Once lost, now found: Christian movie made in Jefferson resurfaces

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

What if I told you there exists a movie, filmed almost entirely in Jefferson, starring a guy who previously appeared in a 1977 episode of Lynda Carter’s “Wonder Woman” TV series as a Nazi scientist in South America who manages to successfully clone Der Fuhrer?

And in this movie, he plays a godless industrialist who with the backing of three demons — one of whom had just been seen on an episode of “Mork & Mindy” — finds himself locked in a battle for the soul of a quaint Iowa town against a guy who would later play a priest on an episode of “Remington Steele.”

Who do we have to thank for this movie?

Naturally, two men who in 1958 had a hand in making “The Blob,” who were so taken with the Mahanay Bell Tower when they got to town that it was written into the script.

If it wasn’t for the internet, we may have gone on believing that “Twister” was the only movie ever shot in Greene County.

Instead, we can now get on YouTube, call up “Whitcomb’s War” and, despite the iffy video quality (it looks as if the guy who uploaded it taped it off TBN one night in 1988), marvel at what should rightly be Jefferson’s answer to Greenfield’s “Cold Turkey.”

I’m a sucker for quirky local history and pop culture, and my recent online find of “Whitcomb’s War,” made in the fall of 1979, was like striking gold.

Plus, we’ve now officially entered that time of year when it’s awfully compelling to spend an entire weekend on the couch in a Snuggie.

That “Whitcomb’s War” — which is actually a comedy whose demons are more of the bumbling variety — should be forgotten in the annals of Hollywood isn’t surprising.

Here was a movie made far removed from the glow of Tinseltown, by a director who nearly made Iowa the epicenter of the Christian film industry a good 35 years before Kirk Cameron starred in “Fireproof.”

Why “Whitcomb’s War” has been virtually forgotten in Jefferson, whose people and places factor heavily in the film, is harder to understand.

Maybe it’s because the movie didn’t star someone of Dick Van Dyke’s caliber, like Norman Lear’s “Cold Turkey” had in 1971.

Rather, here was a young actor, Patrick Pankhurst, at the very beginning of his career, playing a freshly minted minister (David Michael Whitcomb) who’s sent to pastor in the fictional town of Hurrah, Iowa (pop. 3,841).

At last check, Pankhurst today teaches acting classes in L.A., having made a career out of turning up briefly in movies from “Rocky IV” to “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and on a number of TV shows past and present, including “The A-Team,” “Dallas” and “NCIS: Los Angeles.”

In Hurrah, Pastor Whitcomb (reporting to work at the long-razed First Baptist Church, site of the present-day Home State Bank parking lot) finds himself up against a wealthy atheist who lives in the Brown Funeral Home and employs most of the town.

As such, he’s changed the work week in Hurrah to Wednesday through Sunday, making it impossible for the residents to worship.

That just won’t stand, of course.

The rich guy is named Phil Esteem (a play on Philistine) and is played by Leon Charles.

The now-late Charles had worked in the movies as far back as the ’40s, notably working as a dialogue coach on Walt Disney’s “The Parent Trap” in 1961 and the sci-fi classic “Logan’s Run” in 1976.

In the late ’70s, he enjoyed a recurring role on “Little House on the Prairie,” playing Miles Standish, the rich jerk who controlled the fictional town of Winoka.

In “Whitcomb’s War,” he’s unknowingly aided by three of Satan’s demons led by Bill Morey, who later did the voices of Mutt and Recondo on the “G.I. Joe” cartoon.

There’s a who’s who of Jefferson residents in the movie, too,  including Jed Magee, Rolfe Blaess, Doc Telleen, Ozzie Raemaker, Lloyd Baller and Helen Lehman, and they even get screen credit.

Production, according to local press reports, lasted the entire month of October 1979.

“The two weeks I spent in Jefferson were two of the most delightful weeks of my life,” Charles raved to the Jefferson Bee.

The movie had its premiere at the high school theater in 1980, and would have then been forgotten permanently if not for the internet’s ability to recycle the contents of pop culture’s trash bin.

Is it worth watching?

As a snapshot of Jefferson circa 1979, definitely, and also for the sheer zaniness that someone made a bona-fide movie in Jefferson.

That someone was producer-director Russell S. Doughten Jr., the faith-based Iowa filmmaker from Carlisle who died in 2013 at 86.

As the founder of Heartland Productions and Mark IV Pictures, Doughten’s “Citizen Kane” was a 1973 movie called “A Thief in the Night,” filmed in Des Moines, which did the whole Rapture/“Left Behind” thing before “Left Behind” did the whole Rapture/“Left Behind” thing.

By all reports, it’s supposed to be convincingly creepy.

Doughten’s obituary would later call “A Thief in the Night” the “most widely seen Gospel film in the world.”

Before coming home to Iowa to make Christian films, Doughten worked for Good News Productions in Pennsylvania in the ’50s, which had started dabbling in secular films via the name Valley Forge Films with “The Blob,” the drive-in sci-fi classic about a mass of man-eating alien jello that made Steve McQueen a star.

Doughten was one of the producers of “The Blob,” and Thomas E. Spalding was its cinematographer.

The movie was just perfect for a midnight double-bill in 1959 at the Iowa Theatre with “I Married a Monster From Outer Space.”

Two decades later, Spalding would later shoot “Whitcomb’s War” in Jefferson.

When production began in Jefferson at the beginning of October 1979, “Rocky II” was the movie showing at the Sierra.

There’s little doubt that the cast and crew Doughten assembled in Jefferson were underdogs as well.

When production ended, “The Amityville Horror” was at the Sierra.

Unfortunately, “Whitcomb’s War” would never enjoy the same recognition.

You see, when it comes to the box office, never discount the devil.