Tammy Faye Rises Again

The images Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker burned into our minds aren't pretty: Tammy crooning for dollars on TV, Jim cowering in a fetal position under his desk after his affair with Jessica Hahn was exposed, and the televangelism empire he and Tammy Faye had built crumbled amid charges of massive fraud. Over here is Tammy, spaced out on pills, mascara running down her face, whining in her helium voice that she and Jim had done nothing wrong.

Those images, and the demise of the Bakkers' PTL (Praise the Lord) Network, defined televangelism for many Americans, and they continue to haunt Christian broadcasting to this day.

At the National Religious Broadcasters convention in February, representatives from the Christian television industry gathered to discuss how to repair some of the damage done in past years to Christian networks, and how to restore the audience's faith in Christian programming.

The broadcasters just might want to take a look at "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," a powerful, funny, and revealing new documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. The film produces two complexly related but entirely genuine reactions: "Anyone who missed PTL missed the best television of the past decade." And, "Tammy Faye Bakker is a truly inspiring human being."

Narrated by drag queen icon RuPaul, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" is a look at an extraordinary woman who has faced obstacles that would break all but the very strongest of us. Yet she emerged proud, smiling, her faith unshaken--and her eyelashes intact.

The film doesn't try to clear Tammy's name, or Jim's. In 1989, Bakker was found guilty on 24 counts of fraud and conspiracy, and was sentenced to 45 years in jail and fined $500,000. He was released after serving five years. There's nothing new offered here to exonerate him.

What we do find is the little-known history of a young, devoutly Christian couple who single-handedly took a tiny Christian television network that "could barely broadcast down the street" and transformed it into a top-rated station, with shows syndicated around the country, creating the world's first Christian broadcasting network.

We see Jim Bakker develop the first successful Christian TV talk show, the "700 Club," before being shoved aside and forced to start from scratch in California with the Trinity Broadcasting Network, only to be dealt the same injustice again. By the time they started the first Christian satellite broadcast network, PTL, in 1974, the Bakkers were more wary and worldly wise, but were brought down a third time, by their own greed and ambition, but also, according to "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," by Jerry Falwell and by journalists more interested in tearing someone down for a story than presenting the facts.

"The PTL was all about loving everyone--gay, straight, black or white, and for this they paid dearly," says Bailey, whose previous documentary with Barbato, "Party Monster," about a Manhattan club kid, made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998 and later won an Emmy. "It became clear to me in hindsight that the real story of PTL had not been told, and that even those who knew what really happened just weren't being listened to."

Jim Bakker never denied having a brief sexual liaison with Jessica Hahn, or later giving her hush money when she threatened to take the affair public. But the film shows that accusations that he funneled huge sums out of the network to finance an extravagant lifestyle are unfair. The Bakkers, the film argues, lived no more extravagantly than other Christian leaders--including Falwell, whom the film depicts as a coldly calculating Judas who stole the PTL right out of the Bakkers' hands.

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