TELEVISION: CHRONICLE OF A WITCH HUNT

Mass paranoia flourished in this country long before it dressed up in camouflage and stockpiled assault weapons. During the 1980s, hysteria lived in comfortable homes with jungle gyms out back and family vans parked in front. In a number of highly publicized cases-in places such as Maplewood, New Jersey; Edenton, North Carolina; Chicago; and Los Angeles-hordes of parents accused nursery-school and day-care-center workers of sexually abusing children. Spurred by public outrage, prosecutors charged staff members with horrific crimes, often based solely on the claims of youngsters whose tales ranged from gropings in the classroom to ritual satanic killings and rides aboard spaceships. Though their reputations were irrevocably damaged, most of the defendants ultimately went free.

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) and his wife Myra, the film feverishly aims to convince any doubters that the McMartins were the victims of a terrible injustice.

The 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 son.

The charge prompts police to send advisory letters to McMartin parents. The Los Angeles district attorney's office then directs several hundred preschoolers to the Children's Institute International, an agency that cares for abused and neglected children, for therapeutic questioning.

There social worker Kee MacFarlane (Lolita Davidovich) gets the kids to claim that they were repeatedly raped, sodomized and forced to witness the slaughter of rabbits and other animals. Like Lael Rubin (Mercedes Ruehl), the lead prosecutor in the McMartin case, MacFarlane is portrayed as a dangerously misguided zealot. During her videotaped interviews (portions of which are excerpted verbatim from the transcripts), children initially deny abuse until MacFarlane goads them with such remarks as "Are you gonna be stupid, or are you gonna be smart and help us out here?"

The biggest villains in the movie, however, are the media, especially local TV newscaster Wayne Satz, who early on reported the ghastliest accusations against the McMartins with sensationalistic relish. From talk-show hosts to newspaper reporters, the media avidly portrayed the McMartins as torturers. Even Ray Buckey's lawyer Danny Davis-played intriguingly by James Woods as part camera-ready opportunist, part righteous upholder of justice-presumed the McMartins guilty at first.