<i> The Almost Never</i> -<i> Ending Story</i>

The strike by the Writers Guild of America set the record for the longest work stoppage in film and TV history, going a few hours beyond 154 days. As one who has sat through the all-day version of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900,” the four-hour version of Norman Mailer’s “Maidstone” and an entire Patrick Buchanan speech, the strike seemed longer.

For all that was at stake for the rest of us--the soaps, the fall TV season, fresh Johnny Carson zingers and next summer’s installment of “Police Academy”--the strike was scandalously short on drama, especially for people who do drama, as well as comedy. It was like a muffled fight going on in the apartment next door; you could hear it, but you couldn’t tell what it was about, or who was winning. After a while, you just hoped the noise would go away and that there wouldn’t be a body discovered later in a trunk.

Now that the fight is over, it’s easy to understand what the main issue was, and who won. The writers, who lost whatever real money they might have earned during the strike, clearly won, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, whose members won’t know how much they saved until the computers add it all up, clearly lost.

To the writers, management’s contract concessions must look like a cache of lost jewels--King Solomon’s mine. The biggest gem, the one spoil of victory that will keep their PCs humming until somebody else pulls the plug, is this: Whenever one of their one-hour TV shows is shown in Kuala Lumpur, they will get 1.7% of every ringgit paid to the distributor.

I’m happy if they’re happy, but for the people who manufacture most of America’s canned entertainment, this strike did neither the producers nor the writers proud. As theater, it reminded me of one of those scenes of a method acting class where some earnestly hysterical students are attempting to show their instructor how a tree feels when it is about to be chopped down.

The strike had a conventional three-act structure. Management chased the writers up a tree (Act I), management threw stones at the writers (Act II), the writers got out of the tree alive (Act III). But when you examine the script closely, you find nothing but a series of misspent dramatic opportunities, half-hearted showdowns and a failure--in addition to its suspect eat-the-rich theme--to identify the heroes and villains.

Until David Letterman stepped forward on TV and referred to management with the elegant and presumably unscripted phrase money-grubbing scum, the sinister-savvy “Dallas” and “Dynasty” fans among us couldn’t be sure who to root against.

The script contained, and wasted, most of the elements of commercial drama.

There was fantasy: Brian Walton, chief negotiator for the writers, described for reporters a metaphorical dream he had about two unidentified giants in loincloths who climbed to the top of a skyscraper and set a city ablaze with bolts of lightning fired from their chests.

There was sex: Throughout the early weeks of the strike, combatants on both sides accused their counterparts of attempting to turn the negotiations into a metric competition of natural endowments.

There was intrigue: Management had reportedly attempted to lure some writers away from the guild, and there were reported spottings of well-known writers sneaking out of dimly lit copy stores with what-the-hell-else? under their arms. Meanwhile, writers were being threatened with eternal banishment from the Kingdom of the Guild if they so much as slipped an apostrophe into the hand of an enemy.

There was violence: Guild members Burt Prelutsky and Steven Bochco, angrily debating which was the more productive writer, met in the Letters section of The Times and faced each other with exclamation marks unsheathed.

There was subtext: A group of 21 successfully employed writers, encouraged by a federal court decision that gives union members the right to belong to a union without having to be faithful to it, threatened to go back to work if the guild leaders couldn’t show immediate progress toward settlement. The ad hoc group called itself the “Union Blues.” Many of the remaining 9,000 members called them the “Scab 21.”

There were insults: In June, NBC entertainment boss Brandon Tartikoff announced the imminence of “writer-proof” programming. This would include such things as the coverage of shuttle disasters and accidentally dropped Iranian Airbuses, unscripted variety shows (dancers, dancers and more dancers) and programs written by those who don’t, and never would, belong to the guild. It would also have included “American Revivals,” shows made from secondhand scripts. For example, an old episode of “Hawaii Five-0” might be used as a new episode of “Miami Vice.” The only change would be the shirts.

There was a showdown: Because the leaders of the two gangs--the Guild’s Walton, the Alliance’s Nick Counter--had fired everything they had and hadn’t hit anything, everyone within earshot of the feud came running for a last act blowout. The negotiations, after nearly five months, had become a flea market of deus ex machinas . Everybody in Hollywood who could count--agents, lawyers, lawyer-agents--came up with alternative formulas for face-saving solutions to the strike. Walton and Counter held them all up to the light and finally picked one.

So, after all that incomprehensible rancor, the strike is over. They’re selling more bagels at Art’s Deli and, as one producer put it, “it’s raining scripts again in Hollywood.” If the past is prologue, most of those scripts will require dispatching by Pooper Scooper, as will most of the movies and nearly all of the TV shows eventually made from them.

The strike has dominated life in Hollywood this year, but its impact on consumers has been negligible. The threat of a delayed fall season doesn’t rank with the threat of drought-raised food prices and the lack of new shows is of more concern in the offices of “Entertainment Tonight” than it is in most households.

The progress of the strike itself didn’t have the pizazz, the show business know-how, to create interest in it. There were no major stars, no story line, no compelling action scenes. The tension and bitterness were real, but the daggers were always inserted off camera. The strike violated every rule of every how-to screenwriting book on the market, especially the rule banning dialogue scenes that last more than three minutes.

I understand that there was some clever badinage on Walton’s guild hot-line, and that Billy Wilder--that marvelous old warhorse of the righteous--wrote a funny, uplifting telegram that was read at a writers’ gathering. However, the public got no sense of that comic relief from the elongated proceedings. It just looked like a couple of old card sharks refusing to walk away from the table while there was still an unclaimed quarter on it.

What the writers’ needed more than anything is what all badly executed productions need more than anything--some brutal editing.