How the Movie Magic Ads Up : Magazines: Atlantic Monthly decries what it sees as hucksterism that has made films vehicles for sales pitches.

Disney may be jerking its movies from theaters that show advertisements, but is it pulling the ads out of its movies?

“Hollywood: The Ad,” in the April Atlantic Monthly, argues that American films have become little more than vehicles for crass hucksterism. That’s why going to the movies now, author Mark Crispin Miller says, “has become about as memorable as going to the airport.”

Anyone who has seen a film recently knows that counting the number of blatant product plugs is often more fun than watching the story. Miller does a fine job of counting plugs, and an even better job of excoriating the mercenary mentality that allows it.

It’s not just a matter of Coca-Cola--which owned a big piece of Columbia Pictures until Sony bought it--coyly displaying a can of Classic Coke in one of its films. Rather, with increasing disdain for the viewer, directors not only adjust camera angles but also twist movie dialogue and plot to accommodate products they have agreed to sell.

Moreover, as Miller says in a refrain that runs through the piece, because the picture “must enhance the product’s costly, all-important aura,” happy endings are imperative.

The sales technique apparently works. An executive at Disney tells Miller, “Add the magic of movies to a promotion (advertisement) and you can rise above the clutter to get people’s attention.”

The crux of the problem, however, is not in the plugging, but in the way that the techniques and simplistic world view of television commercials have taken over Hollywood.

Miller, who heads the media studies program at Johns Hopkins University, makes a strong case that the film industry has been diminished by its worst commercial instincts.

Unfortunately, as his argument becomes more intricate, he begins to sound like a frustrated auteur, who, given his own captive audience, begins to regurgitate every esoteric gripe about film making his professors subjected him to in film school.

Miller drops the names of almost 200 movies in his “Gone With the Wind”-length essay. But he doesn’t tie them together coherently. About two-thirds of the way through the piece, he unwittingly begins to add credence to his own obvious but unstated conclusion: that excessive exposure to the current strain of cinematic sludge is not good for the brain.

REQUIRED READING

* The April 16 Newsweek is a case study in the complexity of the world’s environmental problems. A special Earth Day advertising supplement features articles on and by major environmentalists, along with ads by Amway, oil companies and trade groups for the timber and nuclear energy industries. Newsweek’s own environmental package is a top-notch trip down the Mississippi River, detailing environmental disasters and improvements that have occurred in her waters and on her shores since Earth Day, 1970. Among the other tidbits in the issue are the second part of an essay in defense of disposable diapers, which is blown to pieces by the letters to the editor in response to the first essay on the subject, and a Newsweek poll showing that while 82% of Americans are voluntarily recycling, 73% think corporations supporting the coming Earth Day are in it mainly for the PR.

* Unless they’re in the family, we tend to encounter insane people only on the streets. New York magazine reports the unresolved saga of a wildly disruptive “crazy woman” and the effect of her wildly disruptive behavior on her co-op neighbors, who remain impotent in their efforts to find peace for her or themselves.

* The April Money proves that whether your return was bungled or not, chances are about 1 in 4 that the IRS will ask you to cough up more cash. And more than half the time the IRS will be in error.

* At least 51 villages, towns, cities or crossroads in the United States or Canada are named Buffalo or have Buffalo in their names. In the April American Heritage, crime novelist Lawrence Block sets out to explore them all. His account of the trip is entertaining. At one point, however, he writes, “I mean, you could do the same thing with Springfields, but who would want to?”

Angolan journalist Sousa Jamba has been doing just that each month in Wigwag magazine. In the April issue, he spends some time in Springfield, Tenn., a town of 12,000 with the sort of all-American problems towns called Buffalo apparently don’t have: crack smokers, overcrowded jails, bigoted librarians, dishonest morticians.

* Most people don’t realize that the honeybee was introduced on this continent by European settlers in the 17th Century. Similarly, most people don’t realize that because of vicious little mites and even more ruthless killer bees, home-grown honey may soon become a thing of the past in America. The March-April Harrowsmith provides the latest buzz on bees.

SHREDDER FODDER

* Until recently, self-esteem was called self-respect and was similar to character : It was something earned. Now self-esteem is something gotten from a state commission or bought at a seminar--or learned by reading cover stories in the April Self magazine.

HUH?

* What do Jodie Foster, Juan Carlos I and Matt Groening have in common with Father Bruce Ritter, the Covenant House founder recently embroiled in an extremely unpleasant controversy? They’re all on Egg magazine’s April “A List.”