COMMENTARY : Interactive Vidiots Push His Button : Movies: The spooky thing about ‘I’m Your Man’ isn’t how different it is from Hollywood films but how much the same it is.

The searchlights outside the Pacific Regency 8-Plex in Lakewood crisscross a big yellow banner proclaiming the West Coast premiere of “The First Interactive Cinema Game!” The “game” is a 20-minute comedy thriller called “I’m Your Man,” and, for three bucks, you can watch it--and watch it and watch it.

The gimmick is that the theater playing the film--officially it’s called an “Interfilm”--has been wired with pistol grips with color-coded buttons corresponding to the three main on-screen characters. At pre-selected moments you can alter the course of the plot by pressing the button prompted by the cue. Should, for example, the endangered guy on the roof race to the door (press green), jump to the next roof (press yellow), or reveal himself as a secret agent (press red)?

Your choice is logged onto the film’s laser-disc data base. Majority rules; plot changes flow seamlessly. Since 90 minutes of film were actually shot, it’s possible the movie can develop its plot in 68 different ways.

I endured six of them. Audience members--who, in terms of decibels, seemed to consist mostly of date-night dudes sporting their first mustaches and a smattering of Lonely Guys--holler their choices and scamper to unattended pistol grips to double and triple their votes. If this is the future of movies, they better start passing out earplugs with your ticket. And maybe flight insurance.

Each showing of “I’m Your Man” ends with a stentorian voice telling us: “At Interfilm, you don’t just sit there.” Have the InterPeople responsible for this film been to a regular movie theater lately? If so, they would know that theatergoers don’t just “sit there” either. Seat-thumping and nonstop jabber have become pandemic. What’s different about Interfilm is that it promotes socially sanctioned “Let’s Make a Deal”-style pandemonium for those people who want to leave their living rooms to see a movie but still have itchy remote-control fingers. It’s channel-grazing as public spectacle, with a democracy-in-action overlay. If Ross Perot ever got into the movie business he might come up with something like this. The communal cyberspace inside the theater has weirdo electronic town-hall vibes.

Controlled Entropy Entertainment, the company behind “I’m Your Man,” is big on blather and hoopla. The publicity notes for the film tell us that we are witnessing “the most revolutionary technological development since the introduction of sound.” We’re told that this is a “new paradigm for the world of arts and entertainment, a renaissance uniting new technologies and the needs and desires of a more demanding human audience.” (“Human audience”? Have they been experimenting on chimps?)

Controlled Entropy president Bob Bejan, whose previous credits include producing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles “Coming Out of Their Shells” tour, informs us that “now you don’t have to just watch the one thing the director wanted to show you.” Funny, this is never a problem when you’re watching a good movie.

But what about watching a bad movie? Bejan, who already is talking about an Interfilm in the near-future complete with gyroscopic seats and virtual reality goggles and gloves, may be onto something after all. Imagine what it would be like if you could tart up the complexion of all those mediocre movies you’ve been watching?

You don’t like Kevin Costner’s Nero cut in “The Bodyguard”? Press the green button and he can look like the president of the Hair Club for Men. Couldn’t take Billy Crystal’s vulcanized old-age job in “Mr. Saturday Night”? Press yellow and watch him pass from the reptilian to the human. Didn’t quite make it past Gerard Depardieu’s accent in “1492”? Press red and he can sound like John Forsythe. Didn’t care for the fanny lobes perched atop Gary Oldman’s noggin in “Dracula”? You get the idea.

But why stop with current movies? You can rework the entire history of cinema. Want Bonnie and Clyde to get away with it? Press red. Want more butter in “Last Tango in Paris”? Press yellow. But remember, majority rules. You may find yourself watching a “Casablanca” where Ilsa goes off at the end with Victor Laszlo. Or Rick goes off with Victor Laszlo.

If the people at Controlled Entropy were more industry-savvy they would realize that modern-day Hollywood has already beaten them to the punch. Bejan is simply fine-tuning a tried-and-true studio ploy. After all, the notion that audiences determine the content of a movie is what test-marketing is all about. And it’s the rare Hollywood movie these days that gets made without standing up to a firing squad of market surveys. Just about anything that doesn’t test well gets jettisoned--not just in post-production but in pre-production too. That’s why so much of what we see now has a play-it-safe blandness. The spooky thing about “I’m Your Man” isn’t how different it is from Hollywood movies but how much the same it is.

There’s a famous dinner party anecdote about the time legendary Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn expounded on his fool-proof device for determining whether a picture was good or bad. “If my fanny squirms,” he said, “it’s bad. If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good.” After a momentary silence, one of his guests, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, filled in “Imagine--the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass.”

Movie audiences have come a long way since Harry Cohn. Now the whole world is wired to our ass.