The Battle of Brazil by Jack Mathews (Crown: $19.95; 228 pp., illustrated; includes annotated screenplay).

Jack Mathews, a film columnist for The Times, has, according to the jacket copy for “The Battle of Brazil,” told “the real story of Terry Gilliam’s victory over Hollywood to release his landmark film.” Although one might debate the terms “real” and “landmark,” Mathews has provided a clear, factual account of the highly publicized struggle for editing control of “Brazil” between director Gilliam and Universal Pictures boss Sidney Sheinberg.

Sheinberg refused to release Gilliam’s 142-minute version of “Brazil,” and Gilliam refused to edit it to please Sheinberg. Gilliam did cut 10 minutes and, while two editors assigned by Sheinberg were recutting the film radically, producer Arnon Milchan and Gilliam began showing their version to informal gatherings of movie industry people, critics, and film students. Enough Los Angeles critics saw it to induce them to take an unprecedented step; namely, to consider an unreleased movie as a candidate for their association’s major awards. By voting it best picture, best director, and best screenplay, the critics forced Sheinberg’s hand, and he released Gilliam’s edited version.

The most interesting section of the book is the part that details and analyzes what is, finally, the only unique aspect of this episode--the film critics’ having a documented, palpable impact on the fate of a movie. The Los Angeles film critics, more than Sheinberg or Gilliam, carved “Brazil’s” small niche in the gallery of Hollywood’s little studio wars.

In terms of the Gilliam-Sheinberg conflict, Mathews, although he has gathered facts assiduously, has allowed his unabashed admiration of Gilliam and “Brazil” and his rather simplistic vision of moviemaking to detract from the reality he is narrating. He has not made the same effort to penetrate Sheinberg that he has Gilliam, condoning most errors of judgment of the director while excoriating all of the executive’s. He believes that “the major issue in this fight was the conflict between art and commerce” and that studio executives should not tinker with finished products.

This book is the latest in a series detailing the struggles over “creativity” in Hollywood, with most entries in the series betraying a Manichaean view of these struggles. Few of the authors accept the obvious fact that moviemaking is a commercial, collaborative craft, that business and artistic elements are not neatly separable categories, that movies are not exclusively a director’s medium, and that a movie is not a work of art. A movie is an expensive product of craft and business skills, and many jobs depend on its commercial success.

One could plausibly argue that movies are a producer’s medium and that had “Brazil” had a strong, able producer, many of the problems might have been avoided. Indeed, after 16 weeks of shooting and exhaustion of much of his budget, Gilliam himself had to cease shooting for a couple of weeks and just start “yanking out pages of the most elaborate fantasies” from the shooting script. Film students, probably Mathews’ main audience, would have been better served had he reprinted this shooting script. Then the gap between shining hopes and sullied reality could have been more accurately compared. But even without the shooting script, Mathews makes it clear that Gilliam had not accurately calculated the time and expense of filming a futuristic movie that was 50% fantasy sequences.

Mathews treats Sheinberg as the Attila of aesthetics, however, while forgiving Gilliam his infidelity to the contracts he had signed, his reflexive rejection of any input from Universal and his cavalier attitude toward the final cut. When Sheinberg gave Gilliam five weeks to edit a 132-minute version, Gilliam told his editor, in Mathews’ words, “to cut ten minutes out of ‘Brazil’--any ten minutes, he didn’t give a and send it to Universal.”

In sum, Mathews has presented his readers not with an epic battle between art and commerce, but with a rather petty conflict between two different types of egomaniac. Mathews happens to prefer Gilliam’s type to Sheinberg’s, but he has only demonstrated that both types are ruinous. Gilliam needed a more decisive, skilled producer; Sheinberg should have left the movie to his production and marketing people.

Several times in the text Mathews makes the point that the fate of the movie--its mediocre box-office performance--should not be used as an ex post facto argument for Sheinberg. He is correct. There is no way of knowing whether any version of “Brazil,” with or without the commotion, would have been profitable.

The moral of this and other stories about moviemaking in Hollywood is that no one knows anything about what the public wants to see; it is all a matter of guesses. Historically, however disturbing this may be to students and devotees of the cinema as art, the hand that holds the financing gets the final guess.