadway. They were in two years in New York. Then they went to London. Then they went to other countries. And so in the meantime, the yajinu in Equus had a mother who had trained her daughter, who was very deaf, to function properly, to how to speak properly, how to function, period. And she and I got together and talked about what could be done for the deaf community, because nobody really wants to do anything. They were not interested in deaf people. So she and I spent a year planning out a network that would be of some value to deaf people and hearing people as well. Because when it goes on television, it's going to have multiple audiences going to hearing and deaf and so on and so forth. So we came up with the idea of a network that dealt with sign language entertainment. So that's S-I for sign, L for language, and E-N-T for entertainment. And that word is silent. Right, right, right. So that's where the word silent came from. And can I ask you a couple of questions about that? So in those days, because this was again, you're saying in about 1970, this all came about? 79. And this was before, I mean, before there was the kind of cable that could have, was there the ability to have, yeah, so you couldn't have subtitles really yet, right? So this is definitely finding a need. Actually, we did have subtitles. There is a company that was doing titles on, if you hired them. And so we got them to do subtitles as well as voice. We didn't cut the voice off. So there were actors that spoke and actors that signed and what have you. And we started with four half-hour shows that we could put together and at least get our feet wet and figure out whether or not this was going to work. And this was the era of cable. Cable was the big thing. And I managed to find somebody that would give us two hours in the seven o'clock in the morning. And we were able to put our shows in front of an audience. And this went on for about three months. And in that three-month period, at the end of that period, I did a research to find out who was watching. Because we were on this borrowed cable system. And we had three million viewers. And then as time progressed, it went further. When I sold the network after 10 years, we were in 20 million homes. Yeah. So the question I had as well, though, is there was a way to get subtitles in those days specifically. But it was still early for just the average guy who maybe had a sibling or somebody they knew to be able to just do that on cable. Right? I mean, that technology hadn't really been invented yet. So you guys are really filling a void that wasn't available to a lot of people. Correct. Correct. And especially the deaf. And what I gathered was that deaf people could do anything that hearing people could do except here. Right. And so I had no knowledge of the deaf community. I had no idea of how they lived their lives and what have you. But thankfully, the parents, the hearing parents of deaf children served a great purpose leading me into what it was all about. And so I spent 10 years cranking out 7000 television shows in sign language and sign language. And and believe it or not, most of those shows are still on TV. Wow. They're on a network called access network dot TV. Okay. And on access network dot TV, you'll find all of the silent network shows. And we did a lot of very interesting things. And my favorite was the best of all the shows I did. It was actually aimed at children. Kim Powers was one of the greatest actresses I've ever worked with. She understood everything. She got her script and it was available to her in the morning, about six in the morning, so that she could memorize it. And for a woman who was both deaf and blind, there was nothing that she would do. As I had mentioned, she skied down a mountain. I had her scuba dive. I had her ride bicycles. And this is a deaf and blind woman who had more talent than a lot of the hearing actors that I've worked with over the years. And we got a number of awards from that show. President Herbert Walker Bush liked it a lot. And we enjoyed that kind of programming. And can I ask you a question? It's on access TV. Access network dot TV. Yep. But it's originally home often in those days. Was that on PBS? No. I owned the network. I owned everything. The whole network. Okay. Yep. Yes. The only show that I gave to another network, RKO General, was a show, a talk show called Off Hand. And it went for nine years. We did 385 episodes with over 500 celebrity guests. And it was hosted by a deaf professor from a college who was one of the greatest talk show hosts I've ever seen. I'll tell you a little story about getting that show off the ground. I saw the host when he was directing some people at Cal State Northridge. And I was very impressed with how he talked and worked, considering that he was deaf and really wasn't verbally talking. He was signing. And a sign language interpreter was interpreting. And I liked his presentation. So I had somebody bring him to me. And through his interpreter, I said, I really liked your work. And I'm planning to do a talk show. And I would be very happy if you would host it. And he said, through his interpreter, he said, okay, do I have to sleep with you first? I said, no, no, no, no. All I want is your voice. So, I mean, that was definitely a very big period in your life. But I also wanted to talk to you because after that, you did say you kind of sold the whole network. And then you were working for NBC for a while, was that part? I worked for NBC on and off for many years, all public affairs programming. And I did a lot of programming for disability organizations. And but the other part of my life was theater. I was a producer of musicals. I worked on Melodyland for a couple of years. I did the music band with Van Johnson, the unsinkable Molly Brown with Ginger Rogers. I did South Pacific with Janet Blair. And a whole stream of musical pieces. And I did quite a few theater productions over the years. And interloved with television shows that I was doing. And I went back and checked to see how many shows I had done. I did 7,000 shows over 10 years for the silent network. And I hired 200 deaf people and taught them how to work in television. And as you may know, last year's Oscar went to a show that featured deaf people. It was called Koda. And Arlie Matlin had a great cast. And those are the kind of people that we work with all throughout the early days of the silent network. And then last August, this past August, I discovered that I had turned 85 years old. Yes. And I said, maybe I should retire. And that just the word retire just never quite came out of my mouth. So I moved in with my daughter. But I'm semi-retired. So let's go over that part because we talked about the silent network. It was very interesting. And you could check a lot of that stuff out, as you'd said. But you did just retire not that long ago. I mean, are you still like, what's your kind of thoughts of having seen Hollywood since, I mean, so much of you've seen that change so much? I mean, I lived in L.A. I lived in the West L.A., actually. My entire career, from the time I was five years old, I was in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and all the surrounding cities. And I graduated from high school in Claremont, California, Claremont High School. And in my junior year at Claremont High School, when summer came, I just wasn't interested in sitting around for a month or two. So I gathered up all my friends in Claremont, and I suggested that we make a motion picture. Let's make a movie. And so they all jumped into it. I had about 40 students in the class, and they all took roles in the show. And one of the friends of mine wrote the script. And it was a movie called Maybe Tonight. It was about a big dude who was in sports. He did all the sporting things. And everybody liked him. He was a nice-looking guy, only one problem. He just couldn't get up the nerve to ask this girl to dance. And where the title comes, Maybe Tonight. And it took us seven months to do the show. My father loaned me a 16-millimeter camera. And we put it all together with Scotch tape on a 16-millimeter film. And then it was over. We had a big premiere at the big theater in Claremont, California. But there was one thing missing. We didn't have a soundtrack. We couldn't afford a soundtrack. So we turned it into putting up the dialogue on the side of the screen, which is what they did at the turn of the century when the new pictures came out before sound was available in film. So I took the actors into the production booth where the films are shown on the screen. Up in the booth, you look out the little windows. And I gave them a microphone and they did their parts from up in the booth for the premiere. And then the rest of it was all audio and music. See the captions and what have you. But that picture also is on AccessNetwork.tv. The entire film has been played countless numbers of times all over the country in various networks and what have you. Because I was 17 when we did that picture. And that was my first real opportunity to create an image, work on it and get it done. Yeah, that was old days of editing where you were taping the stuff together using maybe a steamback machines and clipping and cutting it all together. Yes, definitely. And what was the name of that movie because I'm going to look it up myself actually. It's called Maybe Tonight. You can find it on AccessNetwork.tv. Yeah, great. Well, I want to thank you very much for your time, Sheldon. It was very interesting. So the Silent Network was, I mean, this was groundbreaking. And I mean, it seems like a lot of those things that you revolutionized and started out with are things that we take for granted nowadays. And I think a lot of folks in the deaf community even if they don't know too much about your story would really be appreciative of it. And can they look you up? I think you're on Facebook and it maybe. Yeah, on Facebook, just put my name in there and there's a plethora of information about me. Sheldon, thank you very much. You contributed a lot to Hollywood. You contributed a lot to our viewers today. Have a great night tonight and we'll take care. And for everybody. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. For everybody out there, take care. Have a good night. Thanks again. Okay. Bye-bye. See you.