As Hinckley surely knew, his hope that no one would ever make a film about Mountain Meadows was wishful thinking. The Arts & Entertainment Channel had already shown an episode on the murders as part of Kenny Rogers’ Real West series. Noted Mormon historian Leonard Arrington served as the main talking head, and the episode relied heavily on legends about “Missouri Wildcats” and other evil emigrant fantasies, with similar blame assigned to the terrifying Southern Paiutes, who in Mormon legend forced the righteous settlers to kill the emigrants.

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Along the same lines, Dixie State College cinema professor Eric Young, a descendant of Brigham Young’s brother, made another film in southern Utah in 2000. Based on Juanita Brooks’ study, the documentary is a classic LDS retelling of the story with lots of blame for the victims and the Indians, but it won two “Telly” local television awards. Young became interested in the subject when he tried to date a descendant of John D. Lee. Her mother told him bluntly that because of what Brigham Young did to her ancestor, she wouldn’t let him date her daughter. Ironically, Professor Young “said he made the film with the aim of clearing Brigham Young of responsibility for the massacre, but was unable to find the evidence to do so.”

Bill Kurtis’ Investigating History produced an episode for the History Channel in 2004 about the murders from University of New Mexico professor Paul Hutton’s script. It incorporated Hutton’s updated research and focused largely on the 1859 federal investigation of the atrocity. The channel’s Standards and Practices Committee, which had never objected to any of Kurtis’ productions, took an intense interest in the Mountain Meadows episode. The final script (which won a Spur Award) bore only a passing resemblance to Hutton’s original.

Another film professor, Brian Patrick of the University of Utah, released a more compelling documentary in 2004, Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. (I’m one of several historians Patrick interviewed.) Patrick became interested in the story after reading a news article about the reestablishment of the Mountain Meadows Association. It had regrouped in 1998 to prod the state of Utah into restoring the monument at Dan Sill Hill after the granite slab listing the victims toppled over due to poor construction, weather conditions or an earthquake, take your pick. A newspaper story about the association’s attempts at reconciliation among those who share the massacre’s legacy caught his attention. During the five years Patrick spent making the film, the story evolved as the LDS Church dedicated the second monument, and different factions and personalities came into conflict. (The accidental discovery of their ancestors’ grave, and secretly shipping the bones to Brigham Young University for analysis, offended many of the victims’ descendants.) Ultimately, the film dealt not only with reconciliation but—as its title reveals—the difficulty of dealing with the darker side of Mormon history.

Patrick’s film did very well on the independent film festival circuit and garnered 11 awards, but he was unable to persuade PBS to broadcast it and his documentary found no national distributor. It did attract media attention when Spudfest, the fledgling film festival founded by actress Dawn Wells (Mary Ann of Gilligan’s Island), pulled the documentary from its lineup, claiming the film was too violent for a family-oriented event. Patrick heard a different story: local Mormon authorities were up in arms, he told a reporter, claiming “the film is hateful and mean-spirited, and they don’t want their people to see it and, if [Spudfest] is going to show it, there’s going to be big trouble.”

Bigger trouble was brewing. Every LDS public relations flak’s nightmare arrived this June with the release of September Dawn, director Christopher Cain’s romantic telling of the awful tale and the first feature-length film ever made about the massacre (see review in June 2007 Wild West). Cain, best known to Western buffs as the director of Young Guns, financed the project himself and shot it in British Columbia. He added a melodramatic love story to a born-again script by Carole Whang Schutter. Cain assembled a stellar cast, including Terence Stamp, Jon Voight and Lolita Davidovich. Cain’s son Dean (best known as Superman in Lois and Clark) put in a brief appearance as Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. Trent Ford and Tamara Hope gave solid performances as the conflicted Mormon hero and his doomed love. But Terence Stamp created a terrifying vision of Brigham Young, while sticking to dialogue drawn from the religious leader’s fire-and-brimstone sermons and legal statements. Jon Voight, as Bishop Jacob Samuelson, has generated fear and loathing in Mormon country. Latter-day Saints who saw advance screenings objected to the film’s “stereotypical, one-dimensional portrait of blindly obedient church members that bordered on cartoonish at times.” A brief scene showing a frontier version of the sacred Mormon temple ceremony was especially sensitive.

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