MOVIES : The Warts Have It : Remember the days when Hollywood gave us those loving portrayals of our heroes? Good, because those days are history. Got a problem with that?

Time was, if you were seeking some uplift, perhaps a smidgen of real-life inspiration, Hollywood could help you out with an ennobling film biography:

Selfless scientist Louis Pasteur finds the cure for anthrax, makes milk safe for the world and still finds the time to rescue his infant during childbirth! Swing king Glenn Miller gets the world’s feet a-tapping! Courageous Charles Lindbergh braves the elements and befriends a housefly while crossing the Atlantic!

More recently, however, bio-pics have portrayed less heroic lives: Pampered harridan Joan Crawford traumatizes her kids by revealing her hang-up about wire hangers! Psychotic boxer Jake LaMotta beats his wife and winds up a pathetic mound of flop sweat! Hopeless case Sid Vicious--well, Sid’s just flat-out beyond hope.

One could argue that they don’t make role models the way they used to, but the truth is, they don’t make bio-pics the way they used to.

This season could be seen as the Fall of the Legends, as four recent or upcoming films explore the darker, more personal aspects of heretofore celebrated historical heroes:

* Ron Shelton’s “Cobb” takes filmgoers on a dark, disturbing journey through the last few months of the life of baseball immortal Ty Cobb, as seen through the eyes of his biographer, who witnesses Cobb’s propensity for violence, racism and misogyny.

* Alan Rudolph’s “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” bathes writer Dorothy Parker in a haze of booze, botched affairs and suicide attempts.

* “Tom & Viv” examines the tormented relationship between poet T. S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, depicting him as a sop who couldn’t cope with her mood swings and dealt with her in a most unfeeling manner.

* “Immortal Beloved” rummages through Beethoven’s little black book, offering a speculative history of the composer’s possible mistresses.

“The traditional Hollywood bio was a predetermined entertainment with the facts grafted on afterward,” says writer-director Rudolph. “Whether it was about an opera singer or an astronaut, it was the same old story. Those same films today are looking a lot more closely at their subjects, like the media in general.”

Says Larry Karaszewski, co-screenwriter of “Ed Wood” and the upcoming “Larry Flynt,” a portrait of the iconoclastic pornographer that Oliver Stone will produce for Columbia: “Any genre goes through an evolution. First there were the classical bio-pics, and now we’re deconstructing them. People don’t buy that (naivete) nowadays. You have to show what goes on behind the scenes.

“Hollywood is largely formula stuff, and the way around that is to find some weird true story or person to make a movie about, a story you could never make as a fictional work. It helps you to break the rules--the writer can say, ‘Hey, it really happened.’ A guy who was a terrible movie-maker who was also a transvestite? A pornographer who ran for president? You’d be thrown out of the (studio executive’s) office if you just made that up.”

Brian Gibson agrees. “Real-life scenarios are so much more inventive than anything from the fiction writer’s pen,” says Gibson, who directed the Tina Turner bio “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “The Josephine Baker Story” and is producing an upcoming Frida Kahlo film for HBO. “Audiences have become too sophisticated. They understand and want to see the shadow sides, the dark sides.”

But can sophisticated be a euphemism for nosy ? With the proliferation of tabloid-style journalism, morning talk shows designed largely to get former lovers and friends screaming at one another and quickie TV movies torn, however messily, from current headlines, has our society just become addicted to dirt?

“I think we are more nosy nowadays,” says Miranda Richardson, who stars in “Tom & Viv” and first made her mark as Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be executed in Britain, in the 1985 docudrama “Dance With a Stranger.” “People would like to hear the truth sometimes, or as near as you can get. Looking into this privileged territory helps make the story accessible to more people.”

Says Tommy Lee Jones, star of “Cobb”: “We have grown up and we have gotten nosy, both. It’s easier to be nosy these days. That’s why public figures are no longer required by the leadership and the press to be saints. We now acknowledge people can be both heroic and . . .” He searches for the right word. Human?

“Or worse.”

Film historian Leonard Maltin calls “Cobb” a first: “I can’t think of another bio-pic that covers such a reprehensible character with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”

Maltin, of course, recalls Martin Scorsese’s 1980 epic “Raging Bull,” the damning saga of boxer LaMotta, one of the bellwethers of the current bio-pic trend and widely considered the finest film of the 1980s.

“That’s an extraordinary film by any standard,” Maltin says. “It’s a warts-and-all portrait that is intriguing in that regard, a turning point in the film biography.”

Before “Raging Bull,” Bob Fosse’s 1974 film “Lenny” examined, darkly, the life of controversial comic Lenny Bruce. And Robert Altman’s bicentennial satire “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” excoriated the Wild West legend of Bill Cody. It included a memorable line that could justify many a bio-pic: “Truth is whatever gets the most applause.”

Shelton had “Raging Bull” in particular looming large in his mind while working on “Cobb” but says that his film is intended to ask larger questions pertaining to the nature of celebrity in America.

“This is my version of (biographer Al) Stump’s version of Cobb’s version of himself,” says Shelton, who also brought the story of Louisiana Gov. Earl Long and his lover, Blaze Starr, to the big screen in “Blaze” (1989). That film, like “Cobb,” meditated on the role of the media in bringing public figures’ private lives into public purview.

“What should we know about celebrities? My concern is not that we know too much but that we get confused about what we know, that we pretend that because this man is a very good right fielder or point guard that he is therefore a role model,” Shelton says. “But that man is, whether he wants it or not, a role model, by nature of his working in the public eye.”

Still, despite the wealth of public knowledge about Cobb’s epic unpleasantness, Shelton is sensitive to the idea that he has publicly taken down a legend and that some will find his film off-putting:

“Cobb’s grandchildren are not gonna like this movie, or his children. I had to make peace with the fact that the family probably wouldn’t approve of the movie. But he’s been dead for 34 years, and for most of the previous 20 years he had little contact with his family. So I don’t think I’m doing damage to the family. If anything, we’re trying to come to terms with him.

“I wouldn’t like a movie about my grandfather. And so be it. As a storyteller, I have to stay true to what is the heart and the essence of these people.

“All the poetic license is available to you, and yet you have to be rigorous (in balanced research) at the same time. It’s a tough subject. Obviously we’ve come a long way from ‘The Glenn Miller Story.’ ”

Shelton poses the question bedeviling every maker of a film biography: “If you’re going to write about someone in the spotlight, does that mean you are in the spotlight too? If you accept that responsibility, are you willing to expose yourself the way you’re exposing your subject? I suggest the answer is ‘no’ in almost every case.”

The crux of “Cobb” is an issue that filmmakers always face: What do you leave in a biography? What do you omit? More to the point, when does artistic license become flat-out misrepresentation of a human being?

“The danger is, when these films are good, you do believe them,” Maltin says. “You don’t get a study guide when you walk into the theater. Moviegoers don’t have to take an entrance exam to see a movie. For many in the audience, this will be their only exposure to a subject, and when something says it’s a biography, when it says it’s based on a true story, that’s a certain cross to bear. You leave yourself open for attack if you take liberties with the facts. It’s tricky--filmmakers should take responsibility.”

This autumn saw “Ed Wood,” the misadventures of America’s most inept movie-maker, and “Quiz Show,” based on the memoirs of Richard Goodwin, which revealed the fast-and-loose attitudes of some executives in television’s early days. Both came under attack, the former for its depiction of Bela Lugosi as a profane lech and the latter for its misrepresentation of major players in the game-show scandals.

“When the theme of your film is that you shouldn’t lie for entertainment’s sake, it leaves you a little susceptible to criticism,” “Ed Wood” co-screenwriter Karaszewski deadpans about “Quiz Show.”

His film’s depiction of Lugosi was referenced, he adds, though he says: “We later eventually realized that the source we were using was a little crazy. So instead of the story being about Bela going off, it was just the source going off.”

Says Shelton: “One has to make distinctions. We’re in an age of television and tabloids, and newspapers are all kind of going mad. I don’t think the rules are very clear, and I think they need to be clarified. We’re asking people to think and make choices.”

Shelton’s star disagrees. “Bottom line is, you’re making a movie; movies are, at their best, works of art,” Jones says. “They have no responsibility to anything, other than themselves, so it’s OK to exaggerate or change history to fit your story. And it’s even OK to claim that it’s history. And that’s the approach I take.”

Jones recalls his Emmy-winning turn as Gary Gilmore in “The Executioner’s Song” (1982): “The screenplay was by Norman Mailer, based on his book, which was supposed to be based on reality. There was somewhat of a difference between the real Gary Gilmore and the one in his book. There was a difference between the one in the book and the one in the teleplay. The idea was not to reproduce Gary; it was to play a Gary Gilmore. It’s impossible to come up with a rule of thumb when playing a character from real life.”

Richardson, describing “Tom & Viv” as “faction” and “an imaginative reconstruction of events,” acknowledges that the film fudges the truth on a key plot element that casts Eliot in a more critical light.

“I hope that people like to be challenged, and make up their own minds about the characters,” she says. “Being sympathetic toward those characters doesn’t mean glossing over slightly less noble points.”

Rudolph likewise acknowledges that “Mrs. Parker,” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as the writer, is hardly constructed like the ordinary bio-pic and that he takes some artistic liberties, but he insists that they are necessary to evoke the essence of his characters’ lives in a two-hour movie.

“It’s presumptuous to think you can gather a whole person’s life and put it in a two-hour movie,” says Rudolph, who adds that his film “would hold up to factual scrutiny. But we’re finding that the most picky audiences are people with a smattering of knowledge or (who) have gone with the myths surrounding her. They’ve taken a little information and determined that what they know is more important than what we know.

“Most of the scenes play out uneventfully. I constructed the film that way on purpose. I didn’t want to do the headlines of Dorothy Parker’s life or compile a list of her greatest hits or quips. When you do that, you get brief scenes that don’t go beneath the surface. Truth doesn’t come out in the content of a life. I’m interested in the context, not just the content.”

Hence, Rudolph created a scene he acknowledges is fictional in which Parker and Robert Benchley (Campbell Scott) emotionally discuss their tormented platonic relationship. “Yet people say that scene is one of the most realistic scenes in the film,” he says.

Rudolph doesn’t think he has done Parker’s memory a disservice by revealing her inner torment.

“I think it’s a loving portrait of survival,” he says. “I call her a ‘self-destructive survivor.’ You have to respect her enigmatic qualities instead of expose or simplify them for audiences.”

Those enigmatic qualities--the essential information that puts an audience in communion with the film’s subject matter--are often what is missing in film biographies, Maltin says.

“In doing biographies of creative, artistic people, it’s tough to get inside a person, to dramatize the creative spirit, the muse that causes them to produce great works of art,” Maltin says. “ ‘Bird’ (Clint Eastwood’s 1988 Charlie Parker bio-pic) is a film done by a genuine jazz lover, yet it gives no indication of how much music really meant to Charlie. You would never know by seeing it how music was a driving force in his life and what an influence he had on others. It was very disappointing.”

“ ‘Chaplin’ never found what its hook was, what its main question was,” filmmaker Gibson says. “It’s not enough to say he was a fascinating, successful man. You have to ask: ‘What is it about him that interests me?’ ”

For Gibson, that muse that Maltin finds elusive in film biographies can lie in the dark side of their subjects’ personalities.

“You have to look at what it was about him that made him compulsive and ambitious and wanting to transcend the ordinary,” he says. “You have to establish a hole in a person’s spirit, some damage from which that talent springs. They need that special motor, a fuel that pushes them to greatness, that pushes them in doing ordinary, everyday work to the extent that they become extraordinary.

“You have to approach film biographies in a fashion that you’re doing more than a bio-pic. It’s not a National Geographic tour through someone’s life, like she’s the Grand Canyon.”

“What’s Love Got to Do With It” is a special case because it painted a painfully unflattering portrait of someone still alive who did not cooperate with the production: Ike Turner is routinely shown abusing both drugs and Tina. Gibson says despite Ike’s protestations after the film’s release, there was never any legal trouble, largely because “there was an infinite number of witnesses, from taxi drivers to choreographers--I’d run into them after the movie was out and they’d say, ‘Oh, yes, I saw him when he used to knock her about.’ In Ike’s case, if anything, we strayed on the generous side.”

Part of that may have been due to an unexpected visit from Ike during location shooting.

“I was setting up a scene and turned around, and all the crew had disappeared,” Gibson recalls. “I half-expected fireworks, but he was very mild, very sweet. He went over to his car and opened the trunk and pulled out photos and signed autographs for the whole cast and crew. We were influenced by that encounter with him in some scenes in the film.”

In the case of the upcoming “Larry Flynt” movie, one might expect a little protestation from the Hustler magazine publisher--the film’s basic gist will be, “Sure, he’s a pig, but he has every right to say what he thinks,” screenwriter Karaszewski says--but, in fact, he has decided to cooperate with the project.

“One of the major points of the film is the court case with Jerry Falwell, which Flynt won when the court decided you could parody a public figure,” Karaszewski says of the 1988 ruling in which the U.S. Supreme Court said that Flynt and his magazine Hustler did not violate libel laws in a vicious cartoon of Falwell. “Because Flynt won that case, it gives us free rein to do what we want with him.”

With “Ed Wood” and “Larry Flynt,” Karaszewski and writing partner Scott Alexander may be redefining the bio-pic in another fashion altogether, creating playful, postmodern pastiches that exalt the extraordinarily mediocre.

“What we do are anti-bio-pics, what people in a traditionally just society would not ordinarily get,” Karaszewski says. “They’re not the Great Man bio-pic, which is two hours of being noble, or the Underbelly of the Great Man, which is, ‘Here’s what he was like in real life.’ With our characters, people hate them already, and we have to figure out how to present our case for them.”

But until the campy bio-pic becomes the vogue, the muckraking film bio seems to be the form of choice. And Shelton, for one, has long pondered what is ethical and just when turning the lives of real human beings into slick entertainments.

“What is discretion?” he muses. “If a man is a womanizer, is that an issue? It’s only an issue if he’s Gary Hart and dares you to prove he’s not. If a man is a wife-beater, is that an issue? Of course: It’s criminal, felonious behavior. If a man is homosexual--I don’t understand ‘outing’ people. If a man chooses to stay in the closet, that’s his responsibility.

“I wish we could come up with a simple rule that would apply in every case. The more we talk, the more difficult it is to come up with a set of rules.”

Interestingly, the same actors who bring the lives of others to the public often cling tenaciously to their own private lives.

For example: Is there a bio-pic in the story of a Texas actor who entered manhood as a rough-and-tumble football player, who appeared in four stage plays before seeing one, who became much celebrated for his on-screen versatility as well as his prickly personality and eventually won an Oscar?

“No, there isn’t,” Jones says with a grin. “The subject matter would sue you naked.”

For Shelton, his film bios must have intellectual and historical honesty, and it certainly doesn’t hurt if they’re entertaining.

“Why does ‘Raging Bull’ stick in people’s minds?” he asks. “Because it’s well-made and we feel something of the essence of this man, LaMotta, captured. Artistic license (was) taken everywhere, and I don’t care, because Scorsese captured something about human behavior.

“No one lives their lives in three neat acts. My job is to shape it. That’s a matter of trust. Either I’m talented and honorable at it, or I’m not.

“There’s no rules, I guess, no rules. It’s all discretion, and we’re not living in an age of discretion.”