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Writers Guild Awards Banquet Dishes Up Food for Thought : Screenwriting: Comic assaults on Hollywood share the spotlight with Woody Allen and his best original script for ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors.’

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TIMES ARTS EDITOR

At occasional awards banquets, when the entertainment gives new meaning to the concept of eternity, you’d as soon just hear the winners and leave. But at the Writers Guild’s night, you wouldn’t mind getting the winners on a sheet of paper and settling in for the tuneful and irreverent skits.

Over the years, the guild’s award banquet has won its own reputation for a kind of enlightened self-pity: lethal assaults on studio and network executives, story editors, actors and producers, and in general on the slings and arrows of the Hollywood writers’ lot, the cashmere peonage in which they would have us believe they operate and in which inadequate respect is paid.

This year, the targets included the widening foreign ownership of the Hollywood studios. In a Milt Rosen skit, Pat Morita as the new boss at Columbia suggests a remake of “Tora! Tora! Tora!” in which Pearl Harbor does not take place and the villains are Nicaraguans living in caves. “But you lost the war,” the writer cries. “Really?” Morita says slowly, drawing the writer to a view of the parking lot.

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The high point of the night’s entertainment, produced again this year by Chuck Rapoport, was not a skit per se but an appearance by Sid Caesar, ostensibly to present some foreign-language film awards that were in fact rapid-fire spiels in what sounded successively like French, Italian, German, Russian and Japanese. It was one of Caesar’s triumphs from the glorious “Your Show of Shows” revisited, with an occasional proper word ( vin ordinaire , Freud, Dostoevski, Kurosawa) audible through the torrent of grunts, gutturals, growls and hisses. Caesar drew thunderous applause, an homage to a great and currently sadly under-visible talent.

The night’s top news, presented by Steve Martin and Jane Fonda, was that Woody Allen had won for the best original script for “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Alfred Uhry for his own adaptation of his play, “Driving Miss Daisy.”

The runners-up to Allen were Nora Ephron for “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” Steve Kloves for “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” Tom Schulman for “Dead Poets Society” and Steven Soderbergh for “sex, lies, and videotape.” The runners-up for best adaptation were Shane Connaughton and Jim Sheridan for “My Left Foot,” Kevin Jarre for “Glory,” Phil Alden Robinson for “Field of Dreams,” and Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic for “Born on the Fourth of July.”

“Miss Daisy” and “Fourth of July,” generally seen as neck-and-neck contenders to dominate the Oscar race, now have a significant craft victory, Stone having been honored by the Directors Guild for his film. The portent, such as it was, is that there may not be a major sweep for any film this year.

The new hero figure among writers is clearly Art Buchwald, who, appearing as a presenter, talked about his successful suit against Paramount for a share in the profits of “Coming to America,” which was based, the court decided, on a treatment by Buchwald and Alain Bernheim. Buchwald said he’d been asked if he was bitter. “I was at first,” he said, “until the lawyers explained that Paramount was a nonprofit organization.”

The studio contends that there have been no net profits from the film’s $350-million gross. His accountants now have access to the studio’s books, said Buchwald. “We’re calling it ‘The Search for Red October . . . and November and December and on.’ ”

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In past years, the guild’s shows have done wonders with new and satiric voiceovers on stock newsreel footage; this time, some elaborate spoofy commercials were taped on writers’ themes. In another Rosen skit, executives in an elevator compare what they paid for their scripts, as at C&R; Clothiers. In Rene Balcer’s nutty parody of “This Old House,” the house is made of scripts and it is being knocked down, line by line.

The jokes were all inside, a tour of sore points and poignant bruises, but there was no trouble getting the idea.

Other awards went to T. S. Cook for his movie for television, “Nightbreaker,” and to Bill Wittliff for Part I of “Lonesome Dove,” his miniseries adaptation of the Larry McMurtry novel.

Ellen M. Violett was honored for her adaptation of Gavin Lambert’s “The Closed Set” on the “Tales From the Hollywood Hills” series on PBS. The 14--count ‘em 14--writers of “Not Necessarily the News” won the best musical-variety script award. Karl Schaefer was honored for “Rolling,” an episode of “TV 101,” and Todd W. Langen for “Coda” on “The Wonder Years.”

Six writers for “Ryan’s Hope” were honored for outstanding achievement in daytime television.

The guild’s annual Paddy Chayefsky Award for television writing went to the veteran David Shaw. The Laurel award for screenwriting was given posthumously to Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote the scripts for “Dinner at Eight,” “Philadelphia Story” and other memorable films. The Morgan Cox award for service to the guild went to Oscar Saul, and the Valentine Davies award for contributions to the cause of all writers was given to writer-producer John Furia Jr.

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A new award, named for the guild’s longtime counsel Paul Selvin and honoring a script that deals with issues of civil liberties and constitutional protections, went to Alison Cross, who wrote the movie for television, “Roe vs. Wade.”

The show began and ended with highly polished chorus numbers choreographed by Valerie-Jean Miller and written by Steven J. Fisher and Charles J. Schlotter, whose witty lyrics were not well served by the sound system, though, here too, there was no mistaking the sharp point of defiant pride.

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