Lewis Freedman; Award-Winning TV Producer

Lewis Freedman, the award-winning veteran television producer who created CBS’ “Bicentennial Minutes” during the two years preceding the nation’s Bicentennial celebration in 1976, has died of a stroke.

A spokesman for the University of Chicago, where Freedman was the founding director of the William Benton Broadcast Project, said this week that the Emmy and Peabody award winner was 66 when he died at his Chicago home Thursday after a stroke.

Freedman’s career began in the early days of TV when he produced such prize-winning shows as “Camera Three” for CBS and “The Play of the Week” for the Public Broadcasting Service’s Channel 13 in New York City.

Several of his productions gained national acclaim, including a 1960 staging of “The Iceman Cometh,” which starred Jason Robards Jr. and Robert Redford, and the definitive “Medea,” with Judith Anderson. In 1960 he also produced two August Strindberg plays, leading one critic to praise the PBS station for creating “an extraordinary record of fashioning superlative television.”

One of Freedman’s Emmys came in 1970 for producing “The Andersonville Trial” for Los Angeles PBS station KCET.

As fund director for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the early 1980s, Freedman helped start “American Playhouse,” “Frontline,” “Matters of Life and Death,” “Wonderworks” and “Crisis to Crisis.”

This spring he produced two Benton Project programs for PBS: “The Rage for Democracy” and the three-part “The Glory and the Power: Fundamentalisms Observed.”