Something for the Soul

"You'll Find God . . . Right in There," screamed the bannerline, and the curly-haired little girl in the ad pointed straight at the title, The Lawton Story, "A Picture That Does Something to Your Soul." As the film went into release last week, the two live-wire Ohio promoters who made it were confident that religion would serve them as well at the box office as sex has done since 1945.

Sex has done right well by Producers Kroger Babb and J. S. Jossey. Their only other movie, a feature-length sex education film called Mom and Dad, has quietly taken in $8,000,000 from 20 million moviegoers. For the last four years, it has been strenuously peddled in 42 states and Canada.

Only the Livestock. Now being shown in Latin America and Australia and still going strong in the U.S., Mom and Dad is a knowing mixture of syrup, spice and corn. It blends scenes of childbirth, a Caesarean operation and the ravages of venereal disease into a tear-squeezing fable about a high-school girl who "got into trouble" because her parents kept her in ignorance. (Catch lines: "It Happens Somewhere Every Night," "Millions Learned the Hard Way, But You Can See the Facts.")

Producer Babb, sparkplug of this unusual moviemaking team, pushes Mom and Dad as if it were snake oil. The film is shown only to unmixed audiences after a town has been saturated with a ballyhoo campaign that leaves no one but the livestock unaware of the chance to learn the facts of life. Each of the 16 prints of the film now touring the U.S. has its own advance man, plus a lecturer and two "nurses." The so-called nurses revive spectators who faint during the bolder medical sequences. During intermission, after the lecturer's spiel, they help him hawk pamphlets on sex. Sales to date, at $1 each: 7,000,000.

It's No Sin. The producers decided to try religion when they got hold of a four-hour Cinecolor film of the annual Easter sunrise passion play put on as an Oklahoma hillside Oberammergau by citizens of Lawton, Okla. Babb & Jossey trimmed the film and added some homey fictional sequences fore & aft, starring a six-year-old "find" from Atlanta, named Ginger Prince ("42 inches and 42 pounds of Southern charm").

The Lawton Story will get the same painstaking local promotion as Mom and Dad, and will wear the same trimmings. There will be an intermission for a "world famous lecturer," hawking another $1 pamphlet--"The Prince of Peace." Say the picture's pitchmen: "The film will move the most hardened sinner, comfort the most troubled." Says untroubled Live Wire Kroger Babb: "It's no sin to make a profit."

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