Word: mcmartins
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Among them were Virginia McMartin, her daughter Peggy and two grown grandchildren, all of whom worked at McMartin's preschool in a Los Angeles suburb, which became the subject of the longest and costliest trial in American history. The case ended in 1990 with no convictions on any of the 65 criminal counts. Now the family's seven-year legal ordeal is the subject of Indictment: The McMartin Trial, a gripping-though excessively pious-TV movie that will make its debut May 20 on hbo. Conceived and scripted by veteran screenwriter Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg, The Atlanta Child Murders...
...drama is based on the trial transcripts and various videotapes as well as extensive interviews, though with an aggressively prodefense point of view. The film begins with the initial allegations leveled against McMartin's pasty-faced grandson Ray Buckey (Henry Thomas) by a mother later diagnosed as schizophrenic. Judy Johnson, portrayed in the film by Roberta Bassin as a dazed freak, insists that Buckey sodomized her 2 1/2-year-old...
Oliver Stone co-produced what TIME reviewer Ginia Bellafante calls a "gripping--albeit didactic--new HBO movie" about the mass paranoia surrounding day care centers and allegations of sexual abuse in them during the 1980's. Among the victims of the hysteria were the McMartin family, who were accused of horrific crimes in their Southern California day care center. Their trial, then the longest and costliest in American history, ended in 1990 with no convictions. But screenwriters Abby and Myra Mann's nine-year obsession with the case leaves the film feverishly trying to convince any doubters of the McMartin...
...Mark Jacoby's charming but feckless Ravenal, Rebecca Luker's steely Magnolia, Gretha Boston's ebullient Queenie and Lonette McKee's glorious Julie. (As Joe, Michel Bell sports an impressive basso profundo, but spoils Ol' Man River with a needlessly mannered performance.) Still, it is a relative nonsinger, John McMartin as Cap'n Andy, who is the surprising hit of the show: his desperate reenactment of the interrupted play-within-a-play, The Parson's Bride, is a comic highlight that stays in the mind the way Ol' Man River stays...
...only a predator in his own right but also a stand-in for all the gaudy malevolence of pop culture. "There's a social hysteria about child abuse," says Professor Melvin Guyer, a psychologist and lawyer who teaches at the University of Michigan. "It began with the McMartin Pre-School case and continued with Woody Allen. There has been a feeding frenzy, in which the ordinary presumptions of innocence are not applied. The allegations are treated as evidence." And the public reacts with wide eyes and a bit of drool at the corner of the mouth. "The public gets...