FILM IN THE EIGHTIES : Raiders of the Lost Art : Colorization, kid stuff, corporate takeovers: A decade when old ways of making movies died

Which image best symbolizes Hollywood in the 1980s? The memory nominates several candidates:

The bug-eyed latex runt that Steven Spielberg turned into a lovable alien pup in “E.T.,” the decade’s greatest enchantment and the industry’s greatest box-office performer.

Francis Ford Coppola, the Wunderkind director of the 1970s, standing humbly in the midst of his neon-washed Las Vegas set for “One From the Heart,” telling a few hundred hastily gathered reporters that his great experiment--Zoetrope Studios--was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains looking spiffy in their computer-dyed dinner suits in the colorized “Casablanca,” a version of the black-and-white classic that turned seedy Morocco into Mardi Gras and made us wish Ilsa had been played by Carmen Miranda.

Pope John Paul II reminding an audience of Hollywood leaders of their their moral responsibilities in the world at the precise moment when some of them were busy running David Puttnam--the only studio chief to have actually raised a moral issue during the decade--out of town.

Any scene from “Leonard Part VI,” arguably the worst major-studio movie ever made, which was only made because its creator and star--comedian and regional Coca-Cola bottler Bill Cosby--was important to Coke-owned Columbia Pictures.

Snow White bopping with home-video buff Rob Lowe in the desperate opening number of this year’s Oscar telecast, and the subsequent legal hoohaw when Disney threatened to sue the embarrassed Motion Picture Academy for copyright infringement.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, the septuagenarian poster girl for graceless aging, hiking her skirt for the cameras during her trial for smacking an uppity Beverly Hills cop, and the subsequent announcement that she’ll be getting her own TV show next year.

While all of these things say something about the decade and the business, none captures its essence quite as well as that of a toothless Leo the Lion being driven from his Culver City lair where, during Hollywood’s Golden Age, he reigned over the shiniest kingdom of them all.

Leo didn’t roar during the ‘80s. He was knocked out and vivisected by the financial Frankenstein, Kirk Kerkorian, then sold off, organ by organ, to the highest bidders. During the decade, the home of Andy Hardy and Dorothy Gale was variously owned by MGM/UA, Ted Turner, Lorimar Telepictures and Warner Bros., and is about to become the home of Sony subsidiary Columbia Pictures.

When Turner bought MGM, he made a rousing speech to the studio’s employees about restoring the studio to its previous greatness and revealed that the effect of “Gone With the Wind” had been so great on him that he stuck a son with the name Rhett. Before the staff’s eyes were dry, Turner had sold the lot to Lorimar Telepictures and made off with his real prize, the MGM library, which contained all those great black-and-white classics.

“I think they look better in color, pal, and they’re my movies,” said Turner, on one of the many occasions when he told critics of colorization to lump it.

The greed that governed Hollywood in the ‘80s was not mitigated by many great movies. The last American masterpiece, according to no less an authority than Steven Spielberg, was “The Godfather Part II,” released 15 years ago. Spielberg himself shares the blame for the intellectual slump in film production. He and George Lucas, starting in the mid-70s, were so skillful at reviving the childhood thrill of the matinee adventure that they encouraged a decade of bad imitations and convinced Hollywood decision makers that the only audience worth wooing was the one in puberty.

The ‘80s in Hollywood were dedicated to people with the ability to count to $200 million. Blockbuster fever, the three-year flu contracted by every new major-studio head, resulted in a rash of big, wart-like celluloid bumps.

“Raise the Titanic” cost more than $40 million to make, grossed less than $7 million at the box office, and had the band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” on the stern of Lew Grade’s Rank Organization.

“Ishtar,” a buddy road comedy commissioned by Columbia’s Guy McElwaine, was the decade’s quintessential major-studio misstep. The film teamed three of the best known high-salaried perfectionists in the business--$5-million actors Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman and $2-million writer-director Elaine May.

The announcement that Columbia was making something called “Ishtar” in North Africa with Beatty, Hoffman and May struck some people as the financial equivalent of sticking your hand in a running Cuisinart, and the skepticism was warranted. “Ishtar” went over schedule, over budget, missed its Christmas release date by five months and grossed a fraction of a budget estimated to have come in north of $50 million.

“Ishtar” was not the worst big-budget movie of the ‘80s, or close to it. Nor was Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” the runaway Western that brought ruin to United Artists and gave UA production chief Steven Bach the rare opportunity to exploit his own incompetence. (Bach wrote the best-selling book “Final Cut,” explaining how he let Cimino overshoot his budget by $30 million.)

The worst big-budget movie of the ‘80s was Columbia’s “Leonard Part VI,” a spy fantasy in which retired sleuth Bill Cosby outwitted some mad farm animals who were threatening to steal government secrets. Do you suppose this one looked good on paper?

Cosby, who came up with the concept and produced the film, added a bizarre marketing footnote to the whole saga when he went on national TV just days before the movie opened and advised people to stay away.

Among the other excesses of the ‘80s were these truly awful movies:

“Rhinestone,” a romantic comedy starring Sylvester Stallone as a goofy New York cab driver (so far, so good) who falls in love with Dolly Parton (whoops) and ends up winning a country-Western singing contest (yikes). Stallone did his own singing.

“Can’t Stop the Music,” Allan Carr’s 1980 Village People musical extravaganza, co-starred Olympic decathlon champ Bruce Jenner and was directed by Nancy Walker, who did better work in the decade portraying the paper-towel savant Rosie on those absorbing Bounty TV commercials.

And “Howard the Duck,” a movie of such waddling ineptitude that the title became an instant reference for other failures. (Universal had barely recovered from the “Howard” disgrace when critics began dubbing the studio’s third “Jaws” sequel “Jaws the Duck.”)

The blockbuster mentality bred a revolving-door system of studio management, with insecure chief executives trying to hustle up megahits before their three-year contracts were half up. Scripts were developed by a new generation of production executives, baby boomers raised on laugh-track sitcoms and disease-of-the-week TV movies.

To them, a social conscience meant watching “Saturday Night Live,” a show that has indirectly led to more bad big-screen performances than the Ziegfeld Follies (thanks, guys, for Bill Murray in “The Razor’s Edge”).

Overall, the decade was a black hole for serious film makers. Deals made by one studio chief were routinely scuttled by the next. Films started under one executive were completed under another and shipped off to regional-release hell. (“Sorry, we opened it in Tupelo and nobody wanted to see it.”)

The studios that dominated the marketplace, not surprisingly, produced the decade’s star executives. Michael Eisner and Barry Diller had a good run at Paramount, then went off to other glories--Eisner to work his own magic over Disney’s kingdom, Diller to run Fox for Rupert Murdoch.

Eisner brought Jeffrey Katzenberg along from Paramount to chair the studio’s production operations, and though few films of greatness emerged, Disney went from a virtual non-player to a position of leadership almost overnight. At the beginning of the decade, Disney’s animation department was almost moribund, and the studio leaders couldn’t bring themselves to make mainstream movies with violence and dirty words, even though they had created Touchstone Films with that in mind.

Eisner and Katzenberg had no such reluctance, and when Bette Midler hit a high C with the decade’s noisiest big-screen orgasm in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” it was clear that a new day had dawned on Dopey Drive.

If Eisner was chief executive of the decade, Steven Spielberg was the top producer. Spreading his creative pollen over several studios, Spielberg produced five of the decade’s 10 highest-grossing pictures; three for Paramount (the “Raiders” trilogy) and two for Universal (“E.T.” and “Back to the Future”). He also produced several pictures for Warner Bros., including the hits “The Color Purple” and “Gremlins.”

Spielberg directed most of those films, as well, and was inadvertently caught up in the decade’s biggest Oscar controversy. Although he won the Directors Guild of America award for “The Color Purple” in 1986, he didn’t even get a nomination from the directors branch of the academy. The film, meanwhile, received 11 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture.

The Academy Awards show suffered a Nielsen ratings slump in the ‘80s, partly because of the general audience fragmentation due to the advent of cable and home video. But the event continued to be criticized for the bloat of its antiquated variety-show format, a flaw magnified by the academy’s decision to shift venues from the relatively cozy Pavilion to the cavernous 6,000-seat Shrine Auditorium.

Massive traffic jams got the first Shrine Oscar show off to a dismal start in 1988 and this year’s telecast, produced by Allan Carr, prompted an ad hoc group of high-profile industry people to write a letter to Academy president Richard Kahn complaining that the event had been a professional embarrassment. Hey, the decade was a professional embarrassment.

Next March, the Oscars move back to the Pavilion.

Despite the poor overall quality of movies, the business entered a new boom period. The home-video industry, far from the threat it was perceived to be by studio chiefs in the late ‘70s, actually promoted moviegoing. The convenience of video rentals created a renewed interest in movies among older viewers and broadened the horizons, if not the tastes, of younger ones.

The audience demographics changed dramatically from one end of the decade to the other. It began with kids going one way and their parents another; it ended in a frenzy of familial togetherness. Family movies are back.

Box-office figures are always distorted, and in the current self-congratulatory orgy over toppling records, it is worth noting that most of the records were brought on by rising ticket prices. The average cost of a ticket rose from $2.69 in 1980 to about $4.40 at the end of 1989. That is a 65% increase in prices, compared to about a 10% increase in actual admissions.

In terms of real movie watching, however, the decade saw enormous change. The sales and rentals of videocassette movies, a business that didn’t exist barely 10 years ago, surpassed theatrical revenues in the mid-’80s. When all the math is in for 1989, the video industry is expected to outgross the theatrical playoff of movies by $11 billion to $5 billion.

When you combine the two movie-driven businesses, and take into account the erosion in prime-time network TV viewing, the motion-picture industry appears stronger than at anytime since the late ‘40s.

One thing that the mammoth video revolution proved was that nobody knows how big the next revolution will be. The long writers strike of 1988--which, in part, was about Hollywood’s future--confused members of the guild and the public, who had trouble understanding the victories claimed by both sides. Clearly, management and the industry guilds are jockeying for shares in future revenues from ancillary markets.

There was certainly no revolution regarding women and minorities in film during the ‘80s. Amy Heckerling ends the decade on a high note, having scored a $100-million hit with her thinking-baby comedy “Look Who’s Talking.” But the number of women who directed major-studio movies was fewer than a dozen, and the number of black directors--of either sex--totaled even less. Dawn Steel, at Columbia, was the only woman to run a studio; no black did.

Entering the last decade of its first century, Hollywood has some serious issues to address. At the top of the list is the inevitable globalization of its resources and outlook. With everything that’s imminent--the social and cultural waves that will sweep over the world from Eastern Europe and from the Pacific--who is going to set Hollywood’s agenda?

During the ‘80s, the creative voices were mostly stilled. The power shifted from studio heads to agents and producers, squeezing all but the most facile writers and directors out and creating an environment where deals were more important than films. Flying in the face of global trends and migration patterns, even those in its own community, Hollywood became more insular than ever. Once a window opening onto the world, it is now more a window opening onto “Saturday Night Live.”

Despite an occasional “Gandhi” or “The Last Emperor,” both of which were made outside the major-studio system, few films with worldly themes were made. The farther American film makers went, the closer to home they got. The outer-space adventure “Outland” was a virtual remake of “High Noon,” with the Frontier Ethic in full bloom. The “Star Wars” films were also reset Westerns; the “Star Trek” films were U.S. TV reunions. “E.T.” was “Lassie Come Home.”

For the moment, the rest of the world still looks upon Hollywood as the capital of invention, but it is an appreciation of style rather than of substance. In some ways, Hollywood enters the ‘90s where Detroit entered the ‘70s: full of self-confidence and commitments to short-term goals and domestic impulses.

Soon, we’ll learn whether the industry will change its outlook or, like some gas-guzzling, 4,000-pound Detroit sedan, get blown off the road.