HBO Film on McMartins Stirs Feelings : Docudrama: Cable movie reopens old wounds for some, serves as vindication for others. Producers says they just wanted to retell the story accurately.

Earlier this month, a group of defendants, jurors and attorneys quietly met at a private screening held at HBO to view “Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” a cable-TV movie that premiered over the weekend about the longest and costliest trial in American history.

Obviously pleased with the outcome, Raymond Buckey, who spent five years in jail on child-molestation charges only to be acquitted on all counts, had just one criticism.

“It was too short,” he told his attorney, Scott D. Bernstein.

That’s not how angry supporters of the prosecution regard “Indictment” after seeing it.

In her first public comments on the finished film, the lead prosecutor in the case, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lael Rubin, said, “The film is filled with falsities, distortions, inaccuracies and major omissions. What they portrayed is not what happened, and the record stands behind that.”

In the 1980s, a national wave of fear and paranoia gripped parents when shocking stories of satanic rituals, animal sacrifices and games requiring nudity poured out of the small McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach. Schools across the country were shut down in the aftermath.

Five years have passed since the last McMartin trial ended, after seven exhausting years in court and a cost of $16 million. The camps have remained bitterly divided, though the stormy emotions seemed to be calming--until HBO’s movie reopened the case this past weekend.

Rubin, parents of the McMartin children and sympathetic child abuse experts believe that the film presents a dangerously one-sided view. They contend that in dramatizing the events around the trial, the filmmakers exhibit the same sensational media tactics they set out to condemn.

The filmmakers staunchly stand behind their presentation of events. HBO executives said that every fact in what they are calling a “docudrama” has been carefully documented. When asked why the prosecution’s side was not better represented in the film, executive producer Abby Mann responded: “What other side?”

“I can’t invent evidence,” said Mann, who produced “Judgment at Nuremberg.” “The evidence wasn’t there. This was the most investigated case in 50 years, and there were no convictions. The trial lasted seven years. No convictions. . . . A man spent five years in jail. No convictions.”

Mann co-wrote the script with his wife, Myra, who personally sat through 2 1/2 years of the trial, doing research for the movie and an unfinished book.

“It’s true that there was an assumption in the media that the defendants were guilty and the process was working in an orderly manner,” said psychiatrist Roland Summit, who was appointed by the county to help the Manhattan Beach community deal with the case. “But this [movie] just turned that model upside down with caricatures of the players. The whole thing was melodramatic. There wasn’t even balance enough to be interesting.”

Several on the side of the prosecution wondered why the HBO movie did not present any medical evidence. After all, the prosecution paraded out five different doctors. But according to the Manns’ research, the jurors themselves dismissed the medical evidence.

“We basically threw the medical reports out because they were weak,” confirmed one of the jurors, Barbara Celestine, a federal government employee. She saw the movie at the HBO screening and liked it. “Even the jurors who thought the Buckeys were guilty said, ‘Hey, we can’t go by this. This is not something you can convict somebody on.’ ”

The teachers from the Manhattan Beach preschool who lived through the infamous trial stand behind the Manns’ movie, which stars James Woods as defense attorney Danny Davis. Oliver Stone was also executive producer.

“They did an excellent job of taking seven to 10 years of a very complex and convoluted story and putting it into a little over two hours,” said Raymond Buckey’s sister, Peggy Ann Buckey.

She was one of seven McMartin teachers indicted in 1984 on 115 charges of felony child molestation after hundreds of children claimed abuse. Without hard evidence, the charges against five of the teachers were ultimately dropped, while Raymond and his mother, school co-owner Peggy McMartin Buckey, were acquitted in trials.

“My ultimate hope is that this would never be repeated in history again,” said Peggy Ann Buckey, who successfully sued for the restoration of her teaching credentials and now teaches in California. “If that came about as a result of this movie, that a witch hunt like this would never take place in our history again, then I would be happy,”

The trail of litigation has not ended for many involved in the McMartin case. In addition to being the subject of criminal prosecution, Raymond Buckey was sued approximately 77 times by different families on behalf of their respective children for roughly $10 million each time. He has prevailed in every case, said Bernstein, who has represented Buckey in civil matters since 1985.

Bernstein said that Buckey also won an undisclosed settlement in a “bad faith” action against several insurance carriers who refused to pay for his criminal defense. And Buckey is awaiting an appellate decision on a suit against numerous defendants--from the county of Los Angeles to Cap Cities/ABC--for violation of civil rights, conspiracy, malicious prosecution and defamation.

During the filming of “Indictment,” the Manns’ Hollywood Hills home was burned to the ground in a fire that authorities have said was arson. The Manns believe the blaze was set because of their involvement in the film. A police investigation is ongoing.