Creativity's Season in the Sun American Masters Pbs;

By Richard Zoglin

When the weather turns warm, entertainment is supposed to turn frothy and frivolous. In movie theaters, the summer brings teen comedies and top guns; at the beach, Robert Ludlum mysteries and Barbara Cartland romances. Yet TV, oddly, has taken a different tack of late. Summer series today are more likely to be of the serious sort, shows that would have little chance of surviving the ratings battle any other time of year. Thus two prime-time newsmagazines -- CBS's West 57th and NBC's 1986 -- have joined the networks' hot-weather schedules; both will presumably be back in storage by the fall.

PBS too is contributing some weighty fare this summer, most notably American Masters, a 15-part series of profiles of some of the country's major creative artists. In the typical manner of PBS umbrella programming, the * individual shows have little in common. Two-thirds were made expressly for the series, presented by New York City's WNET; the rest were purchased from other sources (two of these American portraits were, in fact, made in Britain). They vary widely in style as well as quality. But together they provide a stimulating, season-long meditation on the elusive nature of creativity. Not bad for a summer read.

The shows take varying approaches to the task of explaining an artist. An early program on Architect Philip Johnson, for instance, simply depended on the words of the articulate artist himself. Another, Private Conversations, chronicled the creative process, eavesdropping on the filming of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman. The behind-the-scenes glimpses were illuminating but not especially pretty. After 90 minutes of intense ego management, the participants seemed diminished, not enhanced, by the scrutiny.

The opposite is the case with James Levine: The Life in Music, a portrait of the Metropolitan Opera's dynamic artistic director, scheduled to air in August. The tightly woven hour combines Levine's own reflections -- on choosing music as a career, his admiration for Toscanini -- with revealing views of him at work. Whether he is steering his orchestra through a demanding passage during rehearsal ("I need super concentration here . . . like you were driving in heavy traffic") or attending to business in his Lincoln Center office, every scene seems to define the man and command our respect.

Some installments, more ambitiously, try to fashion an appreciation of the subject by combining biographical material with excerpts from his or her work. The results are uneven. An upcoming 2 1/2-hour show on Eugene O'Neill brings on Actors Jason Robards and Geraldine Fitzgerald, among others, to perform scenes from O'Neill dramas. Interspersed are labored re-creations of people and events from the playwright's life, complete with sound effects (snoring in a flophouse) and performers impersonating such O'Neill intimates as his wives Agnes and Carlotta and Critic George Jean Nathan.

The biographical approach is far more successful in The Long Night of Lady Day, a lovely portrait of the legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday. Using old film footage, stills, recordings and interviews with friends and colleagues, the documentary traces a tragic life, from Holiday's troubled childhood (at a girls' institution, she was once punished by being locked overnight in a room with a corpse) through her angry encounters with racism to the mounting drug problems that eventually killed her at age 44. The research is impressive; witnesses range from Bandleader Artie Shaw to the warden's secretary at the federal prison where Holiday spent ten months on drug charges ("To my knowledge," the secretary recalls of the singer's stay there, "she never sang a note"). Best of all are the copious samples of her singing, many of them culled from rarely seen movies and TV appearances.

The high point of the series, however, began last week, with a three-part documentary titled Unknown Chaplin. Film Historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill (who produced the program in 1983 for Britain's Thames TV) scoured the great comedian's archives and other sources for outtakes, home movies and other never before seen footage. In most of his productions, Chaplin worked without a script -- improvising, experimenting and refining on film until he was satisfied, throwing out whole sequences or starting over when he wasn't. There are tantalizing scenes of the director at work (Chaplin getting exasperated with a bit player who has trouble shuffling cards) and some admirable detective work (a dangerous-looking sight gag in which an ax barely misses Charlie's foot was, it turns out, actually shot backward).

The film amply illustrates Chaplin's obsessive perfectionism. His 1931 classic City Lights took more than two years to complete, as the director shot endless retakes and stopped filming for weeks at a time while he sought inspiration. For one important scene, in which Chaplin's Little Tramp first meets the blind flower seller, he shoots for weeks, groping in vain for a way to convey a crucial piece of plot information: the girl has mistaken the tramp for a rich man. Nothing seems to work. The scene is finally completed, but Chaplin returns to it months later with one more idea: a limousine door slams shut, and the girl assumes the tramp is its owner. At last, the sequence works; perfectionism is repaid. So is the scholarship and dedication of Brownlow and Gill. Unknown Chaplin is that rarity, a masterpiece about a master.