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.
