BAD BEGINNING

"The fact that a film or a subject is controversial doesn't eliminate it from our lists," George Stevens Jr. said recently. It was a seemingly unassailable statement of policy for the American Film Institute, which Stevens heads, and it might very well have been read at the inauguration last week of the institute's new theater in Washington's Kennedy Center. Instead, it was only an ironic footnote. Stevens himself yanked out the very first new movie the theater had been scheduled to show, State of Siege. His reason: he thought that the film seemed to rationalize assassination. Directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras, the movie is a fictionalized account of the real-life killing of an American official in Uruguay. Calling Stevens' action bald censorship, directors of as many as a third of the films to be shown in the opening festivities withdrew, leaving Stevens with a blank screen to fill--and a perhaps lasting legacy of bitterness for the fledgling film institute.

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