Executing programs

I'm new to Procmail and this is probably a pretty basic question, but 
.....

I need to save e-mail to a file(stripping out the headers), and then 
call a program with the file-name as an argument.  Saving the mail to 
a file is no problem, but I can't get the program to execute.  Recipe 
 in .procmailrc looks like this:
         :0 bc
        | cat >>$HOME/filename
        | program_name filename

I've tried it using semi-colon at end of the first action, placing 
the program execution in a separate recipe, and the same thing 
happens - the file is created and that's it.

Thanks for any help on this.

larryc(_at_)thegrid(_dot_)net