‘Y2K’ Cries Out for Orson Welles, and Speaking of . . .

Warning: This column is not Y2K compliant.

If you are reading it when 1999 becomes 2000, beware. It will probably make less sense even than it does now.

Goodness knows, I’ve prepared for the worst. I’ve been stockpiling verbs and adjectives to supplement my deep reservoir of split infinitives and dangling participles. I now have enough nouns to last several more millenniums. Graceful metaphors up the kazoo. Adverb modifiers from here to Brooklyn. But a lot of good it will do, because . . .

Y2K IS COMING!!!

That’s the tone of Sunday’s tedious slug of an NBC movie whose title is “Y2K.” The plot: It’s New Year’s Eve, the bug strikes, lights go out in New York, Philly and Scranton, computerized prison doors spring open, a commercial jet flies blind, and only handsome, dashing Ken Olin--riding his old angst from “thirtysomething”--can save us.

In no way, though, from dialogue (“Temperature sensors are red-lighting!”) that leadens your lids.

Although “Y2K” is preceded by a disclaimer, some fear it as a computer chip off the old block, a screeching doomsday alarm bound to terrorize the U.S. much as Orson Welles panicked thousands of gullible Americans on Halloween in 1938 with a sober, news-style version of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds.” That broadcast went at times like this:

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars.

And like this:

His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city’s west side. Now they’re lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out . . . black smoke, drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They’re running toward the East River . . . thousands of them, dropping like rats. Now the smoke’s spreading faster. It’s reached Times Square. People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing 6th Avenue . . . Fifth Avenue . . . 100 yards away . . . it’s 50 feet. . . .

“A wave of mass hysteria seized thousands of radio listeners throughout the nation . . . ,” the New York Times reported the next morning about those who fled their homes, contemplated suicide or swamped police with calls in response to the broadcast.

Could “Y2K” do that? Especially as NBC ran a shameless promo Wednesday night adding “What if he’s wrong?” to news footage of President Clinton telling the nation not to worry about the real Y2K?

Puleeeeeeze!

For one thing, the U.S. is now more cynical and sophisticated about media, as it was even in 1983 when NBC--also with the Welles broadcast in mind--imposed regular on-screen disclaimers on “Special Bulletin,” its movie about nuclear disaster that was shot on videotape so that it would resemble a newscast.

For another, “Y2K” is no simulated newscast. It’s a drearily generic, race-against-the-clock disaster movie, with Olin’s heroic trouble-shooter, Nick Cromwell, faced with delivering us from the glitch’s dark shadow. So generic is this story that by the time he deploys his old-fashioned ingenuity against the looming catastrophe, you’ve half forgotten what caused the problem. Gas leak? Flatulence leak? Doesn’t matter.

And finally, unlike the makers of “Y2K,” Welles the storyteller was capable of rising to the level of genius even at age 24 when he directed his martian invasion that was drawn from a novella that Howard Koch liberally adapted for radio’s “Mercury Theatre.”

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It was that broadcast that made Welles instantly famous coast to coast, giving him leverage ultimately to make “Citizen Kane,” the stunning 1941 film that thereafter would define his possibilities. And whose own evolution was only marginally less turbulent than the martian fiction for which he was anointed a “boy wonder.”

That episode is foreshadowed in the coming Tim Robbins theatrical film about a youngish Welles, “Cradle Will Rock.” It’s depicted with style, moreover, in “RKO 281,” Saturday’s new HBO movie that finds Liev Schreiber formidable as Welles and James Cromwell fittingly stewing in venomous hatreds as William Randolph Hearst.

A legendary media baron, Hearst was thinly disguised in the Welles movie as Charles Foster Kane. But as Citizen Hearst was to correctly conclude after hearing about it from others, a rosebud was a rosebud was a rosebud.

“RKO 281” is a sort of neutral Switzerland separating two camps continuing to argue over whether Welles or writer Herman Mankiewicz deserves the most credit for “Citizen Kane.” In any case, though well directed by Benjamin Ross, “RKO 281” would nose-dive without a credible Welles. And Schreiber is just that. If never quite his solar-eclipsing subject, he does capture the arrogance, hammy tendencies and mad energy of a precocious American phenomenon who is ferociously true to his beliefs while observing Hollywood through eyes as focused as lenses of a newsreel camera.

The title of HBO’s story was the original title of “Citizen Kane,” which John Logan’s script has somehow reaching the screen despite conflicts between Welles and Mankiewicz (John Malkovich) and Hearst’s attempts to have this “tawdry little film” strangled in its crib.

Doing his bidding is his malicious Hollywood gossip, Louella Parsons (Brenda Blethyn), and her attempts to blackmail George Schaefer (Roy Scheider), Louis B. Mayer (David Suchet) and other studio heads play especially well. As do Hearst’s raging anti-Semitism and the anguished sobs of his mistress, Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith), with whom he shares his famously palatial San Simeon estate that “Citizen Kane’ transformed into a shadowy Bat Cave named Xanadu.

“At least in the movie, he marries her,” she pouts about her screen counterpart. Standing by her man, though, Davies becomes the most admirable character in the movie.

More so, certainly, than Welles, in whom we can see the qualities that would mark him not only as uniquely gifted, but also as someone destined to be thwarted repeatedly, and recalled by the masses as a TV pitch man instead of as an artist.

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DUDLEY MOORE. As an interviewer, Barbara Walters is famous for getting her celebrity subjects to weep, or tear up at the very least. Based on a rough cut supplied by ABC, however, her crisp questioning of ailing Dudley Moore tonight on “20/20” is as free of false emotion and manipulating schmaltz as his responses are of self-pity.

That’s why this chat, as part of a broader profile of the 64-year-old Moore, is one of her best.

Once a gifted comic actor and accomplished pianist, Moore is suffering from a rare debilitating brain disease known as progressive supranuclear palsy, and is physically now a shell of his former self and totally reliant on a friend with whom he lives in New Jersey.

His speech is now halting, his doddering step not unlike his heavily boozed playboy in “Arthur,” which has made him the object of sniggering rumors in recent times. Yet he wants us to know he isn’t drunk and is coping as best he can while facing the possibility of a painful death.

“I am trapped in this body,” he tells Walters, “and there is nothing I can do about it.”

* “Citizen Kane” will be shown today at 5 p.m. on TCM.

* “20/20” can be seen tonight at 10 on ABC.

* “RKO 281” will be shown Saturday at 9 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA-L (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17 with special advisories for coarse language).

* “Y2K” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

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Howard Rosenberg’s columns appear Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.

More ‘Y2K’ Fallout

* NBC is airing an ad featuring footage of President Clinton despite a White House ban on the practice. F30

* The film draws fire from technology experts, who say it has little or no scientific basis and creates undue fears. F31