PERSPECTIVE ON ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY : Doors Shut to Our Export Supreme : Europeans say quotas on our films and TV programs protect their cultures. But they really seek to protect trade.

One of the world’s great eye-glazers is a thing called GATT. Never heard of it? Few people have.

Yet it is in the public’s long-range interest to take special and anxious note. Why? Because what is going on in GATT can hit your neighborhood, your livelihood, with more deadly impact than you dared imagine.

The GATT is not a gathering of the five Mafia families. Rather, it is an acronym for General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. More than 100 countries have been negotiating for more than four years (and in the last week) in Brussels. Because the talks began four years ago in Punta del Este, this version of the GATT is called the Uruguay Round. Negotiations on the agricultural sector collapsed last week, and the entire round is now in recess until January.

The vocalized aim of GATT is to reduce global trade barriers and trade tension. The joker in the negotiations deck is that, given the callous attention to that objective by a number of countries that want to keep their protectionist trade fences intact, it will do no such thing.

Within the inner precincts of the talks, where the tribal priests of trade convey a confiding smile to the outer world as they chatter away in a language called GATT-speak, they are furiously resisting open markets. For example, U.S. movies and TV programs, supremely successful on every continent, are an endangered species in the GATT deliberations. Only our government’s unshakable resolve, screwed to the sticking point, can defy the Europeans stiffing an incomparable U.S. trade asset.

The baronial objective of the 12 nations of the European Community, under the guise of protecting their “culture,” is to manacle the entry of American TV programs. A European Community broadcast directive imposes a “quota” on how many such programs can be exhibited on stations in EC countries. France has already barricaded its TV stations with even heavier quotas and doesn’t want to relinquish this unfair advantage. Other countries are eyeing those quotas with the relish of a hawk hovering over a chicken farm.

The great tragic imbalance is that the United States stands almost alone in the world in protesting this travesty on fair trade. The EC and other nations insist that their “culture” will decay and crumble unless the American visual hordes are held at the border. They pursue this theory with a malignant fidelity. How all this connects to the reduction of trade barriers and trade tension is inaccessible to a rational mind.

What most Americans don’t know is that the U.S. film/TV industry returns to this country more than $3 billion annually in surplus balance of trade. In an era when the phrase “surplus balance of trade” is seldom heard in our land, the American visual entertainment industry is one of the U.S.A.’s glittering trade jewels.

Simply stated, what we do creatively and market energetically on all continents, we do better than anyone else.

In every marketplace where we are allowed to compete, the natives of that country admire and patronize what we offer. Many viewers like the movies and TV programs produced in their countries best, but they like ours second. In a phrase, our movies and TV programs are America’s most wanted exports.

What this confirms is that the EC objective has nothing to do with culture. What it is really about is commerce. The only way to force citizens not to watch American programs is to keep those programs off the air. That is exactly where the GATT talks are tending.

If the United States signs a GATT agreement that submits to the restriction of free movement of American audio-visual material, we will have forfeited the future of one of the few American products whose mastery in world markets is affirmed. We will bear witness to the collapse of a unique American asset.

U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills is resolved to stand at the bridge, holding back the tide. But what will happen in the final hour, when the pens are poised to sign, and the Europeans say “no deal unless you throw your movies and TV programs over the side”?