Robert Radnitz Never Forgets Family Audience : Movies: After a six-year hiatus, the producer of ‘Sounder’ is readying a TV docudrama and has a deal at Paramount.

A former English teacher named Robert Radnitz has produced some of Hollywood’s most distinguished family films, including “A Dog of Flanders” (his first), “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” “Misty” and the much-honored “Sounder” in 1972.

Sex, violence and mayhem generally do not loom large in his output, even in his more mature-themed works such as “Birch Interval” and “Cross Creek,” his adaptation of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ autobiographical stories.

But this has not been a congenial era for films low in sex, violence or high in challenging themes. “Cross Creek,” his last film, was six years ago. Until recently, Radnitz has been developing projects that studios insist they admire a lot but say they are bypassing for their lack of those essential ingredients.

In Hollywood, however, nothing is forever, including the stranglehold of the heavy stuff. Barry Levinson’s family chronicle, “Avalon,” both sentimental and incisive, hints that things may change. Bob Radnitz himself has a new development deal at Paramount and is in post-production on a film for Turner Broadcasting.

The new film for television, directed by Joseph Sargent and written by Ron Rubin, is called “Never Forget.” It is a docudrama about Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor now running a successful small business in Southern California, who took on an organization called the International Historical Research Society, which was offering $50,000 to anyone who could prove that the Holocaust actually took place.

“At first nobody wanted to take on this outfit. ‘Don’t give them the attention’ was the idea,” Radnitz said the other day. “Even Mel’s kids thought he was wrong. But he found a feisty lawyer--a Texan and a Roman Catholic named Bill Cox--who said, ‘We’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys; let’s go.’ Eventually it led to the first formal judicial statement that the Holocaust was a fact.” Leonard Nimoy stars as Mermelstein. It will air in April, the month for international Holocaust observances.

The first Paramount project is one Radnitz, 65, has been nursing for years, a filming of “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” from a Newberry Prize novel by Elizabeth Spear that has sold more than 4 million copies.

“It’s about a young girl--I think of her as part Scarlett O’Hara and part Cathy of ‘Wuthering Heights’--in the Colonial period. Her father, the governor of the Barbados, dies and she goes to live with Puritans in Connecticut.” There is a friendly witch and a romance with a sea captain.

A second project at Paramount, on which Radnitz is working with David Ward (“The Sting”), is the classic Robert Louis Stevenson adventure, “Black Arrow.” “David and I discovered we both love the Scribner’s editions of Stevenson with the J.C. Wyeth illustrations,” Radnitz says. He is also working with Ward on an original called “The Perfect Specimen.”

Radnitz has purchased, from the manuscript, a novel called “Aurora 7,” by Thomas Mallon, a teacher at Vassar, about the day (May 24, 1962) Scott Carpenter went up in Aurora 7. It is in particular about a 7-year-old space freak who runs away from home to get nearer the action.

Radnitz is very excited about “Aurora 7,” which will be published in January. “It looks at everybody on that day. A young American is leaving Russia to come back to the United States with his Russian wife--Lee Harvey Oswald. John Kennedy is studying two announcements about the flight--one for use if it’s a success, one if it fails.”

Radnitz thinks that “the day of the blockbuster may be over. Hopefully pictures about people are coming back. I still see the need for the kind of films I set out to make: films that deal with this country then and now, films that families can see together, children and adults, each on their own level.”

What distributors don’t fully understand, Radnitz adds, is that his kind of films, never blockbusters, nonetheless have a pleasant longevity. “I made ‘Island of the Blue Dolphins’ in 1962 and just the other day I got another check, a very nice check, for royalties on it. There’s always an audience.”

Radnitz has a notably tempting wish list of projects: James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Saga; a musical version of “Sounder”; Willa Cather’s “O Pioneer,” to which Radnitz recently won the film rights, and, for television, a miniseries based on Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel.”