OH, FOR THE DAYS WHEN THE ‘BESTS’ WERE <i> GREAT</i>

This is the time of year when the ever-frenetic movie industry takes pause, sucks in its collective breath, puts its calls on hold--and fills out its lists.

It’s not a lot of fun, filling out these ballots for best picture, best performance, etc. Staring at the candidates, you find yourself mumbling insistently, “This can’t be all there is . . . I must have forgotten something.” Instead of trying to summon up the best, you find yourself groping for the least bad. Filling the five empty spaces becomes an exercise in compromise.

Was it always thus? Hell, no. It wasn’t that long ago when choosing the “bests” involved a fierce selection process and when a chorus of indignation always greeted the academy’s nominations on behalf of one neglected picture or another. And one doesn’t need to hark back to the so-called golden days of the studio system to find such a year.

Take 1967, for example--exactly 20 years ago. Of the five films nominated by the academy for best picture, two--”The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde”--were true trailblazers in terms of content and style. Two others--”In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”--dealt earnestly and seriously with social issues of the day. The fifth, “Doctor Dolittle,” was a skillful and engaging musical.

1967 was a watershed year for me because it was the year I decided to enter the film industry, leaving my position as a correspondent with the New York Times to become an executive at Paramount. And one of the key reasons I made that change was that I was amazed and awed by the caliber of films being made. Hollywood, I thought, had turned a corner. A sort of Renaissance atmosphere gripped the town.

There were so many good films made in 1967 that outstanding pictures like “In Cold Blood” and “Cool Hand Luke,” which would certainly have been nominated today, were snubbed at the time.

And consider the list of films that were in preparation or preproduction that year: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Midnight Cowboy,” “Easy Rider,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Z,” “Catch-22,” “Patton,” “Oliver,” “The Odd Couple,” “Romeo and Juliet.”

It was indeed a period of great energy and great innovation. No one was talking “high concepts” as yet. No one would get thrown out of their office for asserting that their films were “about something.”

Film makers could actually tell their friends they wanted to make “important” films without being considered a social embarrassment.

The question is often being asked these days--why have we fallen on such lean times? Why is the cumulative product of an industry so inferior to its combined talents?

As Washington Post critic Tom Shales wrote recently, “A movie once was something BIG--a cultural event. Now a movie by and large is something you carry home in a plastic box.”

Abundant theories have been put forward: the fierce appetite of movie companies to exploit the youth market; the fear syndrome stemming from out-of-control costs; the overemphasis on the “blockbuster” summer picture at the expense of all other kinds of films; the takeover at the studios by the new generation of young executives raised on TV; the “conglomeratization” of the movie companies; the general cultural malaise of the ‘80s.

The explanations are glib and all-pervasive, but perhaps the best way to explain what has happened is simply to hark back to the way things were done 20 short years ago.

A visit to the studios circa 1967 would be an eye-opener to the film executive of 1987. For one thing, the executive staffs were minuscule by today’s standards--no corridors lined with vice presidents and “presidents of production,” no development committees reigning over “pitches,” etc. At Paramount, a mere handful of staff people presided over a film program of more than 20 films.

The reason offbeat films like “Harold and Maude” or “Paper Moon” or “Medium Cool” were approved at Paramount in that period was that no one bothered to stop them. If you had a film you believed in, other executives would say “Go do it--just don’t tell me about it until it’s done.”

In today’s studio environment, it would be difficult to imagine someone pitching a love story between Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort or a father-daughter story set in the Depression and filmed in black-and-white. The battalions of feral young executives would eat you alive.

In that era, there was relatively little--if any--discussion about demographics. Summer megahits like “Jaws” had not surfaced as yet, and movie executives talked about making movies, not making summer blockbusters.

The so-called studio heads of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were an eclectic band of movie mavericks, including the likes of John Calley, Bob Evans, Dick Zanuck, Mike Frankovich, Bob Weitman, Ken Hyman--men who’d been weaned on movies and were impatient with corporate procedures.

The dialogue between film makers and studios was remarkably uninhibited. So many young men were wandering around with so many off-the-wall ideas, there were no constraints about proposing yet another revolutionary idea for a film. There was also a curious lack of pretension among the artists. Directors were not making $1-million or $2-million salaries as yet, and no one was worried about protecting their franchise, surrounding themselves with corps of lawyers and agents to ward off the enemy.

Not that things were idyllic. Everyone still worried whether a picture would make money. A string of losers would still bring down a regime, but in those days a regime would have a few years to prove itself, not a few months. The studios were still fraught with internal politics and dissension, and injustices were still perpetuated with irritating frequency.

But through it all, there was a sense of productivity and progress. Good films were getting made, better ones seemed to be in the pipeline, new styles were being explored, new philosophies and attitudes examined.

And, at the end of the year when it came time to fill out the ballots, it was no great challenge to marshal one’s favorites--there they were, scores of them, wrestling for appreciation and honor. What a shame, one used to think, that there are only five spaces to fill.