Roadshow Paves the TV Airwaves for ‘Never Forget’ : Movie: The production, based on the life of a Huntington Beach businessman and Auschwitz survivor, was recently shown at select spots throughout the country.

While a Holocaust movie may not be the kind of entertainment vehicle normally associated with the idea of “taking the show on the road,” that is just what the star, subject and producer of “Never Forget” did recently to drum up interest.

For, as the Washington Post noted, “Never Forget” is “not to be dismissed as just another Holocaust film.” The made-for-television production, starring Leonard Nimoy, Dabney Coleman and Blythe Danner, airs Monday night and throughout the week on TNT.

Advance word from TV Guide is equally strong. According to the April 6-12 issue, “Ted Turner’s we-can-change-the-world films shown periodically on his channels have been mostly noble but dull. ‘Never Forget’ changes that. Both admirable in intent and engrossing in content. . . .” The review goes on to say that the movie is “the best thing (Nimoy has) ever done.”

Based on the life of Huntington Beach businessman and Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein, “Never Forget” tells the story of the Jewish genocide through the lives of a middle-class, Southern California family. Much of the two-hour movie was shot last fall on location at Mermelstein’s lumberyard--where he maintains his own small Holocaust museum--and elsewhere around Huntington Beach and in Long Beach, where he lives.

Unlike many films dealing with the Holocaust, this one avoids grisly newsreel footage or re-created Nazi violence. As Mermelstein, Nimoy is as eloquent in his anguished silences as in his speaking parts.

The film shows how Mermelstein, with the help of an Irish Catholic lawyer, confronts “revisionist” historians who claimed that Jews were not exterminated at Auschwitz and who offered a $50,000 award to anyone who could prove they were.

After a lengthy legal battle--recounted in the film--the court took “judicial notice of the fact that Jews were gassed to death at Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland and that the Holocaust is not reasonably subject to dispute.”

Ultimately, the Torrance-based Institute for Historical Review and others paid Mermelstein, who lost many family members in the camps, a stipulated judgment of $90,000.

Last month, Nimoy, Mermelstein and producer Robert Radnitz traveled to New York, Chicago and Washington to show the film to several thousand religious and community leaders, in addition to making the usual circuit of talk shows.

Mermelstein, who attended a fourth screening in Dallas, on the campus of Southern Methodist University, said this week that the tour was very successful, drawing a number of Holocaust survivors to each screening.

But the highlight, he said, came when the three men left the road and took to the air, in an experiment engineered by Turner Broadcasting and the Fairfax, Va., school system.

On March 14, Turner Educational Services--a non-commercial subsidiary of Turner Broadcasting that brings some CNN news features into the classroom--sent a one-hour special (called an “electronic field trip”) to 4,000 schools across the country that take the service. The broadcast consisted of a half-hour lecture by Ron Axelrod, a Fairfax teacher specializing in the Holocaust, illustrated with news and documentary footage, followed by a stripped-down, half-hour version of “Never Forget.”

Turner prepared curricular guides on the subject that, in some cases, were supplemented by materials from local schools. Cassettes of the entire film were sent to 20 selected schools.

A week later, Mermelstein, Nimoy, Radnitz and Axelrod gathered in a Fairfax County school auditorium for a tele-conference moderated by CNN Newsroom anchor Casandra Henderson. For an hour, between brief segments of the film, the panelists took telephone calls from the same junior and senior high schools across the nation and discussed the issues raised.

Turner spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the event marked the first time that a TNT entertainment product had been screened in classrooms nationally, before its airing on the network.

Nimoy was included in the film, Murphy acknowledged, because “kids recognize TV stars.” But for an hour, she said, the former “Star Trek” regular “almost became a teacher.”

At a screening Wednesday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, Nimoy, who also served as the film’s executive producer, said he initially was skeptical about the experiment.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. He said he figured the tele-conference would “probably be a little stagy, it’ll probably be self-conscious, it’ll probably be painful . . . one of those things where you do it because it’s a good thing to do. But it was more than that, it was really full of energy and a kind of a vitality. I was very pleasantly surprised.” It was, he continued, “a use of the electronic system in a terrific way. I was really very much impressed.”

Mermelstein said he thought the students were affected by his story in part because he was their own age--17--when he and his family were scooped up by the Nazis. He said the students’ questions were “quite revealing. . . . I was impressed by how much they are aware and how much they have learned about the destruction of European Jewry. . . . I didn’t expect them to be so well-informed.”

Radnitz, best-known for producing such family features as “Sounder” and “Cross Creek,” agreed. He said the tele-conference “proved to me again how bright kids are if you give them a chance. . . . If you don’t talk down to them, you’d be surprised how high they can reach.”

Mermelstein said he feels the national broadcast of “Never Forget” is a kind of “culmination” of his efforts of the past decade, and the completion of a pledge he made in 1944 in Auschwitz.

“A promise fulfilled,” he said. “I made a promise to my father in the camp that I would tell what happened if I did survive.”

Mermelstein, who portrays his father in a brief sequence of “Never Forget,” said his father “didn’t ask me to go out and take revenge. It’s counterproductive to go about it that way. I don’t believe in collective guilt.”

“Never Forget” will be shown on TNT Monday at 8 p.m., 10 p.m. and midnight; Tuesday at 2 a.m. and 4 p.m.; Wednesday at noon; Saturday, April 13 at 10 p.m. and Sunday, April 14 at 6 p.m.