Madonna, Other Stars Film March-for-Peace Commercial

Rock singer Madonna and film stars including Martin Sheen, Leonard Nimoy, Rosanna Arquette and Mary Steenburgen joined hundreds of lesser-known marchers Saturday in making a public-service television commercial for peace at the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area.

The marchers had responded to an appeal from PRO-Peace, the organization planning “The Great Peace March” of 5,000 people from Los Angeles to Washington next year to demand global nuclear disarmament. The 30-second commercial will be aired later this month to recruit marchers and solicit contributions for a projected budget of $20 million, of which $3 million has been raised to date.

Crowd Gathers

Woodley Park rangers said the crowd neared 1,800 at its peak, although others doubted it ever reached 1,000.

“We have all we need,” said Pacy Markman, an advertising executive directing the commercial. Markman, director Nicholas Meyer, producer Steven-Charles Jaffe and photography director Victor Kemper volunteered their professional services.

PRO-Peace organizer David Mixner said he was excited that several young film stars, including Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy and Rob Lowe, had joined the peace marchers. “They’re saying for the first time, ‘OK, We’re going to do something serious here.’ ”

The patient, good-humored crowd, which included a fair number of babies in strollers, as well as dogs, spent about four hours in the hot sun not marching--they lined up on the park road for shots simulating next year’s march, and picnicked under the trees between camera shots.

Variety of Types

The marchers ranged from a semiretired older couple--Pearl and Warren Champagne, who said they had “always been for peace”--to young people like Washington High School student and would-be actor Dwayne Edmonds and Valley teen-agers Cari Schindler and Shari Brooks, who had gotten the word that Madonna might show up.

Madonna did not arrive until noon, at about the same time the crowd was released for the day.

Most left, but the hundred or so who lingered, obediently keeping their distance while she posed for pictures, wound up participating with Madonna in one last take of the march. With Edmonds, Schindler and Brooks in the lead, Madonna followed immediately behind, with actress Rosanna Arquette and Nicholas Meyer. She was hugging 9-year-old Molly Rose-Kuperman, an ecstatic Madonna dress-alike, to her side.

Before she left, Madonna filmed a statement asking for support of the march, concluding: “ The time has come for all of us to take the future into our own hands. If we don’t, who will?”