RELIGION / JOHN DART : Religious Groups to Award Shows That Promote Their Moral Values

Two religious groups trying to promote moral values on television and in the movies are pleased with what they saw last year, especially in light of Hollywood’s past record, and are handing out awards to prove it.

The interfaith Religious Public Relations Council said this week that it will honor CBS’ “Picket Fences” TV series and Director Robert Redford’s film “Quiz Show” at its annual awards program April 1 at the Odyssey Restaurant in Granada Hills.

The Movieguide magazine awards, selected by Publisher Ted Baehr, a conservative evangelical Christian who once proposed reviving a strict movie code, will cite “Little Women” as the top family film and “Forrest Gump” as the top movie for mature audiences at a lunch Wednesday in Hollywood.

Of the slew of professional groups that make such awards in the publicity-rich period just before the March 27 Oscars ceremony, the two religious organizations are small potatoes.

But they point to a trend when they are added to the optimism expressed over Hollywood’s direction recently by two media-oriented Catholic groups, the national UNDA-USA and the local Catholics in Media Associates. That fits with calls by Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles for religious groups to praise morally positive film and TV productions whenever possible.

The Religious Public Relations Council, a national group of 500 publicists and communications officials for religious organizations, received 117 entries for its Wilbur award, a 48% increase over last year in various film, broadcast and print categories.

“The religious community is eloquent--and sometimes stridently so--about the failings of secular media,” said Dan Gangler of Dallas, president of the council. “But we found an unusually high number of ‘treasures’ in 1994.”

For instance, although the television series “Christy”--highly publicized in evangelical and mainline Protestant circles--and the religious-themed series “Touched by an Angel” were entered, it was a “Picket Fences” episode titled “Survival of the Fittest” that won the Wilbur.

The winning episode included two story lines with religious elements--a school teacher challenged for bringing up creationist ideas in a classroom and a sheriff’s deputy who extracts a confession from a prisoner by appealing to their mutual Catholic faith.

Other television entries included “E.R.,” “The John Larroquette Show” and the final episode of “L.A. Law.”

Hollywood Pictures’ “Quiz Show,” based on a TV quiz show scandal in the 1950s, beat out “Little Women,” TNT Films’ “Abraham” and “Jacob,” and the Family Channel’s “Good King Wenceslas.”

ABC-TV’s Peggy Wehmeyer, the first full-time network religion news correspondent, will get a Wilbur for her report, “Billings Confronts Anti-Semitism.”

The awards ceremony, which will conclude the three-day convention of the Religious Public Relations Council at the Universal Sheraton Hotel, will be co-hosted by actress Jean Stapleton and broadcaster Mario Machado. Stapleton, best known for her portrayal of Edith Bunker on the TV sitcom “All in the Family,” is active in the Christian Science Church.

The Movieguide awards on Wednesday at the Radisson Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel deal only with feature films, as judged by its publisher, Ted Baehr of Atlanta, who hands out “Teddy Bear” awards.

Baehr proposed in that same hotel four years ago a resuscitation of something like the Hays office code that restricted movies from the 1930s to the 1950s, reflecting an era of cleaner language and sexual restraint. Hollywood and even many religious groups looking for uplifting entertainment were unreceptive.

The reviews in Baehr’s biweekly magazine sum up instances of profanity, obscenity, nudity and violence in a film and wag a disapproving finger at story line ideological perspectives that are not Christian.

But Baehr himself has been relatively successful in recent years, meeting with studio executives and spreading a more practical gospel that family-oriented, reduced-violence films may be good for both your soul and business. He points, for instance, to how many G-rated and PG-rated films are big box-office hits.

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For the first time in 10 years, Baehr said, there were more than 10 candidates for top family movie of the year.

Baehr said the 1994 crop of mature-audience films was not as good as 1993’s. Yet, he declared that “Forrest Gump” was “a great movie with strong biblical elements” and that it was heartening to see “the emphasis on keeping one’s marriage vows in ‘The River Wild’ and the emphasis on integrity in ‘Quiz Show.’ ”

Furthermore, Baehr said, the year saw “less obvious attacks on Christianity, more films with Christian content and themes, and, surprisingly, some movies, such as ‘Corrina, Corrina,’ ‘The Santa Clause’ and ‘Miracle on 34th Street,’ which made the atheist, not the Christian, the antagonist and the object of derision.”

About 40 studio executives are expected to attend the Wednesday luncheon, said Baehr’s local spokesman, Scotty Dugan of North Hollywood.