This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Outside Utah and some parts of Arkansas, few people know about the dark chapter in Mormon pioneer history known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
Today a new movie, "September Dawn," will introduce this event - when, on Sept. 11, 1857, a Mormon militia led by John D. Lee slaughtered some 120 members of an Arkansas wagon train traveling through southern Utah - to a national audience.
The movie stars Jon Voight and, in the role of LDS Church President Brigham Young, British actor Terence Stamp (best known to American audiences as the evil General Zod in "Superman" and "Superman II"). It opens on about 850 screens across the country.
To the movie's director, Christopher Cain, "September Dawn" is not an attack on The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints but an examination of religious fundamentalism that connects to another Sept. 11 six years ago.
"This story, to me, was about religious fanaticism," Cain said in a recent interview from his Colorado home. "For me, it's not about Mormons, it's not about Muslims. It's about religious fanaticism, and how it can lead otherwise good people to do deeds that are otherwise unthinkable."
Some who have seen "September Dawn" say the movie does bash members of the LDS Church.
Richard Dutcher, whose 2000 drama "God's Army" launched the Mormon Cinema genre, called the movie "a throwback" to the notorious 1922 propaganda film "Trapped by the Mormons," where "all the Mormons are bad guys and all the non-Mormons are good guys. And the Mormons are really bad, and the good guys are really good."
"The film really is very, very kind of anti-Mormon, almost unnecessarily so, depicting them as out-of-control religious fanatics," said University of Utah film professor Brian Patrick, who made the 2004 documentary "Burying the Past" about Mountain Meadows and its aftermath.
Cain said he had never heard of Mountain Meadows before a Colorado neighbor, first-time screenwriter Carole Whang Schutter, approached him. Cain found the history fascinating, but it wasn't cinematic.
Then Cain and Schutter "got the idea to weave in this fictitious Romeo-and-Juliet relationship story" involving the son (Trent Ford) of an LDS bishop (Voight's character) falling for a young woman from the wagon train (Tamara Hope). "Then it felt like a movie to me," Cain said.
Cain read several books on the massacre and did much research on the Internet. He said he has heard of Patrick's film but avoided watching it before finishing his movie. Patrick has claimed that Cain's son Dean - who played Superman on the TV series "Lois and Clark" and plays LDS Church founder Joseph Smith in "September Dawn" - saw the documentary at a film festival in Los Angeles in 2004 and bought a copy for his father.
The movie depicts 19th-century Mormons as religious zealots whipped into a murderous rage by their leaders' paranoid preaching. And by arguing that Young was complicit in the massacre, the movie takes sides in a long-simmering historical debate.
Cain's reading of Young's speeches and writings at the time, he said, makes the filmmaker believe that "if [Young] didn't order it directly, he certainly created the climate that allowed other people to interpret what he was saying as orders." (Cain added, "I'm not a historian" - a statement that will get little argument from those familiar with "Young Guns," Cain's 1988 Brat Pack Western that starred Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid.)
Cain said reactions to the movie cover "everything from it's absolutely a distortion and a hateful Mormon-bashing movie to 'this is a really untold story that should have been told a long time ago and why was it hidden.' "
Much of the press coverage has concerned whether the movie's depiction of Mormons will affect the presidential aspirations of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. "It's been ridiculous to watch from my standpoint," Cain said. "The movie was made and conceived long before anybody knew Mitt Romney was going to run for president." (Cain acknowledged he and his producers encouraged such coverage by inviting Washington political reporters to interview Voight when the actor was in D.C. in March filming "National Treasure: Book of Secrets.")
Dutcher, for one, doesn't think "September Dawn" will resonate the way Cain thinks it will.
"I'd be very surprised if it makes any impact at all, because it's not a very good movie," Dutcher said. "It's a great opportunity and a pretty poor movie. I thought they did a great disservice to history."