First the Fall, Then the Film : Television: NBC insists that although it paid Jim and Tammy Bakker for the rights to their story, creative control stays with the filmmakers.

Television evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker sold their rights to NBC for the upcoming movie “Fall From Grace,” but NBC insists that it didn’t sell out to the Bakkers.

“They have no control over what we’re doing,” said Tony Masucci, NBC’s senior vice president of miniseries and motion pictures for television.

The two-hour movie, scheduled to air April 29, details the years 1980-86, between Jim Bakker’s tryst with Jessica Hahn and the collapse of the PTL (People That Love, or Praise the Lord) ministry. Bernadette Peters and Kevin Spacey star as Tammy and Jim.

Masucci said that the Bakkers approached NBC about doing a movie about their extraordinary lives in 1987, two years before Jim Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for defrauding his followers of $3.7 million. The network paid the Bakkers for their rights and conducted extensive taped interviews with them--but gave them no creative control.

Even though the filming was completed a month ago, Tammy Bakker had only just received a copy of the script from her attorney last weekend and had not yet read it, according to Shirley Balmer, her assistant at the New Covenant church in Orlando, headquarters of Tammy’s current ministry.

“We did make a deal with (the Bakkers), we wanted their perspective . . . we hired a researcher to corroborate whatever information needed to be corroborated,” Masucci said. “That was the extent of their involvement--those interviews, and permission to tell their story.” He declined to say how much the Bakkers were paid for their rights.

The Bakkers had no contact with NBC following the 1988 interviews with network researchers and the screenwriter, Ken Trevey, Masucci said. The director, Karen Arthur, and the actors had no contact with the Bakkers--although Arthur said that Tammy had volunteered to do the singing if the producers had chosen an actress who couldn’t sing to play her.

Hahn, the former church secretary who claimed Bakker raped her, was not involved in NBC’s research. “There was nothing she could have told us that wasn’t on the record anyway,” Trevey said. “The same with Rev. Jerry Falwell,” the Moral Majority leader who took over the PTL ministry for several months after Jim Bakker resigned in March, 1987.

Trevey said that NBC tried to secure rights from Jim Bakker’s associate, Rev. Richard Dortch, but he and his lawyers never responded.

The script, which went through numerous drafts, had to be changed after court transcripts became available that contradicted some of what the Bakkers had told NBC in their interviews, Trevey said. Trevey, director Arthur and actor Spacey also utilized Jim Bakker’s own writings, newspaper and magazine articles and numerous tapes of the Bakkers’ PTL shows and appearances on interview programs to prepare for the film.

“I don’t get the sense that they are liars, but I do get the sense the have a very selective view of reality,” Trevey said during a conversation on the set of “Fall From Grace” in late February. The crew had taken over a sumptuous lakeside home located in Chatsworth’s Monteria Estates as a stand-in for the Bakkers’ first luxury home in Tega Cay, S.C. The real Tega Cay home recently burned to the ground.

Arthur was more blunt. “They lied a lot ,” she said. “Ken wrote one script that he had to totally throw away when the lies became manifest.”

Masucci said he believes that the Bakkers became so caught up in their own image that they never realized what lies they told. “Jim, to this day, doesn’t understand the magnitude of his wrongdoing, that he was responsible for it, and culpable for it,” Masucci said.

The Bakkers were unavailable for comment.

Despite such speculation, the creative forces behind “Fall From Grace” say the movie will present the Bakkers as human beings. The director, writer and actors agree the Bakkers’ rise and fall represents the fate of many caught in the web of greed and materialism that characterized the Ronald Reagan era.

“These were two human beings who were fallible in many of their actions,” Trevey said. “Who maybe started out with altruistic motives, but . . . they were living the good life, not really closely examining the morality of their actions.”

While noting that the Bakkers “ain’t exactly my kind of people,” Arthur added: “It is my position as a director to expose the many sides and the complexity of any human being. I think, sadly for these two human beings, the press was only allowed to see the mask that they wore. What is going to be interesting about the movie is, we deal with the behind-the-scenes stuff--the arguments they had, the kind of lovemaking they had.”

Trevey said that the press circus surrounding the Bakkers led to many misconceptions. One, he said, is the oft-repeated story of the “air-conditioned dog house” at the Tega Cay home. But the Bakker dog house was hardly the temperature-controlled canine heaven such reports would imply, he maintained; interviews with the Bakkers revealed that the structure was a shed constructed to keep the Bakkers from having to house their many dogs in the garage, which they feared might be dangerous; the shed had to be cooled with a window-type air conditioning unit to protect the animals from the brutal summer heat.

As it happens, although NBC had insisted Trevey include a dog house scene in the script, it was eventually trimmed because the movie ran too long. Also cut were shots of gold-plated bathroom fixtures the couple had in their home. But Tammy, who grew up poor with 10 brothers and sisters and often had to use second-hand bathwater, was fascinated by bathrooms, and her enthusiasm is reflected in the movie when, in a scene in which a realtor shows the Bakkers the house, Tammy excitedly hops into the bathtub with all her clothes on to try it out.

Spacey also said that the unforgettable cartoon image of Tammy crying, her thickly made-up cheeks stained with black tears, has been blown out of proportion. “If you actually study as many videotapes as we studied, she only actually cried, with the mascara running down her face, maybe four or five times,” he said.

Peters became fond of Tammy through portraying her. She believes Tammy was driven to compulsive shopping and prescription-drug abuse because she felt threatened by Jim’s devotion to PTL and his fleeting attraction to Hahn.

“I don’t think she was a very happy person; even when she smiled, she couldn’t get the corners of her mouth to go up. I liked her, actually. She was a good person, it seemed to me,” Peters said.

“When you come from nothing, and then suddenly you can buy things, you buy things,” the actress continued. “I also think that it would fill her up when Jim wasn’t around. And I think wearing all that makeup made her feel pretty, but it also covered up a lot of what she was feeling.”

Spacey believes that the movie is less sympathetic to Jim than to Tammy, but he said he still sought to give the character a certain humanity.

“It would not have interested me to play a man who was corrupt, who knew he was corrupt, and got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” Spacey said. “What is interesting is a man who truly thought that what he was doing was right, and what he was doing was to be the word of good to millions of people. Then, when that world starts crumbling apart, he has to examine himself, and try to figure out: ‘What did I do?’. . . . That’s a level of narcissism that’s so bizarre that it’s interesting.”