HALLMARK CHANNEL ORIGINAL MOVIE, 'THE TRAIL TO HOPE ROSE' HONORED AT THE NATIONAL COWBOY AND WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM

Stars Ernest Borgnine and Lou Diamond Phillips to Receive the Museum's Prestigious Wrangler Award

The Hallmark Channel original movie, "The Trail to Hope Rose," will be honored as the Outstanding Television Feature Film of 2005 by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, on April 16, 2005. The award ceremony recognizes the year's best Western movies, television, literature and music which portray the nation's Western Heritage with accuracy and high artistic quality.

"The Trail to Hope Rose" aired Saturday, July 3, 2004 and stared, Lou Diamond Phillips, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Majors. The movie was written by Kevin Cutts and directed by David Cass, Sr. Under the watchful eye of the town's sole lawman, Lee Majors, and under the wing of a sympathetic landowner, Ernest Borgnine, Phillips, an ex-con, toils in the mines to dig himself out of debt while he tills the fields where he intends to put down roots. He manages to steer clear of trouble until a battered young woman (Marina Black) knocks on his cabin door seeking refuge from an abusive miner."

The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's Board of Directors seek to encourage and honor those who tell the great stories of the West. Both Lou Diamond Phillips and Ernest Borgnine will be on hand at this year's black-tie gala to receive the prestigious Wrangler Award, a bronze cowboy on horseback. Past recipients include such notables as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, John Ford, James Stewart, Sidney Pollack, Kevin Costner and Tom Selleck.

Hallmark Channel is a 24-hour basic cable channel that provides a diverse slate of highquality entertainment programming to a national audience of 68 million subscribers. The program service is distributed through 4,800 cable systems and communities as well as directto- home satellite services across the country. Crown Media Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWN) owns and operates Hallmark Channel. In 2004, Crown launched its second 24-hour linear channel, Hallmark Movie Channel. Through its subsidiary, Crown Media Distribution, LLC, Crown also distributes titles from its award-winning collection of movies, miniseries and films for exhibition in a variety of television media including broadcast, cable, Video-on-Demand and High Definition Television.

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