TAKING ON HOLLYWOOD : 'Action' & other fatalities.

Back in September, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and William J. Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues, held a press conference. The occasion was the presentation of the Silver Sewer Award, an honorific the two-man Morals Squad confers on objectionable cultural programming. This year, the winners were two new offerings from the impudent Fox network: "Get Real" and "Action," a dark Hollywood spoof that hype had crowned, on the eve of its debut, the hottest show of the season.

Hot, in this case, meant scandalous. "Action's" creators might have been aiming deliberately for that Silver Sewer as they crafted the adventures of Peter Dragon (Jay Mohr), an ambitious blond film producer who would score in the negative numbers if there were ever a morals Olympics. Dragon became the kind of can-do executive who, when pressed for a matinee idol, cheerily kidnapped one from a detox program. And he worked and hobnobbed with people as despicable as he was. This scenario provided "Action's" scriptwriters with ample opportunity to deride the movie business. For example, in a plot twist that skewered the widespread practice of product placement (in which companies buy screen time for their brands), Peter signed on to a tobacco-lobby campaign to sell cigarettes to teen-agers- after all, he needed cash to finance Beverly Hills Gun Club, Dragon Productions' follow-up to its action release Slow Torture.

The show chronicled such exploits in a style that required an on-screen warning label-"The program is recommended for mature viewers." Each half- hour episode boasted profanity (discreetly bleeped), sexual innuendo ("We all know the erotic effects of reptiles," ran one recent line), gratuitous vulgarity ("I have Harvey Keitel pummeling Winona Ryder's face with a fire iron-it's not a woman's movie!"), and what one might term an anti-P.C. aesthetic ("I'm gayer than a leather pinata!" a character boasted).

The crudeness and ribaldry were, of course, part of a deliberate marketing ploy, designed to tickle palates grown jaded by constant repasts of R- rated movies and cable shows. But the cultural climate that fostered "South Park," Howard Stern, and the urination poster for the latest Adam Sandler movie turned cold on "Action"-the show landed such low Nielsen ratings that Fox took it off the air during the sweeps month of November, and then, after reviving it for a few weeks in early December, canceled it altogether.

Television professionals have attributed "Action's" failure, in part, to its dystopian vision; viewers spurned the show, the logic runs, because it contained not a single sympathetic character with whom they could identify. What makes this turn of events more intriguing, of course, is the fact that dystopian visions of Hollywood have a distinguished history. America's longstanding love-hate relationship with the film industry has produced a stream of movies and novels, not to mention nonfiction accounts, about mercenary, unscrupulous doings in Tinseltown. Works like The Day of the Locust, Sunset Boulevard, Barton Fink, and The Player may not be as unrelievedly sour in tone as "Action," but they are just as firmly bent on exposing the greed, heartlessness, hypocrisy, and minor despotisms that have fueled the motion picture machine. Even the buoyant Singin' in the Rain spends some time lampooning movie-star worship before and after that famous Gene Kelly dance with the umbrella.

"We've had movies that are cynical about Hollywood as long as there's been a film industry," notes Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at NYU. The phenomenon, he believes, springs from that dissatisfaction many of us experience when we contemplate our lives: "People are fascinated by the haves, and are particularly interested in any story that simultaneously celebrates power and wealth, and yet seems to deplore them morally." The luminaries of the film world are, Miller points out, "our version of the aristocracy," and a grim portrait of their lives may please us "because it reassures us that people with all these advantages are really quite miserable."

Power and wealth were demonically fascinating long before American film producers colonized Southern California, of course, and Hollywood narratives also resonate more specifically to the wavelengths of our culture. The exploited and compromised writer figures who populate such stories ("Action's" Peter Dragon hounded one scribbler right into a hospital emergency room) embody our misgivings not just about Hollywood's values, but about broader aspects of our society-materialism, competitiveness, and the troubled relationship between art and commerce.

Film's magnificient illusions furnish still more thematic ore, symbolizing mutability, quackery, insincerity, the triumph of style over substance, the cult of the new. In 1932, the acclaimed British stage actress Ethel Barrymore, who spent her last years acting for the camera, said acidly of Hollywood: "The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal, they don't smell. The fruit is unreal, it doesn't taste of anything. The whole place is a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set, built up in the desert." The remark seems to betray a broader unease with the unrootedness and occasional superficiality of American culture.

A more optimistic comment on these same traits whispers from a marvelous scene in The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald's curiously romantic novel about Hollywood. At the beginning of the book, which Fitzgerald left unfinished at the time of his death, a small earthquake has wreaked picturesque damage on the lot of a movie studio. Flooding has turned reality phantasmagoric, and Monroe Stahr, the tycoon of the title, is mesmerized by a surreal image: "On top of a huge head of the Goddess Siva, two women were floating down the current of an impromptu river." The head, which turns out to be a set piece for a Cecil DeMille movie about Burma, represents the kind of Hollywood chimera that Barrymore denounced. But Fitzgerald makes a beautiful illusion: It symbolizes American creativity and the restless energy that is always ready to start afresh.

But this same passage also hints at the deep disillusionment that stokes so many caustic movie-business tales: "Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland," Fitzgerald writes, "not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood...." Hollywood speaks to us of lost and squandered opportunity-the kind of opportunity that fades as we leave childhood, make choices, and in doing so narrow our own options. And partly because it is situated on the Pacific coast, where the nation's westward expansion had to come to a halt, the town represents, on some level, opportunities America has lost. We have made Hollywood our dream factory, but we are disappointed with our dreams-disappointed enough to imagine an antihero like Peter Dragon, and too disappointed to watch his escapades on network TV.