On View : A Jolt From the Past : A CELEBRATED CAST TACKLES A DARK, TENDER FAMILY CHANNEL FILM

Some secrets really were meant to be revealed, and one such shrouded event surrounds Stolen Memories: Secrets From the Rose Garden, a new Family Channel movie starring Mary Tyler Moore, Linda Lavin, Shirley Knight, Paul Winfeld and Nathan Watt.

In a turn from her more recent roles as headstrong and intense women--the latest being CBS’ recently canceled drama “New York News”--Moore tackles the role of Jessie, who at 56, has never mentally progressed beyond the age of 6.

In what seems like the serene summer of 1956, Jessie tends, as ever, to her beloved rose garden under the watchful eyes of her two sisters, Earline (Linda Lavin) and the tender Sally (Shirley Knight). But when Jessie’s 12-year-old grandnephew Freddie (Nathan Watt “Unstrung Heroes”) visits, the violent details of Jessie’s past resurface and she recalls the terrible events that led to her retardation.

Everything about the production, which was shot last June in Wilmington, N.C., proved challenging, says director Bob Clark (“A Christmas Story”) during a phone conversation from a vacation in New Hampshire. The small budget, the location and the period were all difficult, but he says, “Artists love to rise to the challenge, especially if they believe in the project.” “Stolen Memories’ ” celebrated cast certainly did.

Lavin, the film’s executive producer, says that “Stolen Memories” came to her production company via a circuitous “friend-of-a-friend” route. She was won over immediately. “Even though it’s not a true story, it seems like one,” she says. “It’s a very dark and yet touching story with funny moments. It’s a very funny, sweet story that has a lot of American history in it. There are racial exposures, in terms of the secret. It moved me very much.”

The sisters’ simple life is “jolted by a newcomer, a boy who asks questions, as any child would, who then offers them a greater understanding. I had to tell that story.”

Originally, Moore says from New York, Lavin considered playing Jessie herself, but when Moore expressed a strong interest in the role, Lavin graciously offered it to her.

Cast and crew were drawn to the script for their own reasons. Lavin was “moved tremendously.” Clark recalled his own Southern childhood growing up with a retarded aunt and a Down’s syndrome uncle. Watt, talking from his La Cresenta home, loved the relationship between his character and Moore’s, as well as the easy life of the characters. Moore embraced the “simplicity, the very Truman Capote-esque quality of the beautifully written script.”

“Stolen Memories” is the first produced script for writer Tim Cagney, 46, who says points he’s penned some 20 scripts in as many years. When “Stolen” was optioned, aspiring director Cagney was taking customer service calls for Citibank. The writer based “Stolen” on a brief chance meeting he had with two sisters while he journeyed on a long road trip, he recalls from his Hollywood home. Over the last 12 years, Cagney’s lived in a dozen different states.

“During a dinner in Florence, S.C., I met these two eccentric sisters, who were just gracious and wonderful,” he sayss. From there, Cagney imagined a nephew and then another sister and an aunt who was retarded. “It’s really a combination of my growing up and my meeting those sisters.”

Then Clark, primarily known for comedies--he directed “Porky’s” and “Rhinestone”--came on board. He was looking for “something with a sense of the profound, since I was moving away from comedies. I was attracted to the story’s dark, brooding side, which ultimately comes to an affirmative point of view.”

The director and Cagney joined together, Clark says, “for a fairly extensive rewrite” of what “examined something hideous, but a simple truth evolves.” The dynamics of the piece aren’t all that far from his family, he says. “I’m Southern. I grew up where we all lived closely together.” He could relate to the affection among the sisters and their nephew, between the town’s cabbie (Paul Winfeld) and the family. Cagney, Clark says, really captured that “Southern gothic quality.”

Moore engaged two neurologists to help her capture Jessie’s appropriate speech patterns. “Mary did a lot of her own research,” Clark says.

“We wanted it to be believable and accurate, what Jessie’s limitations would be,” Moore says. “Even though she stopped at 6 mentally, she was a very bright 6-year-old when it happened.” It was great, she adds, “to play someone who can be free without being censored, as children often are.”

The actress was interested in how Jessie “knows she’s different, but doesn’t understand, doesn’t have the ability for the full impact of why she can’t go to church, that her sisters worry that people may laugh at her, but she has her rose garden . . . She’s basically happy until Freddie comes into the house and exposes her to her past.” But, Moore stresses, the revelation offers Jessie a “greater freedom,” to venture out beyond the family property, where she’s been kept “safe.”

Moore hopes “Stolen Memories: Secrets From The Rose Garden” reveals “the tenderness, the delicateness, the fragility of a relationship” that viewers will allow themselves to “be transported and amazed by the story.”

“Stolen Memories: Secrets From the Rose Garden” airs Sunday at 7 p.m. on The Family Channel.