FILM COMMENT : On and On and On They Go . . . : It’s not your imagination. Hollywood movies <i> are</i> getting longer--and not because there are so many more worthy subjects.

Do you think most movies these days are way too long? Do they seem to end not once but two, three, four times? Do you find yourself wondering why a perfectly decent 90-minute movie finds itself captive inside a 141-minute behemoth?

Welcome to my support group.

I’ve tried to be objective about this--I view, after all, more than 200 movies a year in my professional capacity, and I’ve considered the fact that maybe the overload has gotten to me. But I’ve spoken to a lot of non-pros in the audience about this, and it’s clear I’m not alone. Hollywood movies take a lot longer getting to where they’re going than they used to. This is not--to put it mildly--because Hollywood movies have more to offer than they used to.

Entertainment Weekly did a little investigation a few years back that clocked the average running time for Hollywood features in 20-year intervals beginning in 1932. That year, the average length was 90 minutes; in 1952, 109 minutes; in 1972, 113 minutes; and in 1992, a whopping 121 minutes. By my own informal figuring, the average is now a few minutes longer.

This skyward creep is not, by itself, a critical issue. For one thing, a movie doesn’t have to be upward of two hours to seem long--there are plenty of relatively short movies, like, say, last year’s “Radioland Murders” or “Mixed Nuts,” that seem endless. And, likewise, a “Godfather” or a “Lawrence of Arabia”--or even a “Hoop Dreams”--can seem streamlined because it is so compelling. Their epic subjects justify, and make inconsequential, their epic length.

But most of the overlong movies we’ve been seeing are more the result of epic egos, and epic budgets, than of epic subjects.

Big running times are being clocked so that the puny can seem “important.” The high-mindedly mindless 2-hour 21-minute “Clear and Present Danger” crammed subplots about CIA raids in South America into the action like they were circus clowns piling into a VW bug.

Did “Pulp Fiction,” which derives from the terse, lurid pulps and films noir, really gain by being 2 1/2 hours? Did “Wyatt Earp” need to be 3 hours and 9 minutes in order to elaborate on a story that John Ford, in “My Darling Clementine,” told 10 times as well in half the time? Do we really need at the end of that movie an extended flashback inside a flashforward to a sequence--an aborted jail siege--that has no real narrative bearing on the movie’s meaning? Or is it just that, because this is a Kevin Costner vehicle, the studio willfully hid its pruning shears?

Come to think of it, every Costner movie from at least “Dances With Wolves” on has been a fanny twitcher. In 1994, we had a two-fer: “Wyatt Earp” and “The War,” a movie that took as long to end as the Vietnam War it memorialized. (Both films were box-office duds). You could eliminate half of the heart-rending, legend-pumped vanity close-ups of Costner from his films and save a good 20 minutes per movie.

Filmmakers who want to make “important” statements--or at least want to feel important making unimportant ones--often like to log the hours. Oliver Stone and Spike Lee movies, for example, often seem overlong. These directors make Mouthpiece Movies--lots of posturing and speechifying. Stone and Lee want the sheer weight of tedium to certify their seriousness. They like to drub audiences into submission.

One big reason “Natural Born Killers” was actually taken seriously in the media last year is that it kept pressing the same idiot media-bash buttons for all of its interminable two hours. Our cries of “Uncle!” mutated into “Mea culpa.” The film functioned for a portion of the press like an apocalyptic case of the Stockholm Syndrome: The victims learned to love their attacker.

Much is rightly made these days of how Hollywood is a bottom-line business with executives and agents calling the creative shots. But what is lost in this analysis are the ways in which powerful “talent” can govern that bottom line. NC-17 ratings aside, a truly powerful director or star is rarely overruled by the studios on any substantial creative decision--including the film’s running time. Stars who wish to canonize themselves are generally free to do so.

Since, in today’s world of high-speed corporate musical chairs, the star’s longevity is likely to be greater than the studio executive’s, the executive will indulge the star because he wants to lock in a relationship he may need when his golden parachute deposits him at his next way station. And because talent is always at a premium, even the non-star actors and directors may be granted indulgence. Everybody wants to be the exec who coddled in the cradle the next Steven Spielberg or Tom Cruise--or Quentin Tarantino.

Creative freedom should be championed as often as possible in Hollywood, but--here’s the rub--first there must be creativity to champion. Not all studio controls are harmful. “Wolf,” directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, was a deadbeat thriller made even deadlier by its drawn-out, please-let-this-be-over running time of 125 minutes. You could argue that filmmakers of this caliber have earned the right to their indulgence, but the indulgence in “Wolf” had no creative foundation. “I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf,” in its lickety-split B-movie running time, did just about everything “Wolf” did, and it was fun besides.

As a rule, it doesn’t make commercial sense for a studio to release a very long movie because its length cuts back on the number of potential screening times. But there are obvious exceptions: “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which dawdled every which way for its yucks, was a smash, and so, of course, is that epic dawdler “Forrest Gump.” Big movies, even if they’re just bloated tall tales like “Gump,” are perceived as “event” movies, and studios are suckers for events (like, say, the Oscars).

Besides, the studios keep increasing the average cost of a feature film along with increasing the running time. It’s uncool to spend big and think small. Bigger may not be better, but it’s, well, bigger--and in big-game-hunter Hollywood, that counts for a lot. Right now it counts for a lot in the entire media culture, particularly in the book business, where swollen, spottily edited tomes sag the bookshelves.

There are those in the movie business who believe that very long movies are more of a value in the video-rental realm. But this more-bang-for-your-buck approach is bogus. When was the last time you decided to rent a particular movie simply because it was longer than another movie? Many of the great films from Hollywood’s past--including Chaplin’s comedies and the Astaire-Rogers musicals and “Citizen Kane”--were under two hours, sometimes under 90 minutes. Does anyone feel deprived?

I t might seem odd that, in this era of the short attention span, movies should be getting longer. But there is a connection. Until about three decades ago, the gradual increase in feature films’ average running time had a lot to do with the decline of the B-movie and the challenge of television. But the movie business is now predicated as never before on test-market audience surveys--surveys frequently predating production--that collapse the concept of the tightly structured scenario.

It is precisely because we are (supposedly) easily bored now that filmmakers, even those powerful enough to resist, all too willingly follow the dicta of the surveys and throw a little bit of everything into their movies in order to hold us. This is why so few movies anymore have the integrity of their own origins. As with many of the big, highly advertised films of 1994, ranging from “The Paper” to “True Lies” to “Speechless,” what you often end up with is a drawn-out melange of toneless comedy/drama/action/heartbreak. Watching one of these movies, or dozens like them, is like channel surfing. (Is this an unanticipated way in which our TV viewing habits have affected the content of movies?)

The studios want to give you more bang for your buck, all right. What they don’t realize is that the attempt to satisfy everyone frequently results in the satisfaction of no one. And all that misshapen mix-and-matching in a movie just keeps the clock running.

It’s a shame that the Hollywood community’s obsession with slimming down hasn’t rubbed off on its movies.*