Packing our Cold-Weather Gear for the Joseph Smith Documentaries Project
Our daughter told us that there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad winter gear, and we are taking that to heart as we pack our bags to head on yet another shoot for the Joseph Smith Documentary series that we are creating in association with a gifted set of filmmakers.
For this project we are making at least 85 mini-documentaries, each from 8-30 minutes long, telling Joseph’s story and considering his life. We know of hardly any other life that offers so much inspiration, such twists of pain and anguish, so much persecution and misunderstanding and so much courage and generosity in response. His life is dramatic, moving, expansive, visionary and heart-rending.
The project will be somewhat like reading a book with chapters, each video capturing a slice of his life or a major idea. We want people to be able to feel with him, not just look at him.
When he said, “No man knows my history,” he is right. No one can ever or will entirely know his life because he enters realms and has as his mental backdrop scenes and knowledge that we can’t entirely approach. But too many of us know very little at all about Joseph.
This is not a documentary with talking heads where we are interviewing historical scholars, though there will be a companion set of interviews on what some see as the hard topics and questions.
Instead, the approach is to allow the viewer to be transported to feel the texture and the tangibility of Joseph, his time and its profound significance upon the world. Rather than looking at it distantly from a vantage two centuries later, our hope is to take you there.
The Winter Shot
We are currently on our winter shoot and the low this week at Sharon Vermont, where the prophet was born, is a comfy -2. Nauvoo has warmed up from the bone-chilling -35 with wind chill, recently described by senior missionaries, but is still low enough that the Mississippi is frozen. The news has been prickled with descriptions of the nightmarish winter storm that has hit the Northeast.
Why go on a winter shoot, anyway?
Because since we are talking about Joseph Smith not from a distance, but up close and personal, much of his story and the stories of those who were ignited by his message are wintry stories, in every sense of the word. They take place not only in the cold of actual winters, but in the winter of their souls when they had to reach deep down for the faith to endure.
Our Footage
This is the fifth of several multi-week shoots for this project. So far, we have pointed our lens at scenes made sacred in three seasons from Sharon Vermont to the Carthage Jail. We’ve hurried to catch sunrises at England’s Benbow farm and captured the sun leaving at Downham village where Joseph sent missionaries who were phenomenally successful at spreading a restoration that felt delicious to those who heard.
We’ve scoured the country for location doubles. How, for instance, can you tell the story of Far West, when the cabins and stores have long since given way to the prairie? We have looked for their likeness elsewhere with our camera.
Thanks to the work of Robin Saville and his associates, Geoffrey Saville, Darren Schmitt and Josh Sales, the cinematography is stunning.
Still, with the current cold temperatures, it sounds like no time to go out, and that might be true if we were telling a different story, but this is just the weather we’ve waited for. It means we will be outdoors all day in toe-freezing weather holding a cold camera with bare fingers to capture our various shots, but that’s what it takes to tell this story of Joseph Smith’s life.
On video, we need to capture snowy drifts, ice floes on the rivers and spiderwebs of frost on the windowpanes. Why? Because Joseph Smith was born in a log cabin at the winter solstice. Latter-day Saints who hoped to build Zion were driven out of Independence in a rough November, while their attempts to make fires along the Missouri River collapsed on damp, unforgiving ground.
Scot and Robin walked right down to the edge of the ever-flowing Missouri River just two days ago. The closer they got to the water, the colder the air got to be. Large chunks of ice, sometimes twenty or thirty feet in length were floating down before them. Even in the hour of shooting by the river, they got a little taste of what the Saints experienced as they waited to ferry across the ice-choked river in 1833. The temperature was at least 5 to 7 degrees colder by the water and it caused them to think of the Latter-day Saints huddled along these very shores awaiting to be ferried across to the Clay County side to escape the danger of the Jackson County mobs of 1833.
Icy adversity was no less polite when the Saints were driven out of Far West by a militia in the winter of 1838. We think of Hiram Dayton starting to leave Far West in the extremely cold weather, when three of his children begged him to throw them out of the wagon to die, for they would soon freeze to death. When he was back in Far West, his daughter Nancy “caught a violent cold”. The ground was frozen so deep that Hiram, weak from exposure, did not have the strength to dig her grave.
When the Saints were compelled to leave Nauvoo in February, 1846, they described the miracle of the freezing over of the Mississippi River. While the bitter temperature required for that miracle must have penetrated straight to their marrow, it beat the gamble of the icy chunks, big as bounders, flowing down the river to swamp their rafts. Being frozen was a miraculous blessing.
If we picture Joseph Smith’s story and the burdens his followers bore as happening on sunny, genial days, we miss so much of the story and it’s the story we’ve pledged to tell.
So off we go, not heading southward to pleasant temperatures, but into the jaws of the storm where we will count the minutes until we are inside by a fire again.
The Project
Work on the Joseph Smith documentaries began more than 18 months ago and will not be finished until the end of 2027. It was envisioned at first to be a series of 40 mini-documentaries 8 to 30 minutes long, which blossomed to 85 and will probably grow further as we work.
This will be accomplished through a strong narration, that will capture the voices of the past with more than 200 professional voice actors who make the story come alive; sound effects that give depth and realism, and, a storyline that follows Joseph in an intimate and touching way from his birth in Vermont to his assassination in the Carthage Jail.
Visually, this will include much video footage from all the sites that Joseph knew as well as commissioned paintings and illustrations, AI imagery, existing historical art and photographs depicting his time, places and people. Original music by some of the top Latter-day Saint artists will accompany the documentaries.
It’s Because of Joseph Smith
Rather than our formulating it, this project came upon us, motivated in part when we got word of a friend who was “leaving the Church.” Too many people are leaving the Church because they receive false or twisted information about Joseph Smith, taken out of context. They make Joseph Smith a caricature and then disdain the caricature that has been created.
Too many times, we’ve heard the goodbye words that include, “It’s because of Joseph Smith.”
We think, can you be talking about this same Joseph Smith who taught we lived before this earth? That we have a majestic eternal identity? Who introduced us to a God who knows our name and is our very Father? Who expanded our minds to know that the unbaptized are not doomed to hell and sketched a destiny that promises glory? Who taught us a priesthood power that seals families forever so that we are not barren orphans in eternity?
Is this really the Joseph Smith that you are rejecting? After a lifetime of study, writing and teaching of Joseph Smith, our admiration has only deepened. We have not run into information that has given us pause. Instead, we have learned what has made us humble before any project on Joseph Smith. If we read every word in the Joseph Smith papers, including every revelation, we would still come short of evaluating his life.
Jeffrey R. Bradshaw wrote, “In an insightful presentation, John C. Alleman described several examples of difficulties that still plague translators when they are required to render the teachings of Joseph Smith in a form that can be understood by “every nation, and kindred and tongue, and people.”
“In the course of his discussion of specific issues in vocabulary, syntax, culture, scripture citations, and foreign phrases, Alleman summarized the one major proposition that underlies all translation: ‘namely, that one cannot translate that which one does not understand…. The problems in translating the teachings of Joseph Smith require … a range of experience equal to that which the Prophet himself had, almost, to understand some of his writings.’
“A range of experience approaching that which the Prophet himself had? This, the man whose mind ‘stretched] as high as the utmost heavens, and searched] into and contemplated] the deepest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity [to] commune with God’! This first challenge alone threatens to send would-be interpreters of Joseph Smith’s words into despair.”
It is clear that as Joseph said, “No man knows my history,” and just as clear that we know even less about his history if we only pay attention to the picture of it that too often is seen online.
What we have seen is that people who are dedicated members of the church know less about Joseph Smith than they think they do. We have noted, for example, over the years as we’ve led church history tours, that people inevitably say the same thing at the final testimony meeting, often in tears. “I thought I knew Joseph, but I never knew.”
This is one of the great stories of the ages, and we proceed with the idea that the voices of the past will be most important in telling this story and bringing it to life for the Saints.
Born in us
We have not only a writing, but film making background and have spent our lives in the study of Joseph Smith, working on several books of church history, so it was natural that a major project about Joseph Smith should be born in us. Yet, it is one thing to dream about doing something, which is the exciting, romantic part of a project, and another to see it through to the end.
It has been a blessing to have the support of so many people to bring the project to this point and we have felt heavenly support which has spurred us forward. Things have fallen together which shouldn’t have fallen together. Doors have been opened and walls blasted down that would deter us.
Where will you be able to see the finished project?
In many places.
Currently, people are getting much of their information from YouTube. As of this writing, YouTube has more than 122 million users each day, with over 1 billion viewing hours per day and nearly 5 billion users per month. If one searches for Joseph Smith there right now, one pulls up many hostile, unfriendly, offensive and disgusting videos and podcasts. More importantly, false information and out-of-context information is pushed on innocent people and immediately they think they have now discovered the truth because, “we saw it on YouTube” or “we read it on the Internet.”
We want to capture this space with some great material that covers Joseph Smith’s life in a masterful, compelling, and beautiful way. Because there will be more than 85 of these episodes, the Internet-weight of them, through the existing and ever-changing algorithms will put them in the most prominent place on YouTube and other social media.
We will need your help to get the word out when we start launching them online. They will also be housed on a new, special Joseph Smith Documentaries website as well as shared freely with any organization or people who want to see and enjoy them. This is not a commercial effort, nor a money-making proposition. It will exist purely to help the world become better acquainted with Joseph Smith from the voices of the past who were there and knew him.
I have mentioned that they will not come out until at least the end of 2027, but our experience is that when people hear about the project they clamor to see them now or to see them next week. An eagerness for these laps at the surface when this project is shared. We think this expresses a deep love and interest in Joseph, which we share, and once we begin to release them, they will come out week by week.
The Opening Video and Project Theme
On May 5, 1861, just three weeks following the artillery rounds fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, signaling the start to the Civil War (with eight states already seceded from the Union), the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury published: “We have in our possession a pamphlet, published at Liverpool, in 1851, containing a selection from the ‘revelations, translations and narrations’ of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. The following prophecy is here said to have been made by Smith, on the 25th of December, 1832. In view of our present troubles, this prediction seems to be in progress of fulfilment, whether Joe Smith was a humbug or not.” The paper concluded: “The war began in South Carolina. Insurrections of slaves are already dreaded. Famine will certainly afflict some Southern communities. The interference of Great Britain, on account of the want of cotton, is not improbable, if the war is protracted. In the meantime, a general war in Europe appears to be imminent. Have we not had a prophet among us?”
With the roar of a civil war cannon starting the lead video, soldiers marching and then the sounds of inking the stereotype and the press beginning to start, a voice actor of John H. Taggart, publisher, will give us the above article in the background as we see images of not only civil war reenactments but of the original revelation given by the Prophet Joseph. This interrogatory or Mr. Taggarts, “Have we not had a prophet among us?” has become the overarching title and theme of the entire documentaries’ series.
Summary
Meanwhile, I (Maurine) am writing this at Far West in the car, while Scot and Robin are out shooting the snow on Shoal Creek and the cattle, grazing on dead grass through snow patches. The wind is whistling. They pull their coats, scarves and gloves that reflect modern technology closer and stamp their well-engineered boots for protection. We all think that the people who once lived here had nothing like that during those winter months they were expelled from their homes, while their prophet languished in an equally cold dungeon with the ironic name of Liberty.
We are so glad to tell the story.