‘Silverman’ Breathes Life Into the Short Film : Film: The one-reelers never ran out of ideas, only of places to be seen. A work by Richard Crystal is the latest evidence that the form is alive and well.

The movies began as shorts, of course: one-reelers that were slambang, slapstick or simply novel. (The very earliest watched waves breaking on a rock, a steam train pulling into a station.)

Several generations of us grew up on a diet of short films. There were Chaplin and Keaton (seen on shaky 8-millimeter home projectors in the long wait between their first release and the dawn of television), the cartoons, the corny musical shorts, the Three Stooges and Edgar (Slow Burn) Kennedy, and the inspired foolishnesses of Robert Benchley and twangy Pete Smith.

The rise of the double-feature and then of television itself, and then of four and six showings a day of a single feature, buried the short film, including the newsreel, with precious few survivors. Many among those several generations of us who loved the shorts are not convinced that going to the movies has been quite the same since. Not at $7 a shot, and no newsreel, no cartoon, no live-action short.

But the short never ran short of ideas, only of places to be seen. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences manages to find some to nominate every year--choosing from at least a few dozen candidates. They are so good, if you have the luck to see them, that it’s most frustrating they’re not more widely available.

An adventurous cassette producer could do worse than compile a series of anthologies of shorts. It’s unlikely anybody would make a bundle, but expression rather than riches is the name of the short game. Mike Jittlow’s hyperkinetic treasury of special effects, “The Wizard of Space and Time,” just being released as a feature, began life as a short, which Jittlow hawked around with beguiling persistence.

Not long ago Richard Crystal, the writer-producer brother of actor-comedian Billy, sent along a cassette of a slyly wonderful short he has done. It is a sendup of all the worshipful star biographies ever filmed or taped for television.

It’s called “Bobby Silverman--An Actor Prepared,” and the central joke is that Silverman has done almost nothing that wouldn’t have fallen within the jurisdiction of the Screen Extras Guild: a walk away from the screen, a gurgle that would not qualify as dialogue.

There was, to be sure, his debut at age 5 as King of the Trolls in a grade-school production of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.” “Ibsen, and only 5!” exclaims one of Silverman’s admirers.

Crystal was once an agent for industrial film makers at William Morris, and also once an actor. Unsurprisingly, Silverman is Crystal, in a series of glimpses from his fleeting moments on screen. “When I went to other things, I would still do bits helping out friends of mine,” Crystal said not long ago.

The further joke of Crystal’s short is that achievements of Silverman are celebrated in heroic appreciations by Rob Reiner (who confesses that Silverman’s work may have made his own career as producer-director possible). There are encomia as well from Susan Anspach, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Richard Lewis, Charles Fleischer (a new man of all voices) and Dudley Moore.

Moore murmurs about the ambiguity in Silverman’s performance (“Is he alive? Is he dead?”) and concludes, “Hegel expressed it quite succinctly; I’m afraid I don’t remember how.”

Crystal says: “I’d listen to all the hype about actors on programs like ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ and I’d think, ‘Yeah, but it’s not curing cancer,’ and I said why not a satire on an actor who never gets to do anything.”

It is all a lovely silliness, a jeu d’esprit as they say, having sport with the pretensions of actors and of actors talking about actors, the whole thing done with great skill, including snippets from the actual vehicles (e.g., “Fun With Dick and Jane,” in which Crystal/Silverman made his anonymous contributions).

More seriously, producer Crystal has just received an award for best sports video of the year for a profile of Abdul-Jabbar.

Whether “Bobby Silverman--An Actor Prepared” will be seen beyond the circuitry of Crystal’s family and friends, is not certain, although cable, with its ever more insatiable vacuuming up of everything that moves, is a likely outlet for a piece as amusing as this, aimed at audiences attuned to an extended inside joke.

It has been accepted for the San Francisco Film Festival. And indeed, the small screen feels like only a consolation prize as a venue for Crystal’s short.

While “Bobby Silverman” is an intimate piece, certainly ideal for television, it sets up that old longing for short laughs on the big screen as well.