THE SPIRIT OF THE SCREEN SURVIVES

Sunday’s Calendar section is rife with letters, in various cholers, taking issue with last Sunday’s special section analyzing the films of the ‘80s. Hell hath few furies like a film-goer whose favorites have been ignored or savaged.

Where was “E.T.” and where was “Ordinary People”? Did the choices reflect an appeal to the whole audience or a critical elite? And so it went. But, by a fine irony, the passion in the letters confirms one of the hopeful signs about the movies in a thin time.

Despite the continuing inroads of television and all its stay-at-home delivery systems and despite the diet of disappointment (in quality and quantity) the studios have offered in recent years, there continues to be a devout audience for theatrical motion pictures.

The audience is not confined to the jaded young, at whom so many movies still appear to be aimed. The mature audience turns out when there are films it can respond to (and when a film stays in view long enough for word of mouth to get around).

The experience of watching a film in a theater continues to be regarded as special, different from seeing it at home, no matter what the screen size. It needs saying again that the psychological differentness of watching in a theater is the last line of resistance for the movies. It has resisted escalating ticket prices, dirty cinemas, indifferent projection, cramped multiplexes with the charm of garages and the too-often cynical product itself.

The movies are an ongoing triumph of hope over realization.

The studio system seems hogtied by its own built-in rigidities, escalating production costs, including swollen executive salaries not necessarily related to results, inflexible distribution patterns, a lack of decisive leadership at the top of the pyramid.

When you think of it, the motion picture industry was built by the kind of brash confidence in hunches and instincts that Fortune magazine’s Roy Rowan discusses in a new book called “The Intuitive Manager.” It is just that intuition by committee, armed by pollings, does not work the same way or, on the evidence, nearly as well.

The miracle, almost as old as the movies themselves, is that out of the awkward liaison of art and commerce, good and daring movies--by the standards of the critics and the paying public alike--do still emerge.

No film has ever pleased everyone. But no one can reasonably fault either “Out of Africa” or “The Color Purple,” for example, for the breadth and height of their aspirations, and Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” does honor to any decade of film history, or any country.

In the end, the consoling truth for those who love the movies is that nothing stays the same. Economic nature, you might say, abhors vacuums just like the rest of nature, and if the major studios singly or collectively stumble over their own infrastructures, other entrepreneurs are at hand to see what a little more agility can achieve.

The newest monogram around town, DEG for De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, is hustling up a line of pictures. Like the Cannon Group, it recalls the early majors in its seeking after the broad audience and in the loneliness of command at the top.

Meanwhile, it has been a time of rejugglings of ownership or command or both at some of the older studios, with consequences yet to be fully seen, but with encouraging signs already from Disney and from Fox.

While it remains technologically true that the movies are a collaborative art, it remains ever true that if the collaborators don’t reflect a single and confident shaping vision, the parts won’t make a damn.

As in any decade of their history, the movies in the ‘80s have offered glorious exceptions to a humdrum whole. Men and women of equal taste and enthusiasm can differ over which, specifically, those exceptions were, although they might also agree that whichever they were, they were too few by far.

The marketing decisions that have made the movies the captive of the youth market have been unfortunate in two ways. They have undersold the intelligence of the young audience, and they have confirmed their own prophecies. If there’s nothing for mature audiences to see, they won’t be found in the ticket lines, will they?

The movies are a marketplace commodity; that is their bottom line, now and forever. But you have to believe that what the movie marketplace will benefit from is a new generation of unabashed entrepreneurs moved by an optimistic confidence in their own taste and not by a nervous cynicism.