Real-Life Drama for ABC Telefilm Shooting in Mideast : Television: Cast and crew of Israeli-based production about hostages in Lebanon sensed eerie parallels to unfolding crisis in nearby Iraq.

It was touch and go that first week of August after Saddam Hussein’s tanks rolled into Kuwait and Israel feared for its own borders. In Jerusalem, the cast and crew of a fact-based TV movie set in the ancient history of 1984-85--ABC’s “Forgotten: The Sis and Jerry Levin Story”--met to discuss their own safety.

Marlo Thomas, who plays the wife of a newsman taken hostage, recalls: “We all had little meetings. The eight Americans talked it out and seven of us decided to stay.” One American crew member opted to return to the United States.

“We went to work every day with our passports and plane tickets on our persons,” Thomas says, “so we wouldn’t have to go back to our hotels if things blew up--we could run straight to the airport. I felt a little better after my husband (Phil Donahue) called the State Department and they said we were OK.”

It was eerie to be in the Middle East filming a drama about one hostage situation when a new hostage situation was developing nearby. But then moviemakers don’t go to that region to shoot nature films.

“There were five American productions overlapping ours in Israel,” says “Forgotten” producer Carol Polakoff. “We were based just down the corridor from TNT, which is making a movie about the hostages in Iran. We called our floor of the hotel Hostage Hallway.”

(The TNT project’s start of production has been delayed from Sept. 1 to Oct. 1 while producer Gerald Rafshoon seeks alternative locations in Greece. Another company, 21st Century Film Corp., says its feature film “Desert Shield (S.E.A.L.S.)” will roll on schedule this month in Israel.)

Safely back from the Holy land, Thomas and the “Forgotten” company were recently working in a Los Angeles church. They were shooting a scene in which Thomas’ character confronts fellow churchgoers over the fate of her husband, held hostage in Beirut.

Her hair bleached blond and her accent pitched well south of the Mason-Dixon line, Thomas stands up in the crowded church and rails against the American government policies of the period.

Her character, Sis Levin, was eventually to travel to Damascus, Syria, seeking a way to bring about the release of her husband, CNN reporter Jerry Levin (played by David Dukes).

Following her visit, during which she met shadowy figures who may or may not have represented Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Levin escaped from his captors. The Levins, who today in Washington are active in groups seeking peaceful solutions to Mideast tensions, speculate that the Syrians arranged Levin’s escape by seeing to it that the chains binding him to a radiator were left loose enough one night for him to slip away.

Thomas, 51, says she took this role--her first in a TV drama since she played a recovered mental patient in “Nobody’s Child” in 1986--because it gave her a chance to put forward her view that negotiation is a better way to resolve conflicts than combat.

“Our government’s policy was that we wouldn’t talk to those who were holding our citizens hostage,” she says. “But don’t we have to find out what those people are so mad about? It doesn’t do any good not to talk.”

In 1984, as in 1990, one Mideast country had invaded another, America had intervened and hostages had been taken. Back then, the invaded country was Lebanon and the occupiers were the Israelis. The hostage takers were allied with Iran and Syria. The American presence was limited to a few hundred Marines, plus naval warships offshore.

Today, there are 13 Western hostages who were seized in Beirut, of which six are American.

American policy on the Beirut hostages has been to avoid making them an issue. Too much publicity perhaps prolonged the captivity of the hostages in Iran in 1979-81.

When Sis Levin’s husband was grabbed, “she didn’t speak out immediately because the State Department told her not to,” Thomas says. “Quiet diplomacy was judged the best way to get him out.” Making an issue of his fate might endanger him, she was told.

“Sis was a woman who had never made a peep all her life. When she was a little girl in Birmingham, Ala., her father had her memorize Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’ and that was her outlook. For her to wind up questioning government policies was quite a long journey.”

Voicing no opinion about this year’s developments, Polakoff says of the period covered in the TV movie, “The film’s point of view is clear: Beirut was a disaster for America. We stuck our nose in where we didn’t belong. There was no way for us to win. We were on the wrong side. Any side would have been the wrong side. As a result, hostages got taken. They were a political tool.”

Thomas has strong views on that period too. Referring to America’s policy of providing weapons to Iraq during its war with Iran, she says, “We should be leaders in making peace, not in selling arms. I’m ashamed that we helped give Saddam Hussein his arsenal.

“When we were filming in Israel, we saw our ships in the Mediterranean, our helicopters overhead, and I couldn’t help but think that if all this energy, all this money, all this intelligence, all these people were focused on peace instead of war. . . .”