Computers: From Scribe to Collaborator : Technology: A new software program uses Socratic questioning and Aristotelian dramatic structure to help screenwriters work.

In an early nightclub skit, Woody Allen told of an elevator that took umbrage at him, carried him to the basement and tossed him out, saying in a hollow voice, “You passed a remark.”

Allen’s nebbishy tale reflected my own paranoia and intimidation when confronted with complicated devices, these days meaning primarily the computer. I lately acquired a new computer that I’m sure can, if properly instructed, make coffee or cuff a pair of trousers. What I can’t always do successfully is turn it on.

In truth I am awed by its capabilities. Computers are said to be stupid machines that only do what they’re told and only know what you tell them. But mine knows who is boss, and I think that’s true of the whole breed.

And now there is a computer software program that helps a screenwriter write his scripts. I have seen the future and, on the testimony of some who have tried it, it works. It is called Collaborator and I was given a demonstration the other morning at the Writers Computer Store by an old screenwriter friend, Francis X. Feighan, and one of his collaborators, Cary Brown. They wrote the program along with Louis Garfinkle, a co-author of the original story for “The Deer Hunter.”

Collaborator asks the writer questions about the script, commencing with what is the title (which the computer, of course, then remembers and keeps refering to until you tell it to desist).

The questions quickly get tougher: who’s the intended audience, why will the audience respond to the material, what’s the theme and the premise (the premise being what drives the action); sum up the plot in three sentences, what’s the time frame, the principal settings, the characters, and so on to nearly 100 queries.

When it gets to the characters, the protagonists and the antagonists, Collaborator provides templates, so-called, that look like job applications and challenge the writer to fill in height, weight, eye color, previous condition of servitude, identifying blemishes and as much other supporting data as the writer cares to invent.

(Looking at the template, I was reminded that that’s the way Georges Simenon prepared to write a novel, jotting notes about characters on scraps of paper and stuffing them into a large manila envelope. What Simenon would have made of the convenience of Collaborator boggles the mind.)

Collaborator’s Socratic questioning essentially follows Aristotle’s Six Elements of Drama, Feighan says: plot, character, thought, diction, music and spectacle. There are references to the more recent advices of Lajos Egri.

Mixing the philosophical with the eminently practical, Collaborator alludes to nearly 200 films from “Absence of Malice” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and the program package includes a copy of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is analyzed in detail.

In horror films, we used to comfort ourselves by saying, “It’s only a movie.” Watching the Collaborator inquisition unfold on the screen, I found myself saying, “It’s not really thinking.” It’s just that the device in front of you seems to be thinking.

Tell it you are writing “Murder at the B&H; Depot” and that it will include a subsidiary character named Eddie White, and Collaborator asks, “Why is Eddie White vital to the development of your story?” How the program lifts “Eddie White” out of your typed-in answer is what baffles me. (Then again, how did the elevator know to dump Woody Allen in the basement?)

The re-questioning can have a singsong quality, and Feighan and the creators admit that occasionally the questions are ungrammatical, depending on how your previous answer was structured. I find this oddly reassuring; nobody’s perfect, even the computer.

Feighan says Collaborator has been acquired and is being used at USC and some other film schools, and not only by writers in the industry but by some directors and executives. Originally written for the IBM system, Collaborator will be out in a Macintosh version, revised and improved, Feighan says, in a few weeks. The program lists for $400 but, like most software, is generally discounted.

Writer James Tugend, commenting on Collaborator in the Writers Guild Journal, acknowledged one obvious worry, that the program could be an easy road to mediocrity and formula-driven product. Yet he cited the testimony of users who said that the questions hardest to answer were showing up weaknesses in their stories.

Barnaby Conrad (“Matador”), in his workshops at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, cries, “Conflict, conflict, conflict!” at his students as the without-which-nothing of dramatic writing, and Collaborator in its persistent way forces the writer to be sure that conflict is there and well-defined.

There is obviously no substitute for the untrammeled creative impulse. I remember from my teen years an ad for a kind of board with a spinning pointer on it, as for a game. If you spun the pointer often enough it would eventually give you a randomly chosen cast and a setting. I presume you could have inherited an Eskimo seal hunter and a hula dancer stranded in Greenwich Village and built from there, but it wouldn’t have solved the problem of creativity.

As Tugend concluded, there is no substitute for taste and gut feelings: the passion that says a subject, whatever subject, has to be explored dramatically. But with theme and premise established, I suspect that Collaborator does what it is essentially intended to do, which is lead the writer to define his own work. No hula dancers are provided.

And in the end there will doubtless be need for human intervention and second sight. My friend John Myhers--the actor-writer-director who studied film making in Rome, spent months as Captain Von Trapp in the national company of “Sound of Music” and then settled in Hollywood to do movies--has lately become a very successful script doctor and teacher of script-writing.

It is central to Myhers’ credo that you don’t start making a movie until you are dead sure what its ending is. In a long text, he has chronicled Francis Coppola’s woes on concluding “Apocalypse Now,” with suggestions on how a few timely questions at the start would have saved the later grief.

Like Myhers, Collaborator is user-friendly, and there is room in the creative process for both. It’s just that Collaborator works 24 hours a day, except in power failures.