DRIVE TO AIR DISPUTED TV SHOW STARTS

Speaking in tongues, taunting the devil and even passing the plate around the room, writer Harlan Ellison led an old-fashioned revival meeting Wednesday night in the Directors Guild theater on Sunset Blvd.

Ellison collected $1,193 in donations from about 500 faithful who had already paid $6 each to see the documentary “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done.” But none of the money was earmarked for any church.

“No!” Ellison shouted in a parody of a TV evangelist working the crowd. No, he said, the money would be used to purchase screening prints of the two-hour documentary so that television critics across the country would get an opportunity to see what the Public Broadcasting Service refused to air last May.

The combined clout of TV reviews and a letter-writing campaign to PBS could get the documentary reinstated, said Ellison, who hosted the screening on behalf of an admittedly anti-right and “progressive” media-watchdog organization, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

“Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” was originally produced as two hour-long segments of the PBS documentary series “Frontline,” which were scheduled to be shown on May 9 and 16. But a number of mysterious, last-minute problems cropped up, according to the documentary’s British producer and director, Antony Thomas.

Thomas and Curtis Clark, the photographer who accompanied him on a seven-week trek last spring across the United States in search of the so-called religious right, were on hand at the screening to offer their own theories as to why the film was not shown on American television.

At first, they said, they were told in April by “Frontline” executive producer David Fanning that the film would have to be updated to include details of the PTL Club scandal because the first half of the documentary focuses on Jim and Tammy Bakker’s pre-scandal television ministry and South Carolina theme park, Heritage USA. Next, Thomas and Clark were told that the film was too long and had to be edited down to a single 90-minute presentation. Later still, they were told that “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” was being pulled from the “Frontline” schedule indefinitely until the PTL scandal had settled down.

As a result, only a handful of Americans have seen the film.

Except for a smattering of special private screenings such as Wednesday’s, Thomas’s critical and often stinging examination of America’s conservative fundamentalist Christian movement has had no audience here.

“It got good reviews in Britain. It was well-received in Europe,” Ellison said. “Last week you could have seen it in Zimbabwe if for some reason you were in Zimbabwe.”

But with the concurrence of Fanning, PBS has postponed broadcast of “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” at least until next winter.

“I have seen some characterizations of (the ‘Frontline’ postponement) that PBS was responding to some political pressure,” said Mary Jane McKinven, PBS director of corporate information. “That is simply not the case. It is erroneous if anyone thinks that political pressure had anything to do with this.”

“This is the kind of thing where you never get a smoking gun,” said Linda Valentino, West Coast director of FAIR. “We can’t prove that they aren’t showing it because of its content, but we can make a pretty good (circumstantial) case for it.”

Fanning could not be reached for comment Thursday, but Barry Chase, PBS’ vice president of news and public affairs, said that he agrees with the “Frontline” producer’s decision to postpone airing of “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” until it undergoes further editing and fact-checking.

“Committed people from both extremes are going to find things that they don’t like in our programming because it doesn’t match their points of view,” Chase said.

He said that he doubted that “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” would air as a “Frontline” documentary, but that it might be broadcast early next year as a separate PBS documentary.

“We will make our own best professional judgment, trying to close our eyes and ears to the pressures that come to bear from anyone who wants something to serve their political agenda,” he said.

Besides the Bakkers, “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” scrutinizes several facets of the melding of fundamentalist Christianity and the neo-conservative political movement that combined in the late 1970s to create organizations such as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. The message in the documentary that Thomas himself characterizes as “relentless” is that the religious and political right have come together in America.

The result, as captured again and again on camera by Curtis, is a sophisticated and often disturbing manipulation by politicians, church patriarchs and television evangelists of America’s 40 million born-again Christians. Beyond mere spiritual loyalty, “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” shows a born-again constituency equally devoted to political, social and economic fidelity to the cause of the “Religious Right”:

--Volunteer members of a political organization called “The Christian Voice” plant flyers in automobiles parked at a north Florida shopping mall, urging good Christians to turn the incumbent governor out of office. His Republican challenger eventually does win the governorship.

--Youngsters in a Heritage USA toy shop are shown Teddy Ruxpin clones that utter scripture and storybooks with modified fairy tales, explaining how Goldilocks was filled with the Holy Spirit after encountering the Three Bears.

--Inspirational speaker Zig Ziglar, who earns $10,000 an hour to pep-talk corporate executives, explains on camera how Christianity has allowed him to care only about the present because his past sins are forgiven and his future entry to Heaven is already guaranteed.

--Richard Viguerie, publisher of Conservative Digest and one of the leading neo-conservative intellectuals behind Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, patiently explains how a computer bank on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. contains the names and addresses of thousands of born-agains who will receive 75 million pieces of direct-mail propaganda over the next two years.

“Part of the reason that the Right has gotten so powerful is that people sit down and write,” said Valentino.

Echoing Ellison’s pitch for screening print contributions, Valentino asked the theater crowd to further imitate the fundamentalists depicted in “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done” by mailing postcards to both Fanning, at his “Frontline” offices at Boston public-TV station WGBH, and PBS President Bruce Christensen in Alexandria, Va.

About 100 were turned away from the sold-out Wednesday presentation of “Thy Kingdom Come . . . Thy Will Be Done”, according to FAIR spokesperson Linda Mitchell. As a result, at least two more screenings will be scheduled in Los Angeles, and an East Coast screening will be held soon in New York, she said.