Valley Commentary : Multimedia Revolution Tugging at Hollywood : The latest trend will mean a new age in which movies, TV shows and CD-ROM computer games blend together into one high-tech monster.

They’re starting to appear. Studios with names like Iwerks (in Burbank) and Apogee (in Van Nuys). Known as “blue-screen studios,” they videotape actors against blue screens and insert these performances into digitized backgrounds. For Valley residents, such studios--built in storefronts and office buildings--will be visible evidence of a new trend, the much- buzzed- about multimedia revolution.

You know about the revolution: the one that will usher in a new age in which movies, TV shows and CD-ROM computer games blend together into one high-tech monster.

Some of the earliest examples of the new genre were on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. There, famous and semi-famous Hollywood actors shouted and gesticulated against spectacular digitized backgrounds. Wow! Amazing!

But wait--check out those titles: “Return to Zork,” “Voyeur,” “Caesar’s World of Boxing,” “Under a Killing Moon” . . . you get the idea. It was mostly low-grade genre fiction and Dungeons and Dragons ware. Browsing the multimedia exhibit was like browsing a comic book store on acid. Spaceships hurtled into digital scenery, vampires leered, knights with Schwarzenegger bodies wielded swords. It was heaven for 14-year-old boys and hell for everybody else (except maybe 25-year-old boys.)

When it comes to entertainment, Silicon Valley makes Hollywood look like the Old Vic, full of dramatic depth and variety. We can only pray that as multimedia drama goes through its birth pangs, Hollywood will pull Silicon Valley harder in its direction than Silicon Valley tugs the other way.

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What the movies most emphatically do not need is more of a comic-book atmosphere than they already have. It would be the worst kind of deja vu to go back to the Dark Ages of the 1980s when 19- to 24-year-old males were deemed the “target market” for all movies. You remember those days: Nobody over 35 went out to the movies anymore. Webster’s defined movie denouement as “a thrilling fiery explosion involving many vehicles.” Whenever a 17-year-old went on a rampage, he was immediately pursued by at least half a dozen contract-wielding Hollywood producers.

We’ve just come through that phase into something less callow. The word is out that it’s now safe for people with gray hair to wait in line at movie theaters. A thoughtful movie about a mature man with AIDS recently became a box office hit its first weekend out. Hollywood has (dare we hope it?) found a place in its fickle heart for talents genuinely interested in illuminating the human condition. Let’s hope that, come the media revolution, they can stand their ground.

Better still, what if a few visionaries started reincorporating some literary and playwriting talent back into the entertainment loop? We might regain some of the ground lost when literature slipped under the TV semi 40 years ago. Imagine rushing out to Blockbuster a few years from now to rent the CD-ROM of a favorite book by Ved Mehta or Sue Miller, executed with such digigraphic brio that it rivals the latest action-adventure movie for thrills and chills.

The idea’s not as nutty as it sounds. A CD-ROM story can be “filmed” for less than a million dollars--a fraction of what it costs to make a movie. That’s because the army of technicians who shoot and cut film will soon be replaced by a few workaholic programmers. This new cost-effective development leaves room for filmmakers to behave like off-Broadway producers, or like book publishers of old, those gentlemanly scholars who guarded our literary heritage before book publishing had become a subsidiary of media mega-conglomeracy. They could take chances on dangerous new ideas, recouping their losses with a few popular cash cows.

Things could go that way.

Or the new multimedia could follow Beavis and Butt-head down the road to weary adolescent alienation. If that happens, I’m submitting my review of the multimedia revolution without further ado: It stinks.