MOVIES - Oct. 11, 1988

From our Art Attempts to Imitate Life file: A divorced father in Albuquerque, N.M., is trying to make a movie based on his seven-year custody-visitation battle over his daughters. But the girls’ mother is fighting him in court, and two entertainment industry strikes have slowed the process further, perhaps terminally. Fathers’ rights activist Don Chavez says his film will be about “Dad trying to regain a meaningful place in the lives of his children,” but his ex-wife, Marilyn Chavez Newhouse, has asked New Mexico District Judge Robert Thompson to appoint a guardian to decide how to protect the children from future publicity. For his part, Chavez said his daughters favor the idea of a movie, but delays caused first by the writers’ strike and now by the Teamsters’ strike could doom the project.