Once upon a time, some studio head was belaboring the famed director John Huston with a list of “improvements” he required for a film that Huston was making for him. Finally Huston replied in his inimitable drawl: “Ah, yes, I understand: You want a bad film. We can make it bad. It will cost a lot more, but we can make it bad.”

I thought of that anecdote in connection to the recent controversy over the World Trade Center Memorial. The project was estimated to cost more than $1 billion until yesterday, when Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki announced that, pursuant to the report they had commissioned from developer Frank Sciame, they had found a way to modify the design and operation of the memorial center so as to keep it within its $500 million budget.

The problem with the memorial has never been a lack of money, despite the municipal class’s predictable bellyaching to that effect. Rather it was an unwieldy surfeit of dollars thrown at a design that would have profited from a far humbler conception.

I suspect that a memorial costing, say, only $5 million, rather than $500 million, would have been rejected out of hand as unworthy of ground zero. In any case, it does not appear that any such plan was ever seriously entertained. No, it had to be expensive and it still has to be expensive. But the fact that the mayor and governor have decided to work within their budget is certain to improve the finished product. I wish the actual budget could be slashed even more.

The new plan will adhere to the three most important stipulations of the project: that it retain the general conception of Michael Arad’s “Reflecting Absence” with its two underground depressions, that it come in within budget, and that it be completed in time for the official opening on September 11, 2009. Thus it will preserve the landscaped memorial plaza, the signature water falling into twin pools that will bear the names of all of the victims, and a contemplative space for families and visitors.

What it will not have is the entry pavilion and below-grade galleries that had been planned. This will simplify the overall conception by consolidating the entrances and by removing intermediate levels of galleries. Furthermore, it will save money, according to the mayor’s press release, by not having to relocate the river water line and also by using “value engineering.” This is the first time I have ever heard any in stitution voluntarily assume this label, which essentially means building on the cheap, using cheaper materials and shoddier workmanship. Usually it is a term of reproach that you level at someone other than yourself!

If you seek an object lesson in postmodern memorials, compare the recently unveiled Firefighters’ Memorial on Liberty Street with the Irish Famine Memorial in Battery Park City. The former is simplicity itself, a 56-foot long bronze banner with a frieze and the names of the fallen. If there were another attack on the site, this monument would survive substantially intact. The Irish Famine Memorial, by contrast, had to close down only months after it opened a few years back because its designers insisted on using lights, texts, sound, and even a recreation of the Irish countryside. Only after considerable expense and repairs did it reopen.

Clearly, and regrettably, the World Trade Center Memorial is following this latter example. That fact, combined with the talk of “value engineering,” does not bode well.

As I have said, the announced simplifications to the design are likely to be an improvement. Still it is regrettable and telling that it never occurred to anyone that, instead of building a cheaper version of something extravagantly expensive, they should have chosen something simple in the first place, something that declared itself to be the best that could possibly be produced with the money they had.

jgardner@nysun.com