That’s Entertainment. That’s Too Bad.

Screenwriting used to be referred as “writing titles”--it was a description that persisted as a survival and then as a nostalgic anachronism into the early 1940s.

The old joke has it that a neophyte screenwriter, in the early “talkies” era, penned: “She comes into the room. She discovers him there, and words cannot describe the scene which then ensues.” The joke, for those insufficiently hip, is this: If words cannot describe the scene, what the hell is the screenwriter getting paid for?

Well.

The Screenplay has become the late-20th Century equivalent of tatting. Anyone can take a hand at it, and it is counted as “honorary work”: That is, it is considered neither a pastime nor an avocation, but a potentially rewarding use of one’s time.

And it may well be. Those countless hundreds of thousands working away on their screenplay idea may have their dream come true--for, like tatting, writing the contemporary screenplay requires only the minutest understanding of the rudiments.

If the film is a drama, the writer must be a dramatist of great or less ability; he or she must be able to craft a progression of incidents that piques and holds the attention of the audience. But films have degenerated to their origins as carnival amusement--they offer not drama, but thrills . (The early nickelodeon showed a freight train steaming toward the audience, and they, unused to the technology, said “how real,” and were stunned. Today’s computer morphing, blue screen, etc., function similarly).

It doesn’t take a dramatist to “script” a film based on thrills. The requirements of such films are, in effect, fairly identical to those of straight-out pornography--the minimal plot is merely a sop to our sensibilities, so that we may assure ourselves that we’ve retained some modicum of self-respect--the plot is the well-brought-up young woman’s first ritual refusal.

As in tatting, or mime, the skills in contemporary screenwriting are accounted difficult by courtesy; the few variations from the norm are about as innovative as the sartorial accessorizing of the rich. Perhaps there was a Golden Age of Drama in the movies, perhaps not. And perhaps I delude myself to think that the business once was overseen by filmmakers rather than exploiters.

The difference, to me, between the two categories is this: Each wants to make money, but the filmmaker intends to do so by making a film. The Byzantine structure of the studio system, like any terminal bureaucracy, rewards the bureaucratic virtue of adherence to the system.

And the system starts with the script reader.

This is the entry-level position.

Bright young people, fresh from the hierarchy of the university and the film school, begin here. They are given scripts and understand that they are to endorse the predictable--that any deviations from formula will be made by their betters. They are to stand at the gates and reject the unusual. It must be terrible job. I’m sure it is--wading through reams of printed paper day by day, an activity both worthless and boring.

In the late ‘60s, the small theaters had made available to them, for the first time, significant amounts of grant money. Where once these theaters were run by and succeeded through the efforts of those who could communicate with an audience, now they were captained by those who could write grants. Similarly, where once the screenplay was written to appeal to the star, or the director--to those who would make it into film--now it is written to appeal to the bored script reader.

The screenplay of today has, in effect, become a novel.

We have heard “Words cannot describe the scene which now ensues.” Ha ha. But I have read “You guessed it: Here comes the sex scene--I’d write it for you, but my mother reads these scripts”; “He comes into the room, and we hate him--we really hate him”; “outside the window New York, in all its Vicious Splendor”; and, my favorite, “He turns and walks away from the camera. Nice butt, kid.”

Now, the last haunts me like an Escher drawing, something that can have no basis in reality. Let us consider it as an instruction. To whom it is addressed? To the casting agent? But the writer compliments not the actor--as yet unchosen--but his or her own conception, his or her thought . The writers compliment their own thought. Similarly, if we consider it a description, we find that it is a description of something we have not shared--the writers’ thought, and by extension, their ability to think.

It’s monstrous.

Can such a phrase help the actor or the director? No. But it serves the same purpose as the final film--it appeals to the jaded.

“We hate him.” No doubt, as “he” is meant to be the villain. This enormity skips the fact of the film altogether, and refers directly to the emotions of the audience.

Now, one might like to be assured that the audience is going to hate the villain--it might take the melodrama more effective--but it seems to me that the task of the screenwriter is to communicate to those who are about to make the film why we “hate him,” and such can be done only through delineating what the actor does , and what the camera shoots. Many of the modern efforts at screenwriting contain the “you-know-and-I-know” error of describing the characters.

“She comes into the room. She’s beautiful, she’s tough, she has a pair of eyes that make you think of olives in a plate of milk,” or some such. Such description can be written interestingly, but, at the end of the day, the beauty, the eyes, the posture of the character are going to be those of the actor or actress cast in the part. Similarly, “You know and I know that they’ve been around the block.” Well, how do we know that?

“He wants to take her hand--or does he . . . ?”

Such a line makes the script readers’ morning a bit less drab, but it is unfilmable. “The lead car crashes into the bus, flames envelop the sky. Brad jumps from the lead car into the Jeep, which careens on two wheels around the Volkswagen.”

This is, of course, the stuff of comic books. As most action movies are aspiring to the level of comic books, it might be considered good (useful) screenwriting, except for this: The action sequences will be thought out and executed by the director and the stunt director with little or no relation to the material in the script.

Similarly, the “juicy” parts of the modern screenplay: “Her long legs twine around his back, and the sweat from his . . . ,” etc.

It’s supermarket pornography; it might be counted as worthwhile writing if such pornography is what the studio intends to make, but the obligatory scene of pretend fornication will take place on the closed set with the actors miming passion in complete disregard of the supposed script. Nice butt, kid.

Robert Altman’s film “The Player” contained a scene in which a studio executive explained that the screenplay was unnecessary--one need only to look at the headline of the affective news story, and there’s your film: “Mother kidnaps, abuses own child”; “Bank clerk returns $2 million.” Well, it’s so. The housewife in Topeka and the salesman in Canton and you and I can all write that screenplay. Indeed, most of us have.

But I consider the screenplay drama-in-schematic.

Does this make me a good person? Not particularly, although, of late, I have begun to think of my outlook as an idiosyncratic anachronism--like dressing in buckskins, premarital chastity, organized labor, reading. But I digress.

The flickers began, as noted, as an arcade amusement, a trick to extract a modicum of change for a moment of diversion. It is perhaps accidental that their evolution coincided, for a period, with that of the drama. There was the nickelodeon, and then the storefront theaters that exhibited a series of short subjects. The program lengthened and coalesced in an effort by the exhibitors to justify increased admission charges; as the unitary film approached an hour’s length, a provenance was found for this new bastard art: It was, it was observed, not unlike the drama. And for the past 80 years the cinema has--except for the marginalized “short subject,” aped the staged drama both in length and pretensions: Both ran 80 to 140 minutes and professed to explore the human condition in its various humors.

But lately we see a divergence.

Just as the history of religion is Moses’ fight against the people’s wish to reinstitute idolatry, and as our Republic’s history is the fight against the masses’ wish to lay down the burden of Representative Democracy and cough up a king, so, finally, in entertainment we see ourselves, the audience, clamoring for a repeal of the Law of Dramaturgy, and a reversion to entertainment-as-pure titillation.

The pornographic and the mass-market Hollywood film string together titillating instances of sex, violence and emotional exploitation--these instances separated by boring bits of nonsense called, in the trade, back story, or narration. The contempt with which these interstices are treated is a reassurance to the consumer view that better will be coming soon.

As an addicted movie-viewer and old fogey, I carped and carped at the ludicrous distortion of the dramatic form that movies have become, until, having fatigued first anyone who would listen, and, finally, myself, it occurred to me that The Cinema is just going its own merry way, diverging from its momentary harness-mate, the Drama, and slouching toward Bethlehem like the rest of us.

All right then. “Nice butt, Kid.”