What an adventure! A three-part narrative weaving through most my life, from high school well into the late stages of middle age…
The experiences that led me to compose an operatic musical about Joseph Smith.
The advancements of technology that allowed me to orchestrate the work, recruit singers, record it in a studio, and order double CD sets, thereby bringing my creation into the physical world where other people could experience it.
The groundbreaking movie that inspired in me a desire to satisfy my passion for telling stories through film, which incubated for decades before I finally took serious steps to do it.
And now for the final part 4, the culmination of all these threads and influences into one grandiose project.
It was inevitable I would reach the point where I determined that the next level to take General Prophet Joseph Smith would be to produce a film adaptation of it. My one musical theater creation would become my first professional film production.
The first thing I had to consider was the music itself. Sure, I have on my shelf direct from the recording studio tapes of the orchestration itself without the singers from when I produced the CDs. Couldn’t that actually be used as the soundtrack for the movie?
A resounding “NO!” to that. I did the best I could with the limited resources available to me, but it simply was not up to par for a professional film. I would need to recruit a talented composer to rework the music into something well above amateur.
And that meant the music would have to be re-recorded. And that meant it would have to be performed. By an orchestra? Yeah, that would be ideal, but ugh! How costly would that be?
Alternatively I’d need a keyboardist with a quality synthesizer who could perform the whole thing on a keyboard one instrument or instrument group at a time, then have the whole thing mixed together. Possibly that could be the same self-said composer.
I would need to audition actors who could not only act, but sing and dance. These hyper-talented folk will have to be paid real wages, not any paltry $50 token pay. Speaking of dancing, I would need to hire a decent choreographer to arrange the dance routines because that’s a field of artistry I am utterly ignorant of.
Then back into the recording studio to perform the singing in advance before any filming can begin, because I’m not pulling any Tom Hooper stunt like with the film version of Les Miserables where the singing is recorded live on set. This is an operatic musical, dammit, and the quality of the musical performances is top priority.
So the music will be recorded in advance and played back while filming so the singers can lip sync to what they’ve already sung in a controlled environment. I already oversaw the recording of the CDs music, so I know what’s up in the recording studio.
I needed a screenplay, of course, but that’s my talent. I’ll churn that out. I’ll also need locations to film the movie, so that would involve location scouting—another thing I’ve done multiple times, especially for my film Geeks & Goblins, Elves and Elliot.
I would need a great director of photography, the fellow who aids the director in setting up shots and lighting and has the most influence on the look of the film out of everyone else next to the director—sometimes maybe even more than the director.
And I’d need a crew for the multiple other tasks needed to be accomplished while filming—setting up lights and other equipment, holding the microphone boom at just the perfect position to catch the dialog, errand runners for smooth communication and functionality, etc., etc. Lots of people to pay—or maybe recruit experienced interns from my two alma maters’ film programs at SLCC and UVU?
But one issue that concerned me greatly was, the story the opera tells is a period piece, happening in Nauvoo, Illinois, in the 1840’s. Period pieces are expensive! Period costumes, period locations, period props, keeping modern anacronisms out of the shots like an airplane flying by or highway traffic noises off the sound recording.
I came up with a brilliant idea to avoid that expense altogether. I’d put a frame story around the musical’s period story. High school Mormon kids attending early morning seminary classes, a religious educational program for high schoolers that meets five days a week in addition to high school classes.
One day when they arrive at their class, their instructor is absent. They’re told he was in a car accident and is in the hospital. He’s alright, he’s alright! But he won’t be here today. So just read your scriptures or do homework until your rides come to bring you to school.
The kids go, “We don’t want to do that!” But what shall they do to kill the time? Turns out, one of the boys brought his new girlfriend with him, and she isn’t a Mormon. One of them suggests telling her the story of Joseph Smith that they’ve been learning about in seminary class.
That’s when they burst out of the seminary building singing and dancing to the first song Have You Heard the News?
From then on they act out the story in various locations around modern-day Salt Lake City. First a prolog of what Mormons call Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” in 1820 in upstate New York, then jump forward to the 1840’s to act out the events leading to Joseph’s martyrdom in Nauvoo, Illinois. The high schoolers act out a portion of the story, then switch back to their classroom environment as themselves to process the piece of the story they just enacted.
Voila! No period sets. No period costumes. Lower budget required. Lots of difficult preparation avoided.
At last I took the final official step toward making the movie. I registered the production company with the state of Utah with the name GPJS LLC and applied to the IRS for an EIN number. One more step left, open a bank account for the LLC, then I’ll be off and running, doing what I’ve dreamed of doing for a good long time.
Keeping GPJS off the shelf this time, at last to become a real production that I can share with the world. In honor of that crazy dreamer of a high school boy I was when I first concocted the whole scheme.
Fifty-four years ago.
I told them I wanted to be a movie producer. My mother said, “Isn’t that the guy who raises the money for the movie?”
As my project for the class, I made a documentary of Cambridge State Hospital half an hour north of my Minnesota home. It was an institution where mentally challenged individuals were permanently warehoused. Armed with a camera, rolls of 8mm film, a portable cassette recorder, and my best friend Tom Jones, I headed up there.
In the Twin Cities television market we had an independent channel, WTCN channel 11. Saturday afternoons that channel broadcast a half hour show of local people that had done something interesting in the recent past.
After graduation I headed off to BYU for college in Provo, Utah. As so many other freshmen before me, I arrived on campus not knowing what I wanted to major in. I grabbed a catalog and thumbed through the pages of possible majors. I came to a screeching halt when I encountered “Theater and Cinematic Arts.”
We made a film about a guy on the toilet, having done his business, reaching for the toilet paper. Sadly the roll was loosely attached to the wall and fell off. It escaped out the door and down the stairs of an upstairs apartment, unrolling and leaving an ever-growing trail behind it.
At one point the roll crossed a street as Future Wife #2 drove up in her little orange Dodge Dart. She made an emergency stop and looked out the window as the TP rolled by. As she drove away we see a sticker on her back bumper reading, “I brake for toilet paper.”
My idea was to end it with the paper unrolling all the way off, leaving a cardboard cylinder. The poor fellow would pick it up in frustration, toss it aside, and walk away.
And I, being savvy enough as a filmmaker by then, immediately knew how to take advantage of this. The dog would be featured in the movie, and the new ending would be the poor guy picking up the roll, examining how disgusting it was with dog teeth depressions, dog saliva, and bits of filth and mud on the paper, toss it aside in disgust, and walk away.
Now in every such little community there are those who are the popular inner circle. You know the type. They all joined together in their own group. They didn’t make a movie. They just ran the camera as they goofed around in some half-assed impromptu attempt to film a story on the fly. After the awards were given out, their film was shown again because, you know, they’re the popular guys and aren’t they so funny?
Finally I thought, I should just go back to school and finish my Computer Science degree I had begun at BYU. I knew deep down I’d never developed a full career because my true passion was being creative telling stories through writing and making movies and that one time composing a musical. But those old bugaboo voices in my head kept plaguing me with, “Come on, get real! Those are pie-in-the-sky dreams.”
The very next day I headed down to Salt Lake Community College where I knew they had a film program and to the office of the head of the film department, Channing Lowe. He was available just then, and he could tell I was serious—and I was obviously mature—so he spent the next hour or more discussing their program and giving me a tour.
Well, actually, they have a whole-assed program there, and much more. Channing had built up a pretty impressive program with the resources available to him, and he had a good grasp on what he was doing. Because I was a mature student and he could tell I was serious, he gave me special treatment now and then, which I was very grateful for.
, and I returned to school fired up for Production 2 class. But this time I was armed with a screenplay I had written—a feature length film developed from Laura’s idea called Geeks & Goblins, Elves & Elliot.
I said, “I don’t think it’ll be that long. It’s pretty dialog heavy.” Dialog goes by faster on the screen rather than paragraphs of action descriptions.
I left Salt Lake Community College with an Associate degree. After a while I headed down to Utah Valley University and cherry-picked my own program from multiple departments: Digital Media—Cinematography, Theater, Communications—and left there with a Bachelor degree.
in the late 1990’s another momentous event had occurred . Computer technology caught up with me and inspired me to blow the dust off General Prophet Joseph Smith when music synthesizers became a staple in the music world. It occurred to me, I could orchestrate the whole damn thing and turn it into a real work of music instead of a patchwork of melodies, lyrics, and guitar or piano accompaniment.
One hundred years ago this month, astronomers discovered the universe.
Who hasn’t seen Hardware Wars, a ridiculously low budget satire of Star Wars that came out in the late 1970s? It was the first and arguably the most popular Star Wars spoof ever.
Vivaldi, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Queen.
Physicists are people, possibly slightly crazy, and usually incomprehensible when talking shop, who seek out laws of the universe that can explain and predict how the cosmos works. They use this thing called science to accomplish this feat.
The golden age of rock and roll was the ’60s and ’70s, with some spillage into the ’50s and ’80s. I declare it, so it must be true! Some of the greatest music of the century sprang into existence during those times.
“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.”