Plot Thickens: Keating S&L; Backed Screenplay

Had things worked out differently, Charles H. Keating Jr. might have become a movie mogul instead of a symbol of the disastrous excesses in the savings and loan industry.

Keating, former chairman of American Continental Corp., spent more than $100,000 of his company’s money in 1987 for a screenplay about a Soviet plot to assassinate the Pope at Fatima, Portugal, according to court records and interviews.

The effort by Keating was aborted later as he was coming under increasing pressure from federal thrift regulators over the risky ventures and shaky financial condition of the company’s main unit, Lincoln Savings & Loan in Irvine.

Keating was also prepared to spend $20 million to produce the movie, titled “The Third Secret,” though it was unclear where the money would come from, according to the Associated Press.

“I found his purpose to be noble: He wanted to save the world,” said Robert Fiveson, an award-winning documentary filmmaker who wrote the script. He said Keating’s only desire was to spread the word of Roman Catholicism to as wide an audience as possible.

Keating’s lawyer, Stephen C. Neal, would not let the 67-year-old businessman talk about the movie project while the criminal securities fraud trial of Keating is pending in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

“This was a modest expenditure to see if a profitable motion picture could be produced,” Neal said. “After the screenplay was done, a decision was made that it wasn’t viable the way they wanted to do it. There wasn’t enough comfort that it was going to be a success financially.”

Neal said all expenses were “reported and accounted for.” He said Keating had a “significant background in the entertainment area” through his work at American Financial Corp. in Cincinnati.

AFC, headed by financier Carl Lindner, owned National General Corp. in Los Angeles, which counted Grauman’s Chinese Theater among its chain of movie houses. National General was sold to Mann Theater Corp. of California in 1973 for $67.5 million.

A devout Catholic who contributed $1 million in company money to Mother Teresa’s missionary efforts, Keating had long wanted to help produce religious movies, several family members said.

Keating’s daughter, Maureen Mulhern, was involved in “The Third Secret” project, originally entitled “Fatima.” American Continental paid the expenses for her, her husband, Fiveson and Phoenix producer Hamilton Wright Jr. to visit Portugal for a week during the annual pilgrimage, Fiveson said.

Fiveson turned in a script that mixed historical information, such as the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish terrorist and an attempt a year later by a crazed priest brandishing a bayonet, with his fictitious account of a Soviet KGB agent blackmailed into duty to finish what the terrorist failed to do.

The final scene, he said, took place in Fatima at the anniversary of the 1917 appearance of the Virgin Mary to three children. As the gunman was preparing to shoot, an apparition of an old woman blinded him momentarily.

Fiveson said the plot may sound strange but it would have been better than much of what he sees on television. It also would have got across the message that Keating wanted the world to hear about Catholicism and salvation, he said.

For regulators, who did not know about the expense at the time, the incident simply was “another example of Keating using the institution as a private piggy bank,” said William K. Black, senior deputy chief counsel for the Office of Thrift Supervision in San Francisco.