COMMENTARY : The Greatest Movies Never Made : The film industry loves to eulogize its great directors but fails to help them realize their vision when they’re alive.

When a great film director dies, it’s as if a vision had been blanked. A master director offers up a way of seeing, and when he dies, that way of seeing goes with him.

When David Lean died, I felt profoundly cheated. If a great director plays out the ambitions of his career, his death, however tragic, is also the occasion for cherishing what he has given us.

But Lean’s death, like far too many great directors’, carries a large measure of regret. For the fact is that he was obstructed by the money men from directing at least two of his epic projects. At age 82, after years of being turned down by financiers, Lean had at last been on the verge of realizing one of his epics, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s dense, hallucinatory 1904 novel “Nostromo.” On location during pre-production in the south of France in January, he fell ill.

One of the cruelties of the film medium is that, because it is so expensive, it is often so heartbreaking for precisely those artists who have the most to give. No matter how famous he is, a director who works on a big scale, or in any way that the money men don’t understand, finds himself living out a career of dashed hopes. And, if he advances much beyond the age of a superannuated whippersnapper, he’s put out to pasture. Directors like Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann, at an age no older than, say, John Huston when he directed “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The Dead,” have discovered they have no place in an industry they helped glorify.

In the last three years I interviewed Lean twice: in 1988 at Cannes, where he received a tribute from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and where he spoke about his plans to direct “Nostromo”; and a year later, with the reissue of the revamped “Lawrence of Arabia,” where he again talked about “Nostromo,” his plans for casting Marlon Brando in it, and his joy at the prospect of once more peering through the viewfinder.

At such moments, Lean had the look of mad, cheeky royalty--the bitterness he felt in enduring year upon year a steady stream of reluctant financiers was nowhere on his face. He was lit from within by his vision.

A year later, Lean received the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award, and the old bitterness came through in his acceptance speech, where he revealed that he had finally gotten the green light to direct “Nostromo” only two hours prior to the ceremony.

Perhaps in no other art form are there so many impediments to realizing your artistic vision. If you are a novelist, you are not prevented from writing epics with a cast of thousands; it cost Tolstoy the price of his paper and ink to write “War and Peace.” If you are a painter, the costs of brush and canvas and oils need not stand in the way of expression. If you are a playwright, you may not always get your play staged but at least you can write it. Picasso did not need to be rich and famous in order to produce “Guernica.” He could have painted it in a garret.

But the business of the movie business has a way of retracting an artist’s reach. Any true history of film must include not only the great work its artists have achieved but also the great work directors were prevented from achieving. In an era when the cost of movies about hot-head hot-rodders and mechanical terminators is approaching the hundred-million mark, this obstruction is doubly distasteful.

It is, after all, the same era in which a director like Robert Altman still finds himself continually turned away at the door--and for projects with budgets a fifth of what the mega-movies go for.

Altman, like Lean, has had more than one dream project shot down, or strung along, including, most recently, a 25-part linked series of Raymond Carver stories transposed to L.A. called “L.A. Short Cuts.” What does it say about today’s film industry that the director of “Nashville” has to go hat in hand to scrounge financing for a big-canvas movie set in America?

Between them, Lean and Altman are associated with some of the greatest movies never made. In Lean’s case, besides “Nostromo,” there was a projected two-part epic of “Mutiny on the Bounty” that he worked on with Robert Bolt for producer Dino DeLaurentiis in the late ‘70s. (Lean was eventually dropped from the project and replaced by Roger Donaldson.) Until the day he died, Lean thought of the “Bounty” script as the best material of his life. “One of the saddest things in my career,” was the way he described the experience to me in an interview. And then, in detail, he described a scene. “Bligh attempted to round the Horn to get to Tahiti. The ship froze up, so he came back the other way, via South Africa. We had a scene with the whole ship locked in ice, and the sun comes out and the ice starts falling off it, slowly.”

DeLaurentiis was also responsible for dropping Robert Altman from “Ragtime,” a book that seemed to have been written to be made into a great Altman movie. Altman had worked closely with E.L. Doctorow on the screenplay. Who knows how the course of American movie artistry might have been changed if that film had been made? (The Milos Forman version eventually released didn’t change the course of anything.)

There are some careers, like Orson Welles’, that are harrowing in their missed possibilities. With Welles, the projects that he couldn’t get financing for are almost as notorious as the ones for which he could: projects like “The Cradle Will Rock” and a whole slew of Shakespearean dramas. One of the most heartbreaking presentations I’ve ever seen was a short videotape of Welles pitching his vision of “King Lear” to prospective investors. As you listen to him animatedly describe all sorts of avant-garde ways in which he would approach the play, your heart sinks. He makes you see the movie that would never be, and it’s a greater movie than almost any other you could name.

There are, of course, many other legendary entries in the Greatest Movie Never Made pantheon. Both Luchino Visconti and Joseph Losey were blocked from making “Remembrance of Things Past.” Visconti wanted to cast Brando; the Losey project had a script, since published, by Harold Pinter. The great Danish director Carl Dreyer, whose “Passion of Joan of Arc” is the finest of all religious-themed films, was defeated in his lifelong dream to make a movie about Jesus. His script has also been published. Reading it is like examining the blueprints for a magnificent unbuilt cathedral.

Perhaps an appeal to immortality might loosen the purse strings of the ego-inflated money men who control the film industry. After all, it’s been pretty well established that you can’t take it with you. On the other hand, there’s nothing quite like a masterpiece to ensure eternal life.

Every time a great director has his vision scotched by an accountant, a piece of that eternal life dies within all of us.