Russell S. Doughten Jr. (February 16, 1927 – August 19, 2013) was an American filmmaker and producer of numerous short and feature-length films.
His film work is credited under numerous variations of his name: with or without the "Jr." suffix or middle initial, and sometimes using the informal "Russ" instead of "Russell".
[1] He has been referred to as "the godfather of independent film in Iowa" and his body of work ranks him as the leading filmmaker in that state.
[5] Doughten was active in the Methodist Church and served in youth ministry and boys' camps as a recreational director and swimming instructor.
[3] After completing graduate studies at Yale, while still living on the East Coast, he began working for Good News Productions in Pennsylvania as a producer, director, editor, and writer.
[7] Good News Productions partnered with Jack H. Harris and Valley Forge Films to make the 1958 sci-fi classic, The Blob.
[8] In 1958, Doughten returned to teaching English and drama, as well as supervising and directing student productions at South Pasadena High School in California.
[10] Having become disillusioned with Hollywood, Doughten returned to Des Moines,[7] initially planning to produce a film called Heartland about an Iowa farm family.
[15] The series dramatizes the Rapture and Tribulation and the struggles of a small band of believers against an increasingly hostile worldwide Antichrist dictatorship.
Doughten appears in all four films as Reverend Matthew Turner, a survivalist who has an elaborate chart of the End Times events, but did not fully believe in the Bible until after the Rapture, even if not accepting Christ as his savior.
With his long, graying hair usually worn in a ponytail and shaggy beard, he didn't look the part of the stereotypical Christian fundamentalist, a fact that is credited with earning him secular fans,[citation needed] as is his use of unusual camera angles and layered audio.
directed by Ron Ormond in 1971, a sweeping, ambitious project like Thief—with three sequels telling one continuous story over the course of a decade—had never been undertaken even in Hollywood.
[citation needed] Doughten's identification of the Antichrist not with Communism as Ormond had done, nor with Jack Chick's sinister view of the Vatican, but rather with a worldwide government that initially acts as a global peacemaker, i.e. the United Nations, is consistent with many other Biblical interpretations of the Tribulation.