Film Flam: ESSAYS ON HOLLYWOOD by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster: $16.95; 159 pp.)

Larry McMurtry, whose novels-into-films include “Hud,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Leaving Cheyenne” (filmed by Sidney Lumet as “Lovin’ Molly”) and “Terms of Endearment,” knows his way around Hollywood and is not much enchanted by what he sees.

“With rare exceptions,” he says in an introduction to “Film Flam,” “the pictures coming out of Hollywood today are the last resorts of the gutless. In my opinion, a little film flam is all such an industry deserves.”

McMurtry contributed a column on movies and television to American Film magazine for a couple of years, then found that the prospect of going on was appalling--columnizing is “a perversion in which only the vain and/or the indigent indulge.” Or the vainly indigent, he could have added.

The book is a collection of those columns and some free-standing pieces, including a lively account of a day spent wandering around Pasadena with Diane Keaton and her grandmother, Mary Alice Hall, that illuminates Keaton far better than the millions of words uttered elsewhere.

As with all such collections, the passage of time is evident, and the films under attack (as most are) have, like “The Deep” and “Lovin’ Molly,” long since passed to their eternal rest, disturbed only for an occasional late-night ghost walk across the television screen.

But the untimeliness matters relatively little with McMurtry because his indictments of and observations about the industry are fairly timeless. He writes trenchantly.

Coming to Hollywood to help on “The Last Picture Show,” he says, “I felt that a novelist might, after all, be of some use in the creation of a movie script, if only as the guardian of valid motivation.”

He discovered that screen writing was a particular craft for which the novelist was by no means inevitably well-suited. He realized that his novel had been written hastily (in six weeks) in unjustified bitterness toward his hometown. Peter Bogdanovich, imposing his gentler perceptions on the material, may have made a movie that was in some ways truer than the book. McMurtry admires good screen writers, but says: “The vast bulk of the industry’s writing chores is still divided between smartassed amateurs (the novelists) and dullwitted hacks: in other words, between people who are given little chance to treat screenwriting as other than a joke, and the peons of the system, who can only treat it as a job.”

He has words for the boxcar salaries paid to executives, stars and novelists (other than himself): “Big money has a way of convincing people they deserve it. . . . Being rich is an occupation in itself, particularly for people who arrive at it via parachute in middle life.”

Like many a viewer, McMurtry laments the decline of stars: “The generation of actors and actresses who could interest us in a character simply by appearing on the screen . . . are slipping away fast, to be succeeded, for the most part, by a generation of dope freaks, pretty boys, and lazy ladies, some of whom are better actors than their predecessors but precious few of whom can make us like them.”

Part of his lament for the generation of Bogart, Grant, Tracy, Wayne, Crawford and Bergman is what McMurtry finds to be the devaluation of grace (as embracing everything positive you might hope to find in a character).

“Grace is seen as insincere, probably phony, nearly always a cheat--or, at the very least, dumb.” It bespeaks “a desperate distrust of polished people.” The decline of grace parallels and is probably related to a decline of the love story and the romantic impulse, as against what he saw as a current diet of “Trivial comedy, torture, assassination, horror and star epics offering nothing but the inflations of personality.”

McMurtry is, or was, happier with television, finding in “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and even in many of the cop shows and the mini-series a grasp of American realities and a gallery of middle-American portraits that the movies had for a whole complex of reasons forgotten how to do or chosen not to do.

A leading studio executive remarked at a luncheon recently that the movies were not much fun to be around anymore because the executives responsible for them hated them, or, at a minimum, found no joy in making movies and felt no passion for them.

The founding moguls may have had their monstrous moments, but they did have a passion for making movies, and for making movies that audiences would be eager to see. The latter-day chieftain and McMurtry would find much to agree on.

Driving across the country, McMurtry concluded that his “The Last Picture Show” had been all too prophetic, confirming “the long retreat of movies out of rural and in some cases even suburban life.” Even in the six-theater complexes in the jazzy malls, “there is evidence of torpor,” McMurtry says.

The movies, historically, have been unpredictable, living out a death wish, as it sometimes seems, but never quite getting to the last reel. New screens are going up by the hundreds and, quite surprisingly, the prevalence of VCRs appears to have sustained rather than hurt walk-in theater trade.

Yet a look at any day’s movie ads seems to sustain McMurtry’s snarling dismissal. The vitality in style and content, movies mirroring something of life as it is actually lived, seem to arise abroad or on the independent fringes of the American industry. “Film Flam” is rich in well-said clues why this should be true.