Recall When Creativity Was Valued Over Rerun Rights?

“Things change,” Fox executives told reporters recently, explaining an about-face from a policy they articulated less than a year ago. And while it’s true change is inevitable, it’s equally common in the entertainment industry to see worthy ideals trampled as time marches forward.

It’s like stepping into a time machine, then, to attend the Caucus for Television Producers, Writers & Directors’ annual dinner, where one is surrounded by those who remember when the term “independent producer” wasn’t an oxymoron; when ABC put on “Roots” or “Holocaust” because chief executive Leonard Goldenson felt the network should, not because those programs were owned by corporate parent Disney; when CBS News invoked images of Edward R. Murrow, not endless self-promotion for “Survivor.”

The caucus’ latest gala, held Sunday evening in Beverly Hills, honored several reigning industry heavyweights, among them NBC West Coast President Scott Sassa and “The West Wing’s” creative stewards Aaron Sorkin, Thomas Schlamme and John Wells. As always, however, the overarching tone was as retro as Jackie Kennedy’s bouffant hairdo and the soundtrack from “Camelot.”

The room played host to producers who once towered over the television landscape, names at best distant memories to most twentysomething development executives, unless they happen to be their offspring. Some dared cite ancient credits such as “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Brian’s Song,” while others tossed about phrases like “creative rights” and “freedom of expression.”

These are terms that largely faded from Hollywood’s lexicon during the 1990s--a wrenching period that irrevocably revised the rules of the TV game. In fact, just mentioning “creative rights” instantly exposes the speaker as someone hanging on to a past that will never be again, in the same way the alien in a ‘50s sci-fi movie would look human before giving himself away by emitting a strange trilling sound.

Nevertheless, it’s a history lesson worth teaching, if only to remind current and future generations of the way it was before they become too comfortable with the way it is. Moreover, it’s important to understand how the business has hardened as writers and actors prepare to face off against the present studio system, contemplating strikes that could throw thousands out of work.

Admittedly, the 1990s weren’t entirely bad. They brought television viewers exciting new technologies and an explosion of options, including a vast array of cable channels tailored to specific tastes, astonishing interactive TV applications, even a couple of new broadcast networks.

Yet those years also saw ageism become more blatant, as the pursuit of younger demographics became almost obsessive. More significantly, 20-year-old restrictions on television networks’ ownership of programs they broadcast, known as the financial interest and syndication rules, were phased out, resulting in more shows getting on the air based not on merit but who produced them and thus owned the rerun rights.

Eliminating those federal guidelines opened the door to a flurry of mergers and consolidation, placing more programming under a few giant thumbs. Indeed, every network but NBC--already owned by deep-pocketed General Electric--was soon wedded to a major studio.

At worst, having these huge companies exert greater control over what is seen on TV, branching out to cable as well as broadcast television, has helped subtly homogenize content. At the least, the freedom of producers--particularly in areas such as made-for-TV movies--has been undeniably compromised.

Historically the gatekeepers of what is seen on television, networks now frequently serve as owner and financier as well, not just selecting what movies and TV shows to make but also dictating the most minute decisions about how they are made and who is hired.

Two years ago, under the leadership of Chairman Jerry Isenberg, the caucus drafted a creative “bill of rights” for producers, writers and directors, hoping to reclaim some autonomy over the decision-making process that networks had pirated away.

As Dennis Doty, a onetime ABC executive turned producer, explained at the time, “When I was at the network, we respected producers because we assumed they might know something about that particular project that we might not know. It’s not that way today. You have people telling you, ‘You can’t have that cameraman. You can’t use that editor.’ ”

At the caucus event Sunday another ABC alumnus, producer Leonard Hill, struck a similar chord, citing the need to protect individual expression so that it “does not get relegated to committee-think.” And former MTM President Bill Allen, accepting a tribute to the late Steve Allen, said networks could best honor his father’s memory by removing “the obstacles that stand between the artist and the audience.”

Isenberg, a veteran TV executive and professor at the USC School of Cinema-Television, has not given up on the bill of rights, even if little progress has been made since the parchment was unfurled.

The problem is the television business--dedicated more steadfastly than ever to the bottom line--leaves little room these days for high-minded ideals. Producers will never win back lost freedoms until executives are convinced doing so will make them money, and while that might be demonstrably the case with someone like Sorkin, the creative latitude afforded the privileged few in his strata only underscores the disparity between them and their peers.

Young writers, producers and directors, meanwhile, seem increasingly divorced from the notion of creative rights, having entered the game when it is simply no longer part of the rule book. Hey, the money is still good, they say, and they want in desperately. So where do we sign?

Moreover, the TV industry has yet to come clean about these new realities--still trying to perpetuate the fiction that “We just put on the best shows.”

At a forum of studio executives on Saturday, Steve McPherson, executive vice president of Disney’s Touchstone Television, downplayed corporate lineage’s role in determining which programs make the grade. “I still think content is king,” McPherson said with a straight face, suggesting he would have us believe it is an enormous coincidence ABC bought only one scripted series for the fall that wasn’t a Disney production.

Actually, profits are king, but with so much power in so few hands, no one wants to risk saying the emperors have no clothes. The caucus, with its memories of a different time, is in its own way trying to get that message out to TV’s new breed of corporate managers, but one suspects all they hear is a strange trilling sound.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears on Wednesdays. He can be reached by e-mail at brian.lowry@latimes.com.