The hushed crowd at the Gateway Theaters in Salt Lake City rose to their feet as the 96-year-old Mormon leader walked slowly in, but he laughed and said, "Sit down." He didn't seem to have grabbed the free popcorn and Coke products provided in the lobby, although many others did.

Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson, his counselor in the church's governing First Presidency, about half of the 12 apostles, their families, friends, filmmakers, entertainers and community leaders, filled the large theater for a free screening of "Amazing Grace."

Larry Miller, owner of the Utah Jazz and dozens of theaters across Utah, paid for the screening and invited all the guests. He did it, he said, after getting a call from Apostle M. Russell Ballard, who asked Miller to watch the film and help arrange a Utah viewing.

Ballard, in turn, learned about "Amazing Grace" from Gary Dixon, a former employee at Bonneville International who now runs the Foundation for a Better Life in Denver. Better Life is the nonprofit wing of Walden Media, which is funded by Philip F. Anschutz, a conservative oil, media and movie mogul. Walden has produced such films as "The Chronicles of Narnia," "Holes," "Charlotte's Web" and the upcoming "Bridge to Terabithia."

The partners strive to promote "better values" in society, Dixon said, through movies or media campaigns.

That's where Thursday's screening comes in.

For the past seven months, Walden has been showing the film to various religious and political opinion-makers across the country. In Salt Lake City, who better to watch the film than the leader of 12 million Mormons?

"At the airport, I saw lots of young people returning from their mission trips," Walden's president Michael Flaherty told the crowd at Gateway. "It's a pleasure to be with so many people walking the walk."

He then introduced "Amazing Grace," produced by Walden's sister company, Bristol Bay Production and set to open nationwide on Feb. 23. It tells the story of William Wilberforce, who spent two decades in the House of Commons working to end the practice of slavery in the British empire. The film takes its title from the stirring abolitionist hymn, "Amazing Grace," written by John Newton, who was Wilberforce's childhood pastor. For years, Newton (played by Albert Finney) worked for the East India Company, but abandoned the slave business after he converted to Christianity in 1764.

“Only God's amazing grace could and would take a rude, profane, slave-trading sailor and transform him into a child of God,” Newton declared in a sermon from which he drew the lyrics to the hymn beloved to Christians everywhere but not in the LDS hymnal. "I was blind but now I see."

The movie is part of a nationwide campaign to end modern-day slavery, said Erik Lokkesmoe, the project director at Walden. "It's a global awareness movement. Like William Wilberforce, we want to show how a band of people can change the world."

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* PEGGY FLETCHER STACK can be contacted at pstack@sltrib.com or 801-257-8725.