Fast Foward: HOLLYWOOD, THE JAPANESE, AND THE VCR WARS by James Lardner (Norton: $18.95; 344 pp.)

Nature and man joined in unintended irony when they made the landscape on this side of the Potomac River.

From the District of Columbia’s bank, lawmakers, lobbyists and journalists see on their right a megalith of commercial buildings raised in defiance of any reasonable aesthetic of urban sensibility. On the left, squats the Pentagon. And between those monuments to corporate and government profligacy lies a cemetery.

Washington’s view of the rest of world: It’s a place where nothing makes sense. And you die.

It’s no wonder, then, what happened when New Yorker writer and former Washington Post reporter James Lardner ventured across the Potomac in search of a big story about the American and Japanese entertainment and electronics industries.

Clearly, Lardner, like David Halberstam in the “The Reckoning,” wanted to write about the U.S.-Japanese competition and the sorry state of American big business in the 1980s. Like David McClintick in “Indecent Exposure,” Lardner also appears to have wanted to reveal something about the soul of Hollywood as well as of this new machine, the videocassette recorder.

He didn’t. Instead, he too quickly retreated to the comparatively not-so-rough and not-so-tumble world of Washington’s courts and congressional hearing rooms.

There, as he couldn’t in the factories of Tokyo or the executive suites of Los Angeles, Lardner found a public record--an accessible account, tedious in part and wholly undigested--of a remarkable series of events that began on the other side of the world, flashed brightly in Hollywood and, from Lardner’s perspective, climaxed in a mad scramble of pin-striped lobbyists in the clerk’s office of the U.S. Supreme Court.

For them and for Lardner, the events related in “Fast Forward” moved inexorably toward a resolution by nine sensible jurists--who on a January day in 1984 said, yes, it is legal for Americans to videotape TV programs broadcast over the air into their homes.

It was known as the “Betamax” case, a famous lawsuit brought by Universal Studios against Sony Corp., maker of the first popular home videocassette recorder. Universal argued in courts from California to the far bank of the Potomac that Sony’s machine made it possible for millions of Americans to steal copyrighted movies and TV shows.

Five justices said it didn’t.

But by the time they said so, no one involved really cared any more. The public had all but rejected Sony’s Betamax machine in favor of the VHS cassette format, and the Hollywood movie moguls had made their peace with the new and, as things turned out, phenomenally lucrative video business.

(I’ve never forgotten the revolting cynicism of one studio executive commenting in a Times article by another reporter and myself on the day after the Court’s decision: “Off the record, I don’t see any change . . . on the record, we’re ‘shocked, disappointed.’ ”)

Lardner’s “Fast Forward” is really three partially interwoven stories. The best, told with assuredness and insight, is the story of the Betamax case. Less satisfying is his history of the videocassette recorder and the home-video business. The least agreeable is Lardner’s timid effort to explain what the VCR has meant to culture and communications.

So “Fast Forward,” to its credit and its fault, is principally a story about how Washington deals with the new. That’s a plus because Lardner--who seems comfortable interviewing lawyers and lobbyists even if he does not especially like them and what they do--tells a truly page-turning tale of government’s role in the entertainment revolution brought on by the VCR.

The Lucifer of Lardner’s Betamax story is Sidney Sheinberg, president of MCA Inc.--aided and abetted by the irrepressible and hyperbolic Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America and Hollywood’s helmsman on the Potomac.

(New Yorker readers will recall that this part of the book served as a two-part article in the magazine. Another portion appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and some observant readers might notice a number of similarities with a 1985 Washington Post Style section article.)

That Lardner takes a difficult bit of legal arcana--the copyright law--and deals with it in an easily readable manner testifies to his formidable storytelling prowess. He does tell his story well, and this part, at least, is well reported, too.

Not so for Lardner’s history of the VCR and the video business. The story is full of names that don’t matter and often void of outside events that do.

What’s good here is Lardner ferreting out of some of the more interesting personalities--most notably pioneer video dealer George Atkinson, whose coarse language and unpolished demeanor come through admirably. Andre Blay, who pioneered the pre-recorded videocassette business, and Wunderkind Stuart Karl, who got the bright idea of putting Jane Fonda on video and created the made-for-video business, don’t come through nearly as well.

Neither, for that matter, does the VCR itself.

Despite Lardner’s pretty good reporting and his better storytelling, he actually understates the power of his electronic protagonist. Lardner can and does tell you far more than you ever dreamed you might want to know about the mechanism itself. But other than a couple of quotes from TV critic Tom Shales and a few lines from others, Lardner never really grasps (or lets us in on) why he wrote “Fast Forward” in the first place. He missed what should have been his own point.

Historian Daniel Boorstin--on whom Lardner relies for a worthwhile quote on the nature of technology--might have explained it for him. This Japanese machine is really as American as apple pie, baseball, hot dogs or Chevrolet.

Like Thomas Edison’s phonograph or George Eastman’s original Kodak camera, the VCR democratizes culture. It is abolishing the programmer as the manipulator of the most influential medium of culture and communication in history and replacing him with the viewer. It is forging a new and perhaps fateful relationship between the creators of an art and their audience. About this we need to hear more than what Lardner has to say. Before long, no doubt, we shall.