The Film Industry Is Not Just Another Business : Studios: With Matsushita’s acquisition of MCA / Universal, the melancholy fact is that more than half of the major founding units of the U.S. movie industry are now in foreign hands.

The sale of MCA/Universal to Matsushita will, among many other things, call for some re-ranking in Forbes’ list of the richest Americans and Fortune’s lists of the 500 richest firms here and abroad. So much for the neutral news.

The transaction is another blast of the icy winds of change that have been blowing through the whole American economy ever since we collectively began sending our dollars abroad for TV sets, VCRs and cars, cars, cars.

It carries yet another message about an economic colossus being cut down to a new, lesser size. In other parts of the economy and indeed elsewhere in Hollywood, the changes in ownership betoken failures of American management to respond adequately, let alone forcefully and imaginatively, to new technologies and shifting marketplace tastes.

The Universal buyout is different in one significant way from some of the other foreign purchases. Matsushita acquires a viable, well-managed and profitable concern. The price was a bargain, compared to the $3.4 billion Sony paid for Columbia, which was still in disarray when Sony bought it.

Very little will change, keen observers in the investment community are saying. The foreign buyers, now representing not just Japan but Australia (Murdoch of Fox) and Italy (Parretti of MGM), simply want and need the product--and, of course, the profits--but are content to leave the driving to the locals, whose expertise they have long admired from afar.

Coming from the paper-dollar experts in the sector that gave us Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and Charles Keating, these reassurances are less serenely reassuring than they might be.

The melancholy fact, sharp and inescapable, is that the ultimate shaping control of four historic segments (more than half of the major founding units) of the motion-picture industry has passed into foreign hands. And what is abundantly clear is that we probably have not seen the last of the studio turnovers.

There seems nothing in Hollywood, nor in the country at large, that is nailed down--if the price is right. The tax laws make it wise if not imperative for proprietors to sell, to cash in their gains. And in the present atmosphere of deregulation and non-regulation, the fact that foreign takeovers are often one-way streets seems to bother no one. (Universal could presumably not have bought Tojo Studios even if it had wanted to. T. Boone Pickens can’t get on the board of a Japanese company of which he is a principal stockholder.)

But the larger concern for anyone reading these symptoms of economic decline is that movies are not just another business. Picture-making began almost simultaneously in several countries--Australia itself was making serials before 1920. Yet some fortunate conjunctions in creative history gave the American industry a world-dominating position it not only still has but has extended to television.

And the importance of this global saturation was not simply the profits that have rolled back home on the plus side of the balance of trade. It has been the movies’ exporting of ideas, images, aspirations, ideals bearing the American label. Some of the images--notably as they still stress material possessions above all else--have admittedly been delusive and dangerous.

Yet the simple presumptions about equality and justice as fundamentals of American society and as dramatized by the movies have had a powerful impact all over the world. And the freedom of the American screen to be critical of American society when it has fallen short of its own ideals has been watched with envy by audiences--and filmmakers--even in nominally democratic countries where the screen is guarded more circumspectly.

The freedom of the American film to deal with social and political issues here or abroad has been one of its glories (an infrequent glory, maybe, in a medium designed to divert and entertain, but a glory when it happens). This is not to say that things will inevitably change. But all the foreign buyouts are predicated on profits and the bottom line--in considerations of which chance-taking and daring departures from the norm are anathema. A hard-eyed realism must suspect that the blockbuster mentality, series, remakes, prequels, sequels and Roman numerals generally will be in greater vogue than before, not less.

Individual filmmakers or stars with clout, like Kevin Costner in the matter of “Dances With Wolves,” may be able to buck the bottom-line mentality. But the fact that Akira Kurosawa, Japan’s greatest filmmaker, had to look to the United States rather than to his own industry to be able to make “Kagemusha,” “Ran” and “Dreams” does not invite confidence.

And that old devil, the well-known chilling effect, is a presently incalculable consequence of all the takeovers. How will it play in Peoria is no longer the relevant geographic question.

It is a new day in Hollywood, and no mistake. The question is what kind of a day it will be, and the weather reports are inconclusive.