LDS filmmakers in Utah County are embarking on a new feature film, "Emma Smith: My Story," they announced this week.
"Beginning with her childhood, we learn about the world that molded Emma into the woman she would ultimately become," directors Gary Cook and T.C. Christensen said in a statement. "The story follows Emma up through her final years in Nauvoo, [Ill.,] providing insight into this amazing woman's complicated life."
Gracia Jones, Emma Smith's great-great-granddaughter, will act as the consultant to help maintain the production's historical accuracy.
Emma Smith was extolled in LDS scripture as the "Elect Lady." She followed her charismatic husband from state to state as he and his flock were harassed and persecuted. During that time, she gave birth to nine children and adopted two others, only five of whom lived to adulthood. She became a kind of high priestess of the newly organized LDS Church who presided over the faith's first all-woman Relief Society, which would reach nearly 1,000 members after the first year.
But Emma Smith refused to accept her husband's practice of polygamy, and after he was killed in an Illinois jail in 1844, she did not go West with the Latter-day Saints
"She struggled between her faith in her husband's prophetic role and her aversion to a principle that he, as prophet, had been instructed to institute," writes LDS historian Carol Cornwall Madsen in an essay for the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. "Unable to condone continuation of the practice of plural marriage or the leadership of Brigham Young, who supported it, and ambivalent about the proper line of succession to her husband, Emma made her first priority after her husband's death the preservation of an inheritance for her five living children."
Unfortunately, Joseph Smith had mingled his personal finances with the church's and there was no easy separation.
The situation "involved Brigham Young and Emma Smith in a series of complex and often bitter legal entanglements," Madsen writes.
Emma Smith did not follow Young and the main body of Latter-day Saints to Utah but stayed in the Midwest, later marrying Lewis Bidamon, a non-Mormon, and eventually supporting her son Joseph Smith III as leader of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ).
More than one Mormon artist has seen the potential in this human drama.
In 1984, Brigham Young University music professor Murray Boren wrote and produced an all-female opera, "Emma," featuring a libretto by BYU playwright Eric Samuelsen. Eight years later, the opera was performed by The Hell's Kitchen Opera Company at St. Paul the Apostle Church Auditorium, two blocks from Lincoln Center in New York City.
"The opera explores Emma's decision not to go West with the Saints," Boren said at the time. "It deals with the question of making choices."
The new Emma film is being made at LDS Motion Picture Studio in Provo. Actors include Katherine Nelson Thompson as Emma Smith, Patricia Place as the elder Emma Smith Bidamon, Nathan Mitchell as Joseph Smith Jr., Rick Macy as Joseph Smith Sr. and Tayva Patch as Lucy Smith. "Emma Smith: My Story" will be distributed by Candlelight Media Group in spring 2008.
