A Quarter-Century on the Southern California Arts Beat : Entertainment: Since the final days of the Hays Code and the last stars on contract to studios, a lot of growing up has occurred on the Los Angeles arts scene.

The matter of anniversaries divisible by five has arisen again, compounded this time by the curious charm of a century divided into quarters. It was 25 years ago this very day that I took up my chores at the Los Angeles Times.

As usual on such an occasion the air is full of ghosts and memories, all tinted with astonishment that it has been so long. Yet it was only yesterday that I lugged a heavy suitcase through LAX, jet-lagged after the flight from London, to be met by my old friend Art Seidenbaum, already in residence, and the late Leonard Riblett, the assistant managing editor who had recruited me.

The paper was doubling the space it gave to entertainment, Riblett had told me: from five columns a day to 10. There is now that much space for television listings alone and there are between three and four times as many of us keeping an eye on the arts, for a Calendar that has long since been a free-standing section.

I reveal my antiquity by remembering that for many months I wrote my columns on a manual typewriter on a roll of teletype paper, an original and one carbon, my secretary Vi Stevens scrounged someplace. I required about 30 inches of the paper, double-spaced. I now gaze at an amber-lettered VDT screen, and the column is a screen and a half long.

The other day I did some rough multiplication and came up with the appalling conclusion that I have written something well over three million words on these pages. Given their durabilities and their frequency, Jack Smith and Jim Murray would consider this a modest output, if they were to lay their own columns end to end. But the total lends a certain poignancy to my notion that writing for a newspaper is like carving your initials on the surface of a lake. Yet the trade-off, as between television and motion pictures, is the immediacy of what you do.

It was coincidental, but it seems to me that I began my watch on the arts here in Southern California at an unusually interesting moment in history.

Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn and Walt Disney were still in place at the studios they built, and I interviewed them all. But Warner was already negotiating to sell his studio, Goldwyn was to make no more films and Disney died the following year.

The last of the founding moguls were departing, and the golden age of Hollywood they had helped create had already changed fundamentally. The days of the contract players, the stables of stars, were gone. I remember doing a column with Chad Everett, the point of which was that he was the last and only star under contract at MGM. The film industry was learning finally to be the film and television industry, but it was a chaotic time.

Jack Warner, in the Burbank twilight, did his part to push the movies into a new day, just as Warner Bros. had ushered in sound. He produced Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in 1966. (I remember the launching party on the sound stage, Jack Warner holding court, Mike Nichols looking vaguely discomfitted, as if he wished he could just get on with the picture.) And Warner released it with a voluntary “Suggested for Mature Audiences” label, giving notice that a new day was at hand in the content of mainstream, major studio films.

The tossing out of the old Hays Code with its onerous restrictions and its censoring powers and the adopting of a new ratings system in November, 1968, reflected many things: changes in the society’s manners and mores over the 34 years since the Hays Code became Hollywood law, pent-up demands for a freer hand in the creative community, court decisions about what was or wasn’t allowable on screen and the competitive pressure of television. It was clear to the industry that the movies were going to have to change not only form (the wide screen) but content to lure audiences away from the television set.

For all the excesses that followed, the gratuities of sex, violence and language, the new freedom of expression let the motion picture come of age as an art form. It has made this quarter century an extraordinarily exciting, and occasionally uncomfortable time, for movie watching.

I recall the first press screening of “I Am Curious Yellow,” all of the gents nervous and embarrassed because there was a woman present. (It was a long time ago.) I joked at the time that audiences attended because we were curious and not yellow. The film would, I suspect, now be found boring, but then it prospered from the considerable curiosity that the “legitimate” film could be so candid.

(I remember a screening, for expert witnesses, of “Quiet Days in Clichy,” seized at the docks as obscene and facing trial. After the screening, ex-Gov. Pat Brown shook his head and said, “To think I banned ‘The Outlaw’ when I was an assistant DA.” It did measure the changes, at that. The film was acquitted because, the judge said regretfully, he couldn’t prove it wasn’t a seriously intended work of art.)

By now the battles for the freedom of the screen seem largely, although never completely, to be won. Thinking back to the then-outspoken dialogue of “Virginia Woolf” and listening to almost any current film this side of “The Little Mermaid,” we do appear to have come a long way. Mixed emotions are permitted, yet the power of “Born on the Fourth of July,” for example, would have been unachievable not long ago. As a commentary on the Vietnam era, I couldn’t help thinking how vastly far removed Oliver Stone’s film was from “Riot on Sunset Strip,” one of the quickie films exploiting the tensions of the time (at that, one of the few that reflected the times).

It has been fascinating to watch television develop and flex its muscles, intermittently to be sure. Yet the immediacy of its globe-spanning news coverage has changed the course of history and probably done more than deterrence to give war a bad name.

This has been a remarkable quarter century for the performing arts as well. The Music Center had just come on stream in 1965, the Shubert Theatre was yet to be. The Museum of Contemporary Art was at best still a distant dream. So was the dazzling Performing Arts Center in Orange County. But it was clear that there was a growing appetite for the arts, handsomely confirmed by the success of the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984.

But, to paraphrase a line from a wildly different context, the arts are like housework, they never stay done. Success bounces around the studios and the networks like loose Ping-Pong balls. There is never quite enough money to sustain the arts as they should be sustained. There may or may not be a Beatles reunion, and there is a lively suspense always about how outrageous the next pop phenomenon will be. But meantime the best of the popular songwriters, long after Cole Porter, are still writing the ballads that speak to their generation.

I’m not quite ready for another quarter century, thanks, but so long as the eyes, ears and spine hold out, I’d like to sit in on the proceedings a while more.