You have to give people the opportunity to prove themselves.

I did my first movie,a movie called Whiffs, which very few people ever saw.

I moved out to L.A. in July and Hot L Baltimore started in September or October. So I had done a few things. I'd done a Mary [Tyler Moore]. I'd done a Waltons. I hadn't done a Rhoda yet I don't think.

I'm one of the handful of survivors of the guys I came up with.

Most profoundly deaf people have speech that is very difficult to understand.

I have to say I was very lucky in this [movie] business. I was in the right place at the right time when I first got started.

Maybe if I'd gone in younger, I wouldn't have had that feeling, but I've seen an enormous amount of changes since the early-'70s in how this stuff is shot. I did the first TV movie ever shot in 18 days; before this film the normal length of shooting a TV movie was between 21 and 26 days. We shot a full-up, two-hour TV movie in 18 days with Donald Sutherland playing the lead, who had never worked on television before.