BOOK REVIEW : A Sketchy History of Female Screenwriters : THE WOMEN WHO WRITE THE MOVIES, <i> by Marsha McCreadie</i> , Birch Lane Press, $19.95, 243 pages

Twenty-two years later, my dog-eared copy of Molly Haskell’s “From Reverence to Rape” sits on the bookshelf with little hand-torn scraps of paper marking pages I wanted to go back to. All I have to do is glance at the first chapter, and I recall what an exhilarating experience it was to read Haskell’s analysis of women in Hollywood, both on the screen and behind the scenes.

There are scribbles in the margins of that book, because it almost demanded active participation from the reader. It was the early 1970s, and Haskell--brimming with knowledge and a feminist’s righteous indignation--wanted nothing less than to write a book that set the record straight. Like Peter Finch’s character in the film “Network,” she was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Out of such passion came insight that still holds up.

Things aren’t a whole lot better two decades later, according to Marsha McCreadie, author of “The Women Who Write the Movies,” a survey of women screenwriters. Today, there is a handful of women writing movies (thus offering an alternative sensibility), but the percentage is still smaller than in the 1940s when Hollywood, like other industries, had to open its doors to women while the men were off fighting.

What has changed, however, is the attitude and discipline of the writer who’s looking over the scene. McCreadie clearly has a genuine affection for movies--she likes to talk to writers, likes to look through their scripts for recurrent themes and images (although I doubt anybody’s going to get a master’s thesis out of women’s references to dogs in the oeuvre of Nora Ephron). When she gets access--and more about that in a minute--she asks the right questions about whether screenwriters are oppressed and women scribes, doubly so.

Then why does this book seem so light compared to its older sister? In part because these are the polite, anecdote-driven ‘90s, a time when feminism is used more often as an epithet than an honorific. McCreadie is more the oral historian than the probing journalist; she has conversations with her subjects, and if there’s something missing, she’s disarmingly, if frustratingly, frank about telling us that she doesn’t know.

When writing about the late Eleanor Perry’s screenplays, for example, she says, “Interestingly (though I have no idea why or what this means) all but one are adaptations.” Did McCreadie try to contact Perry’s ex-husband Frank to see if he had a theory? And even if she couldn’t get to him, she’s the author, not a pal chatting about movies over lunch. We depend on her to have a point of view, whether we agree with it our not.

And we depend on her to get information we can’t get. For whatever reasons, McCreadie did not get access to Callie Khouri (though she’s delighted to share with the reader the amusing exchange she had with Khouri’s aide), who wrote “Thelma and Louise,” nor to Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, author of “Howard’s End,” “A Room With a View,” “Heat and Dust” and other landmark films.

So the last section of the book, the contemporary section, is distressingly light; McCreadie is reduced to telling us what other interviewers learned from Khouri and Jhabvala. Or she tells us everything Ephron had to say and then fails to talk to any of the people Ephron has collaborated with.

Inadvertently, her approach diminishes the very subject she wishes to elevate. McCreadie knows her history; she tells us about writers even the most devoted contemporary filmgoer may well not have heard of. And she gives us a happy sense of the old camaraderie that existed among women in film in the days when a star might demand a particular woman writer, might try to surround herself with members of the small circle of women who had made a name for themselves.

But the contemporary material cries out for a deeply felt point of view--and more, for a better sense of context. McCreadie says that several screenwriters were “a bit elusive or difficult to research,” and so dispatches Jay Presson Allen, Carole Eastman, Melissa Mathison, Barbara Benedek and Nancy Dowd in a page.

Those of us who regard “Cabaret,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “Slap Shot” as terrific films can only feel cheated. Surely clips exist about these women, even if McCreadie couldn’t get them to sit for interviews.

“Their story should be told in another whole chapter in another whole book,” she writes. I say: Uh uh. If this is supposed to be a book about the women who write the movies, they ought to be here.