MOVIES : The Hollywood Two : Ring Lardner Jr., one of the Hollywood Ten’s survivors, has lived a life worthy of an autobiography. But he’s too busy writing other tales.

Screenwriters who cry “age discrimination” in the motion picture industry, take note. Octogenarian Ring Lardner Jr. has just completed an adaptation of “The Boys of Summer,” Roger Kahn’s saga about the Dodgers and the integration of professional baseball, which is due to begin filming in the spring.

Lounging on the covered patio of producer Ingo Preminger’s Pacific Palisades home, the two-time Oscar winner is brushing up on a 10-year-old unproduced script based on Marc Blitzstein’s controversial Depression-era musical “The Cradle Will Rock,” in which there is said to be renewed interest.

Although he claims to be semi-retired, Lardner also speaks enthusiastically of another screenplay, the true story of two innocent death row inmates. And of yet another he intends to write, a comedy lampooning the religious right.

Lately, he’s also been sorting through his papers and considering writing his memoirs. Or not. It is obvious from such activity that Lardner’s muse has not flown. His only difficulty, he says, is discipline, forcing himself to sit at the word processor every day--a writer’s malady that knows no age.

If a successful life is one crammed with incident, Lardner ably qualifies. The son of the famed baseball writer and humorist recently celebrated a joint 80th birthday with his wife, Frances, at their Connecticut home, with 35 family members in attendance--children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces and great-grandchildren. Professionally, Lardner’s mantel holds two Oscars, won three decades apart. The first, in 1941, was for his original screenplay (with Michael Kanin) of “Woman of the Year,” starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

Lardner won his second Oscar in 1970 for adapting the anarchic comedy “MASH” to the screen. He has also won the Laurel Award from the Writers Guild honoring the body of his work, which includes such films as “Forever Amber” and “The Cincinnati Kid.”

In between his Oscars, Lardner endured an extended period of exile. As one of the famed Hollywood Ten, Lardner refused to discuss his political affiliations past or present with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Invoking the 1st Amendment, he told the committee in 1947: “I could answer the way you want. . . . But I’d hate myself in the morning.”

He was cited for contempt of Congress and sentenced to a year in prison. Losing on appeal (the Supreme Court refused to hear the case) he was incarcerated for 10 months in 1950. The judgment arrived at a time when Lardner was at the top of his game, earning $2,000 a week under contract at 20th Century Fox. Following his prison term, he was blacklisted for 15 years, laboring furtively under assumed names, often in collaboration with Ian McLellan Hunter on various television and film projects.

While in prison Lardner began his first novel, “The Ecstasy of Owen Muir,” which was published in 1955; he later wrote a reflection on his family, “The Lardners: My Family Remembered.” At the time of the blacklist Lardner left Los Angeles, returning only for the occasional visit or story meeting.

“I’m always willing to come out here to work. But I like the distance in some ways. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, when I was employable again, if they paid my fare out there it meant they were probably serious, more so than if they call you in to talk just because you’re around.”

In town to attend a 25th-anniversary screening of “MASH,” he mentions that even at the time, the iconoclastic black comedy film was written, produced [by Preminger] and directed [by Robert Altman] by men who were already grandfathers. “After I wrote the first draft, I remember saying to Ingo that in most scripts the characters are supposed to change. But in ‘MASH’ the characters are the same at the beginning as at the end. In this case it was the right thing to do.”

After returning to Hollywood in triumph to scoop up his second Oscar, however, Lardner discovered that the industry hadn’t changed so much after all. And neither had he. “After winning the Oscar I was in a position to do pretty much anything I wanted to do,” he recalls. “But I chose material that was controversial and, therefore, less likely to get made.”

But when he was offered the golden opportunity to steer “MASH” to television, he passed: “I felt it had no future.” This from the same man who argued against David O. Selznick buying “Gone With the Wind,” he notes with a bemused chuckle.

In 1937, producer Selznick hired Ringgold Lardner Jr. away from his $25-a-week job at the New York Daily Mirror for a $40-a-week job in publicity. Soon after, Selznick asked Lardner and story department reader Budd Schulberg to come up with a satisfactory ending for his “A Star Is Born” opus. The duo concocted the famous kicker, “This is Mrs. Norman Maine speaking.” From then on, he was a screenwriter.

But apart from some script doctoring, he didn’t get much experience working with Selznick, who preferred older, more experienced writers, such as Ben Hecht.

So in 1938 Lardner moved over to the “B” movie department at Warner Bros. Studio mogul Jack Warner’s idea of a working writer was “someone who came in at 9, left at 5 and worked half a day on Saturday.”

Along with Ian Hunter he wrote two low-budget films, “Meet Dr. Christian” and “The Courageous Dr. Christian.” And with Michael Kanin he wrote an original screenplay, “Woman of the Year,” which caught Hepburn’s fancy and commanded the then-high-water mark of $100,000.

In 1936 Lardner became a member of the Communist Party. But his reasons for espousing national socialism were born of idealism, not subversion, he points out.

Communism’s popularity in the ‘30s, he says, “came out of an atmosphere that existed then. The Depression seemed rather permanent and there was a pessimism about what was happening here and in Western Europe. Socialism seemed like a good solution. But we saw it happening a lot differently here than in Russia. We thought it would come about gradually and democratically.”

After World War II, however, he and many of his fellow travelers recognized that communist regimes were guilty of many of the same excesses as fascist governments. “There’s a tendency for entrenched bureaucracy to become corrupt as happened in Russia,” he observes.

Gradually, he dissociated himself from the party. But it was precisely at this moment of disenchantment that HUAC decided to pounce on the film industry. “The idea that if a man in a movie were a communist he could subvert American ideals . . . preposterous,” he still maintains, “an extreme way of handling a situation that was imaginary.”

It wasn’t so much whether he was, or ever had been a communist that concerned him, so much as the fact that he felt his right to privacy was being violated. “They put us on the defensive because the grounds on which they were attacking us were wrong. We felt we had to justify ourselves.”

Lardner registered his complaint by invoking the 1st Amendment. Or, as his 6-year-old son Joe told a hectoring schoolmate, “My daddy’s in jail because somebody in Washington asked him something that was none of their business and he told them it was none of their business.” He’s not bitter about the blacklist years, he says, and never had a desire for revenge.

“I only wanted to right the wrong. The whole idea of a subversive Hollywood plot was irrational. The [Hollywood] producers knew it. The congressmen knew it.” But then, as now, he says, “Hollywood is a convenient target. HUAC chose Hollywood because it has great publicity values.”

Nonetheless, he sympathizes with attacks by Sen. Bob Dole and conservative William Bennett about sex and violence in movies. “Hollywood is setting itself up,” he says. “There’s some validity to the attack on violence and its effect on American life. It would certainly be good if there was less violence [in movies]. But to argue that violence in films makes for more violence in the streets. . . . “ Lardner shakes his head. “Dubious.”

His own objections are more aesthetic than social. “I find violence boring. There are not enough variations in how people get shot or in car chases, to make it very interesting.” He has similar complaints about the recent talk show tirade. “The networks and others seem to hire talk show hosts based on who has the greatest lack of taste. Some self-discipline would help a lot.”