PERSPECTIVE ON HOLLYWOOD : Good Scripts Would Drive Out Bad : When writers abdicated authority, the last line of personal responsibility was lost. Now no one feels shame for the gore.

It’s cheap, it’s easy, it gets ratings, and you don’t have to pay a real writer. Anyone from the third production assistant to the caterer’s nephew can do it--can write: “He chops off the old man’s head with an ax. Blood spatters everywhere.” You can leave it to the director to fill in the details; he’s done it so often before: Where the killer finds the ax--”So shouldn’t there be a damn forest out there?”--what sort of ax?--props will provide--whether it needs two or three blows or whether it’s neatly done or otherwise. Makeup will provide a severed neck with the little tubes that were arteries and esophagus still sticking up, and severed heads abound in the property stacks. Take your pick.

How many murders did the kids watch last month, how many family slayings, in a world in which what is fiction and what is news is hard to determine (except if it’s non-news, the women are a whole lot better-looking)? And forget the kids, what about us? If we wake in the morning depressed and paranoid, is it surprising? Did we not go to sleep with the sound of screams, the boot against flesh, in our ears, as we channel-surfed to see if anything good was on? Which there wasn’t. Because who wants to pay a writer when they don’t have to? When the production assistant will do?

Extraordinary what humans will do to each other, in the search for profit. Why pay the writer? Who wants dialogue anymore? What people say in dire straits is obvious, and mostly it’s grunts anyway, and if you want to sell in foreign countries, the less speech the better: Everyone everywhere understands rape, hate and murder. Let the actors improvise. And anyway, the writer’s rotten and looking for the easy way out--which is, let’s face it, rape, hate and murder. If in doubt, kill the whole lot off. Even Shakespeare did it, in “Hamlet,” on a bad day. Don’t blame the producer, blame the writer. And actually, people don’t make TV programs for profit only, they like doing it. There is enormous pleasure in doing what you can do well; ask any special effects maker proud of her rows of severed heads, babies her specialty.

The capacity for invention is rare and despised, and aren’t there enough real-life dramas to work from anyway? If real life depresses and invention elates, who cares?

OK, so times are bad. So bad, so violent, so murderous that it’s worrying even the people who create the stuff on TV and film: themselves on the whole un-murderous, un-violent, non-rapists and often perfectly decent people who see no harm in providing others, whom they see as lesser than themselves in human quality and sensitivity, with the sadistic fantasies they obviously like, and who feel the highest good is the greatest ratings, because then the advertisers cough up and the wheels of our society have to keep spinning somehow. Don’t they?

But these film and TV people have children too, and don’t like to see their kids, when the adults get back from the Oscars, stuck up against the screen, jerking and shuddering to the moving image of boot on flesh, knife through neck, the various orgasms of death.

“But you produced that program, Mom! Anyway, isn’t it based on real life? Didn’t those Waco kids really burn to death? Gee, they had it coming to them, I guess. So stupid--didn’t they believe in God or something crazy like that? Can I have some good-night chocolate marshmallow crunchies, like in the commercials, then I’ll go to bed. And don’t tell me when to go to bed. I’ll go when I want, or you’ll be lying dead, too. Pow!” No, the adults don’t like to hear that.

Oh, children, your marshmallow crunchies are soaked in the blood of fantasy. If I say that, it’s because I hope some advertiser somewhere, on his way back from church, will call his agency and say, “Look, I only want to advertise on programs that show violence off-screen,” because that’s what it’s going to take to change things. The consciences of advertisers, the consciences of all of us, not just the producers.

It’s also, unless our screens are to go blank, going to take the rebirth of the TV writers, the non-time-servers, the non-hacks. They are disheartened, and/or looking for work, or even inhabiting the bodies of those very time-servers, those hacks, and if you give them half a chance, would surface once again. Take over their hearts and minds.

Their own union has sold them down the river. In return for first-class air fares, some decades back, the copyright, the moral authorship, was allowed by the Writers Guild to pass from writer to studio. It was a charter for the moral degradation of programs, of course it was. By “moral” I don’t mean “respectable” or prudish. I don’t mean one-foot-on-the-floor time, I mean there was no one individual left who would or could or should feel responsible for what came on the screen; who would blush with shame and stand between the TV and his kids. The “studio” now owns that feeling, and a studio has a group existence behind which producers, directors, writers can hide: “Studios” consist of money men and publicity moguls, and wasn’t it a legal concept anyway? “Moral authorship” now has to do with payments received. Language itself is altered to suit our convenience. No one is left to blush.

Oh, producers--I use it in the Latin vocative, not in breathless female tones--oh, producers, if you would only stop talking about the evils of censorship and the 1st Amendment guarantee of free speech (Speech? Those grunts and groans?) and give back moral authorship to writers, you would save yourself millions and stay in existence, because you wouldn’t have to rely on production values to disguise the paucity of your material, and bad writers would turn into good writers, and forgotten writers crawl from under the table where Scott Fitzgerald left them, sober up and produce a decent script or two, which you and they could both take seriously. We’d even travel steerage if it meant saving Western civilization, which increasingly means the world.