Happy Independents Day, err, Independence Day

July 4th is this week — and between the fireworks, the 5K’s, and the grilled hot dogs (or, if you are in health conscious, LA, the grilled mushrooms and tofu) I would like to take a moment  of silence for a long forgotten patriot who fought for our right to be self-supporting and independent years before anyone even thought there could ever be such a thing as Twitter, or a Google or a Simon Cowell. 

No, not Ben Franklin! Come on, think. No, not Crispus Atticus.  I’m talking about Len Hill, a Lt. Col. in the War on Indpendents who put himself and his livelihood at risk when he went to Washington D.C. in the early 90’s to testify against the implementation of The Repeal of the Financial and Syndication Rule, which prohibited networks from owning the entertainment programming they air.

But unlike the unruly mob that gathered in front of Faneuil Hall to protest the inherent unfairness of the Stamp Act, Len braved the fight against the behemoths of programming all by his lonesome — think of Paul Revere riding in the dead of night to warn his compatriots that ‘The British are Coming, the British are Coming’ only to realize once he finally reaches Concord that all the other soldiers have made a side deal with King George, or in Len’s case, with Les Moonves, the then President of Warner Brother’s Television and one of President Bill Clinton’s favorite Hollywood golfing buddies .

Len warned us that the Repeal of The Fin Syn, as it was known  back then, would doom a generation of independent purveyors to a life of indentured servitude, serving at the whim of the corporate royalists while battling for creative freedom and a shrinking percentage of the pie.

That Len Hill had an outstanding career as a network executive (who gave me one of my first jobs) and a prolific independent producer of TV movies (including one on the Beach Boys which I wrote) is all but forgotten during this woeful , culturally impoverished, era of Jon and Kate and TMZ.

Please join me now for a moment of silence as we read the roll call of the fallen production companies who went to their final resting place as part of a larger conglomerate  thanks to the scourge of network hegemony: Carsey Werner, Stephen Cannel, Lorimar, MTM, Spelling- Goldberg, and Tandem Productions, which was the name of Norman Lear’s main production  company for all you who have no recollection of what life was like before there was Fox Television…

Ah, but I remember Len. He gave great script note, he smoked a pipe, and he screamed a lot, and as soon as it was clear that networks would no longer buy projects from him when they could do them for a bigger profit margin by themselves, he left show business to develop real estate and play golf.  And in his honor, I pledge to name a future character on showbizzle ( the digital showcase and destination website I created with my daughter Lindsey) after  Len.  Happy holiday, everybody

Oh, one other thing — did you honestly think I could write a blog without a mention of the bizzle?

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