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It's the professor vs. Mary Ann.
A fledgling Idaho film festival, founded by former Gilligan's Island co-star Dawn Wells, has pulled a University of Utah professor's documentary about the Mountain Meadows Massacre from its lineup.
Organizers of the first Spudfest Drive-In Film & Music Festival, starting Wednesday in Driggs, Idaho, say filmmaker Brian Patrick's Burying the Past: Legacy of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, is too violent for the family-oriented event. Patrick said festival officials told him last week that they received calls from members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints threatening to picket the film or boycott the festival.
They said, 'The local bishop and church authorities here are up in arms,' Patrick said Monday. These people have said the film is hateful and mean-spirited, and they don't want their people to see it and, if [the festival] is going to show it, there's going to be big trouble.
Patrick countered that his award-winning film - which details the 1857 incident in which a group of Utah Mormons killed 120 Arkansans headed to California - is a balanced presentation, featuring independent historians and those representing the LDS Church. The church even helped me make the film, he said.
Patrick got a call Thursday from an attorney on SpudFest's board, saying the film would be pulled.
SpudFest's publicist, Kim Wells (no relation to Dawn Wells), said organizers did not hear complaints from LDS members. It's just not family-friendly, Wells said of Patrick's film. After the board of directors of the festival saw it, they said because it's about a massacre, frankly, it is too adult for a family film festival.
Another film on the SpudFest schedule, the Utah-made World War II drama Saints and Soldiers, had to undergo minor editing to avoid an R rating for its wartime bloodshed. Wells said the festival's board of directors watched both films, and The violence in 'Burying the Past' was more disturbing than the violence in 'Saints and Soldiers.' Also, Wells said, Saints and Soldiers is scheduled for evening screenings, while Burying the Past was slated for daytime shows.