Gripe List Starts With a Hype List

Who has automatic entree to television? Just about anyone with a big movie to promote. The small screen’s hunger for star presence is ravenous.

Is anyone else fed up with this phenomenon, disgusted by the way TV climbs inside the pockets of press agents and their clients by embracing stars with movies to promote merely for the privilege of displaying their mugs in front of the camera? The bigger the star, as the scenario goes, the bigger the TV audience.

Although newspapers are sucked into the publicity process too, TV remains the dazzling big prize for movie promoters. When is the last time you saw a major movie star being interviewed on TV when not hyping a movie?

The latest to make the TV rounds in a major way is his brawny blockbustership himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is simply everywhere these days talking about and selling tickets for “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Sometimes you get Schwarzeneggers even in duplicate: On Monday, for example, through the magic of videotape, he appeared simultaneously on “CBS This Morning” and the new “KTLA Morning News.”

Not content with a single morning of Schwarzenegger schmoozing, Channel 5 came back Tuesday with “Arnie Talks about the Making of the Film,” code for: News Story on Behalf of the Movie Industry.

It’s a free ad.

It would be one thing to interview Schwarzenegger or other superstars in depth. But that isn’t the way the process works. Actors rarely talk about anything not connected to the movies they’re promoting, and the interviewers rarely are skilled enough or determined enough to take control.

Enough already. The policy that lets stars promote their movies via TV should be, well, terminated.

A GROENING OF SALT: In addition to creating “The Simpsons” for Fox, Matt Groening has for years been a brilliant, self-syndicated cartoonist whose satirical messages are infinitely more sophisticated than the goofy, buck-toothed rabbits that deliver them.

Here is some vintage Groening on “How to Be a Clever Film Critic” (which you may notice applies to all critics): “Develop a clever rating system that reduces your critiques to cute ‘n’ easy consumer guides.” He recommends stars, numbers, smiling faces or dollar signs.

He also suggests clever words to use in reviews to ensure being quoted in ads, including such adverbs as “richly,” “refreshingly” and “stunningly” and such adjectives as “haunting,” “evocative” and “elegant.”

And he adds: “Don’t forget these handy phrases: ‘I loved it!’ ‘It sizzles!’ ‘. . . great fun . . . ‘ and ‘A masterpiece!’ ”

Groening suggests the following ways to pad out reviews when you’ve nothing to say: “Recount the plot. Throw in gratuitous puns. Write about yourself.”

Actually, this petulance disguised as humor comes from a man who does not understand critics. For example, as I was writing just the other day about me. . . .

DAYS OF MISTAKEN IDENTITY: KCET Channel 28 on Thursday begins rebroadcasting “The Golden Age of Television,” five dramas from the era (roughly the late ‘40s through the late ‘50s) that has somehow been indelibly stamped with greatness.

Golden Age?

Yes, if you thought political blacklisting was golden.

Yes, if you thought 15-minute newscasts were golden.

Yes, if you thought making blacks invisible was golden.

Yes, if you thought depicting women as vapid and inferior was golden.

Please! The so-called Golden Age stood out only because the medium then was young and relatively fresh, projecting a sense of daring and unpredictability if for no other reason than TV was mostly live.

As a laboratory for anthology drama, however, the age was unique.

Starting with “Bang the Drum Slowly” at 10 p.m., each of the five plays being rerun by KCET was later made into a theatrical movie. The best of these TV oldies--still holding up despite the rudimentary technology--is J.P. Miller’s “The Days of Wine and Roses,” airing July 18, with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie as a married couple who are alcoholics.

Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick went on to receive Oscar nominations for the 1962 movie, but this production--especially Laurie’s overwhelming performance as a tragic character who prefers seeing the world through the haze of alcohol--is the one that’s most golden.

MOST OBNOXIOUS TV PICTURE OF THE WEEK: The traditional running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, whereby persons of dubious intelligence careen through the streets pursued by charging bulls, trying not to get trampled or gored. One of them didn’t make it.

Just about all newscasts aired pictures of this Saturday spectacle, and many made light of it. More than anything, the coverage reflected insensitivity on the part of TV news people who, by chuckling at the pictures, gave their own endorsement to this act of animal cruelty.

If TV is so in love with action, how about showing these peabrains being chased by a speeding train?

LENO OR LETTERMAN?: Should NBC have picked David Letterman instead of Jay Leno to succeed the soon-to-retire Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show”? Leno and Letterman are both very funny.

Yet as an interviewer--someone who in the “Tonight Show” tradition can ask gentle questions that elicit responses no one will recall--Leno is vastly superior. Leno is a comfortable fit. Letterman agitates.

Although Letterman’s world-class late-night show remains one of TV’s raucous joys and rare pockets of unpredictability, Letterman may be not only the worst interviewer on the small screen, but also the cruelest. I saw him destroy a dazed Molly Ringwald once in an interview that could have gotten him arrested for mugging.

Robert Downey Jr. says about Letterman in the current Playboy magazine: “God, he’s funny, but he can be really mean. If you don’t score the second you get out there, by either saying something or doing something, it’s over. I said something funny within the first 60 seconds, and I saw immediately that he decided not to hurt me. I was so thankful.”

YES, HE’S SILLY, BUT . . . : Say what you will about him (and some of us have said plenty), but Willard Scott gets a standing ovation for the way he has continually celebrated the elderly on NBC’s “Today” program by showing their pictures as he notes their birthdays and anniversaries.

There is something pure and Americana about these segments. A typical Scott comment about a 100-year-old: “A fine lookin’ woman!”

FINALLY: I saw “Terminator 2.” A masterpiece!