COMMENTARY : Assembly-Line Work--No Artists Need Apply : Movies: Able directors have been done in by a Hollywood atmosphere that stifles creativity.

Hollywood is often fawningly referred to as “a state of mind” but these days it’s more like a turbo-charged assembly line. The directors and screenwriters working the line are earning bigger bucks than ever before, but there’s a catch: The only clear route to success is the well-travelled, four-lane, techno-violent freeway.

For those filmmakers who are more comfortable with machines than with people--and their numbers are legion--this development is a boon. It places the burden of cinematic success not on human interaction but on engineering, and if the engineering is in the service of a star, or a sequel, so much the better. But for the filmmakers who made their reputations on more humanly contoured movies unreliant on great big shock effects, the current turbo-charged atmosphere represents a closing out of creative possibilities. Directors who don’t capitulate often find themselves unemployed, or directing the occasional film for cable TV.

Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch director who made “Total Recall,” and Irvin Kershner, of “RoboCop 2,” are both highly talented. And I think that, in very different ways, both have been done in by the new turbo-Hollywood.

In the case of Verhoeven, who also made the first “RoboCop” movie, Hollywood has made it possible for him to reach the widest possible audience. But he’s reaching that audience in ways that are increasingly reprehensible. Verhoeven has always had a brutal, cavalier streak but, in his Dutch movies, like the 1980 “Spetters,” about teen misfits in Holland, and the rip-roaring 1979 World War II epic “Soldier of Orange,” there was also an emotional core that charged the action and made it mean something to audiences.

“Soldier of Orange” was the kind of traditional high-style war film that Hollywood used to do so well, a la “The Great Escape,” and now does so badly, or not at all. At the time it seemed peculiar, and yet somehow weirdly apt, that a director from Holland should carry on the tradition.

Maybe it took a director from a country completely outside any slam-bang Hollywood tradition to recharge the action movie and reclaim its innocence. For those of us who saw “Soldier of Orange” when it came out, there was the recognition--the same one we had when George Miller’s Australian “Mad Max” movies came out--that here was a director who could really score in Hollywood making ferociously well the kinds of films Hollywood had been botching for years.

In a way, this has come to pass. After the misfire of Verhoeven’s first American film, the 1981 tooth-and-claw extravaganza “Flesh + Blood,” starring Rutger Hauer as a medieval warrior out of some Wagnerian fever dream, Verhoeven hit big with “RoboCop” and “Total Recall” by essentially torching the standard action film to a crisp. Audiences unused to the conflagration were floored by Verhoeven’s scorched-earth skills.

Not even the most ardent detractors of “Total Recall” have charged it with incompetence. On the contrary, Verhoeven’s hypercompetence in his new film has made it possible for him to realize to the most lurid degree the current climate of movie brutalization. It hardly matters at this point whether Verhoeven has been destroyed (albeit lucratively) by Hollywood or whether Hollywood has fulfilled him. He’s king of the hill, all right. Does it matter to himself or to the studio executives whose coffers he’s filling that the hill is a fetid compost?

Irvin Kershner is a more resonant and dispiriting case history. It’s been his fate, ever since he made his first low-budget feature in 1958, to be criminally underrated. Kershner is perhaps the most versatile American director in Hollywood; I can’t think of anyone else who has been so extraordinarily successful over such a broad range, from semi-documentary to space opera.

Films like “Loving” and “The Luck of Ginger Coffey” had an exquisite, short story-like expressiveness, a feeling for the entrapments of disillusioned lives. “A Fine Madness” (even in its studio re-cut, i.e. “botched,” version) and “Up the Sandbox” had elating sequences of knockabout urban poetry. “Return of a Man Called Horse” was a profoundly stirring epic that probably got further inside the mystic folklore of the American Indian that any Hollywood film ever has. “The Empire Strikes Back” was easily the greatest, the most resplendent and imaginative, of the Lucas-era sci-fi epics.

Kershner is also an artist who is profoundly alive to the pleasures of performance--a dying art in Hollywood. And of all American directors he is perhaps the most intuitively observant of women’s lives--a dead art. An inordinate number of actors have given what is quite likely the performances of their careers for him: Eva Maria Saint and George Segal as the anguished couple in “Loving”; Richard Harris’ passionate, lyrical John Morgan in “Return of a Man Called Horse”; Sean Connery’s subversive Village poet in “A Fine Madness”; Robert Shaw as the Irish dreamer transplanted to Montreal, and Mary Ure, in “The Luck of Ginger Coffey.”

With the exception of the 1989 HBO movie “Traveling Man,” Kershner has not made a movie in seven years, not since the last Sean Connery/Bond movie, “Never Say Never Again.” It’s not for want of trying, either. In the past decade he’s been announced as the director on a slew of aborted projects, ranging from an adaptation of the Eric Van Lustbader novel “The Ninja” to Mario Puzo’s “Fool’s Die” to John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle” to a film about Puccini.

In itself, this is nothing particularly new; most directors, even the most bankable, have racked up comparable lists. But most directors of Kershner’s class, and many below it, still end up working regularly on something . What does it say about Hollywood that one of its greatest directors has been at large for seven years? (The only comparable outrage is that Richard Rush has not directed a movie since “The Stunt Man” 10 years ago--also for not want of trying.)

What it says, I think, is that Hollywood has become a supremely inhospitable place for an artist with the skills and the temperament to make people’s lives reverberate on the screen. Eleven years ago, Kershner, bemoaning the influence of television on the movies, said in a magazine interview that “the poetry has been taken out of the image. Audiences want to be force fed. They must be titillated every minute or they get bored. Television has conditioned the American public to constant excitement because they must keep you tuned to that channel. So what they do is bombard you with histrionics: The car is always moving too fast, the shots are fired in volleys instead of singly. They even hit you over the head emotionally.”

How ironic then that television has today almost completely co-opted the small, intimate, “personal” movie. On the big screen, Kershner’s empathic skills are simply not in demand. And these skills are as out of place now in the big films as in the small. (In these days of the body-count clobber epic, it’s easy to forget that “big” is not automatically synonymous with “inhuman.”)

Given his vaunted versatility, it may not have been a mistake, at least in theory, for Kershner to have taken on “RoboCop 2.” After all, I remember feeling a bit doubtful when it was announced that he would direct the “Star Wars” sequel. But what’s upsetting about “RoboCop 2” is that although it’s wittier and, in places, far more imaginative than “Total Recall,” it’s part of the same techno-blowout continuum. In the past, Kershner’s best films, epic or intimate, all shared an avidity for what people were going through in their lives. His “big” films were as emotionally varied as his small ones.

“RoboCop 2” represents the work of a director for whom empathy has been declared off-limits. Hollywood wants its artists to be more than hacks; it wants them to be robots.