`PICTURE' OUT OF FOCUS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Theater Critic

Ready for their close-ups, Mr. DeMille?

Alas, even the director of ``The Greatest Show on Earth'' might have trouble breathing a little old-fashioned razzle-dazzle into ``The First Picture Show,'' the blurry and emotionally flat silent-movie homage that opened Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum.

Nor would a campy, charismatic monster like Norma Desmond necessarily be enough to supply this ethereal chamber musical with a good, solid core of dramatic conflict.

Instead we get Anne First, a crusty-saintly 99-year-old former silent-movie director, waiting around to die in a retirement home, and her great-great-niece, Jane Furstmann, a TV director determined to tell the old woman's story.

Although Estelle Parsons, the great actress who plays the elder Anne, has no peer in making crankiness seem next to godliness, her scrappy personality here feels largely subdued. Like most everything else in ``The First Picture Show,'' Anne's character is as monochromatic and fuzzy at the edges as an old daguerreotype.

Mind you, ``The First Picture Show'' isn't trying to be ``Sunset Boulevard'' revisited. David and Ain Gordon, the father-son writing/directing team whose work ``The Family Business'' was produced at the Taper in 1995, obviously had something very different in mind than an Andrew Lloyd Webber-style extravaganza.

Known for their heavily stylized, unconventional fusions of text, movement and music, the Gordons initially thought of developing a show about early Hollywood censorship. Somewhere along the way, that theme got combined with Anne's story, which is partially the story of how early Hollywood briefly opened its doors to women writers and directors like Lois Weber and Alice Guy Blache - only to slam them shut once the rough-and-tumble business of moviemaking turned into a tightly regulated corporate undertaking.

Both Weber and Guy Blache appear here as characters, as does Universal Studios honcho Carl Laemmle, portrayed by Ken Marks as a smarmy pragmatist. Indeed, while ``The First Picture Show'' parades some 40 different fictional and non-fictional characters across the stage, most of them stay virtually as ill-defined and one-dimensional as the cardboard cutouts that form part of Robert Brill's design.

While the Gordons smartly recruited talented young composer Jeanine Tesori (``Violet'') to work with them, the music is a patchwork of tone poems and melodic suggestions, well performed by two pianists. Though Tesori's wit and ability to filter old musical styles (vaudeville, Victorian parlor tunes) through a contemporary sensibility is in evidence, the snatches of music never resolve themselves into anything resembling an organic, coherent score.

Despite or possibly because of the nonstop movement on stage, with characters dashing on and off after delivering a couple lines, and the decades flying by in a blur, the show's narrative wobbles. Unaccountably, the Taper house lights go up and down several times, adding to the sense that the Gordons are too intent on stripping away the magic of movies rather than creating a theatrical equivalent.

But we're talking about the Dream Factory here, right? Glamour, excitement, hedonism, scandal? The Gordons are more interested in studio mergers and acquisitions, Japanese-American internment camps, white producers' exploitation of black ``race movies,'' and other issues, which would be fine if they were better integrated with the underdeveloped relationship between Anne and Jane.

Many serious theater people, from Clifford Odets on down, have arrived in Hollywood hoping to tame the movies and ended up as their victim. Sadly, ``The First Picture Show'' can now be added to the list of casualties.

THE FACTS

What: ``The First Picture Show.''

Where: Mark Taper Forum, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave.

When: Performances at 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays; through Sept. 18.

Tickets: $29 to $40. Call [phone].

Our rating: One and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: Estelle Parsons is a former silent-movie director remembering her heyday in ``The First Picture Show'' at the Mark Taper Forum.

Gus Ruelas/Staff Photographer