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Robert Butler

Michael Zinberg credits Butler with having the ruthless, adventurous, innovative vision that produced the powerful pilot episode of Hill Street Blues (1981) that sold NBC, and network president Fred Silverman on green-lighting this landmark urban-cop series.
As of March 2023 he is the last surviving credited person (in this case, as director) of the original Star Trek (1966) pilot episode 'The Cage' (filmed in 1964). All of the credited cast and crew have passed away.
Graduate of University High School (Los Angeles) and UCLA.
He played the trombone, and as a teenager, he was a musician in the band on Hoagy Carmichael's live NBC Radio variety show.
His father was an insurance adjuster and his mother a schoolteacher.

[on making Hill Street Blues (1981)] I was tired of clean speeches, where people waited until others stopped talking, tired of clean shots--I didn't fucking want it. In my mind, the show came from the congestion of the material, the congestion of the characters. I remember the camera operator cleaning up shots, in the classic Hollywood style that I had begun to hate, and I had to brainwash him to let it be a mess. I wanted it messy. The trick was to make it look seemingly real, live, raunchy, congested. We jammed the streets with derelict cars and graffiti. We suggested Eastern-city crunch very well. The multiple stories added to the congestion, so I ran with it. There's a pair of people arguing here, something developing over there. My idea was that we were putting on binoculars and panning around at the people, keeping it fluid, rather than cutting. That really worked well for that series.