PERSPECTIVE ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY : World Lines Up for Craftsmanship : Our movies are the most popular in the world. Detroit should take a cue from Hollywood’s teamwork.

The beginning of summer is the occasion for unveiling the newest models of America’s most competitive industry: Hollywood movies. While this country’s cars, cameras, clothes and other products fight for survival in the international marketplace, moviegoers the world over line up to see films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Costner and Julia Roberts.

Why are they so popular? One answer is that American filmmakers have a special feeling for the hopes and fears, dreams and terrors of people from Alaska to Zambia. Jon Boorstin’s splendid book, “The Hollywood Eye,” published last year, suggests another reason: craftsmanship.

In describing how Hollywood movies are made, he shows that, beneath all the glitter and hype, the film business operates according to certain basic principles from which distressed industries could profit. Detroit, for example, has something to learn from Hollywood.

Learn by doing. To become a film-maker in Hollywood requires an apprenticeship, not an academic degree. The past two decades have seen the establishment of film schools where students can take courses in the various cinematic arts and make their own films. But attending film school is no substitute for spending long hours on the set and in the editing room of a major Hollywood picture, learning how to put a movie together. Screenwriter and author Boorstin, who was trained as an architect, got his start in the movies through an association with the noted director Alan J. Pakula. In this way, Hollywood is more like European and Japanese businesses, which value work experience, and less like American business, which is impressed by credentials from prestigious business schools.

Money counts. Hollywood is well-known for the huge salaries it pays movie stars. Just as important is the money that producers spend on technical features. Film is cheap, of course, but the time of the people involved in the scene is not. In Hollywood, as elsewhere, time is money, and movie-makers spend a lot of both on their product.

“Money shots” are panoramic scenes like the grand view of Bombay at the opening of “A Passage to India” or the moment in “Tucker” when crowds gather outside the factory to see the hero’s new model car. Such scenes are costly and often occupy the screen for only a few seconds, but are worth having because they set the tone and mood of the film.

In the international marketplace, Hollywood competes on quality, not price. So it is with most other American industries, which need to learn that because they cannot make things more cheaply than others, they must make them better.

The customer is always right. Movie-making involves thousands of decisions: whom to cast, what camera angles to use, how to light the set, when to cut a scene. All are made on the basis of a single question: What will keep the viewer’s attention? This distinguishes Hollywood films from movies made elsewhere. Boorstin compares the great Italian director Federico Fellini’s masterpiece “8 1/2” with the Orson Welles classic “Citizen Kane.” He shows that, while both are wonderful works of art, the American film is easier to follow and understand. Few American products are as carefully designed to be user-friendly as Hollywood movies.

Teamwork is everything. American business is often criticized for being too hierarchical, with layers of bureaucracy between top management and workers. By contrast, making a movie is a collegial enterprise. Many people have a say in what happens. From the first shot to the final cut there is an ongoing conversation among the people involved about what to put in and what to leave out. As Boorstin describes it, the process of movie-making resembles the periodic meetings, the “quality circles,” in European and Japanese firms and factories in which workers can voice complaints and suggest improvements.

Hollywood is better-known for lavishness than for productivity. In fact it is home to both, and the two are related. Other American products may not be popular, but Hollywood movies are the films of choice in Germany, Japan and Italy. That is why the movie capital is home to North America’s heaviest concentrations of Mercedes-Benz automobiles, Nikon cameras and Gucci fashions.

What Detroit can learn from Hollywood is that craftsmanship pays off in big profits.