When "Brigham Young" had its world premiere in Salt Lake City on Aug. 23, 1940, it was no small event.
Most of the film's stars - Dean Jagger, Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Mary Astor, producer Darryl F. Zanuck, etc. - were flown in, took part in a parade and had dinner with local officials before introducing the movie in no less than five of the seven Salt Lake theaters where it was screened.Those local officials included LDS Church leaders - including President Heber J. Grant and his counselors J. Reuben Clark and David O. McKay - along with Gov. Henry H. Blood, Mayor Ab Jenkins and just about everybody who was anybody in Salt Lake City at the time. (President Grant said, "The show will prove to be a friendmaker.")
A big-budget movie ($2.5 million, no small amount in 1940 dollars), "Brigham Young" was seen by some 9,000 people that first night and went on to break house records set the previous year by "Gone With the Wind."
The Deseret News published a special 14-page section celebrating the film's world premiere in Salt Lake City, loaded with stories about the making of the film, which was published the day before the premiere, Aug. 22, 1940.
Among the facts (no doubt supplied by Fox publicists, so accept them at your own risk) about "Brigham Young" gleaned from those articles (as well as stories in the Aug. 23, 1940, edition of the Deseret News and the September 1940 issue of the LDS magazine Improvement Era):
- Salt Lake City, circa 1847, was re-created for the film in Lone Pine, Calif., with 55 buildings constructed over 20 acres of ground, complete with streets and gutters. Cost: $85,000.
- Scenes of Nauvoo and Carthage, Ill., were filmed on the Fox back lot in Beverly Hills, with $40,000 worth of sets replicating Brigham Young's home, the Nauvoo Temple, the Carthage jail, etc.
- There were some scenes filmed in Utah - down south in Kanab. In addition to Lone Pine, other outdoor sequences were filmed in Big Bear, Calif.
- Location shooting of the pioneer trek, with studio-built prairie schooners, covered 2,400 miles - almost twice the ground covered by the real pioneers nearly 100 years before.
- The studio hired 500 extras, 300 horses, 124 head of oxen and constructed 300 covered wagons (at a cost of $300 each) for the filming of the Mormon pioneer migration. (There were literally thousands of extras used in the course of filming.)
- The movie company also scaled Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the United States, with 20 tons of equipment and 300 actors and technicians. Plus a couple of Lone Pine veterinarians for the animals.
- A snow scene shot in Lone Pine under a blazing sun that brought temperatures up to 111 used the same snow machines that created ice for Sonja Henie's ice-skating pictures. The "Brigham Young" actors persevered, chattering their teeth while discreetly wiping the sweat from their brows. The most ironic moment came as cast members had to "warm themselves" before a roaring fire.
- Veteran character actor Moroni Olsen, who played Dr. Willard Richards, was the only prominent Utah performer in the movie. However, Dean Jagger's stand-in, Len Harbertson, was also a Utahn. Both men were natives of Ogden.
- Children residing near the Lone Pine set were encouraged to gather crickets from the fields for use in the film by chief property master Abe Steinberg, who had been told by adult residents that the insects were scarce in that region. So, Steinberg offered $3 per quart - and soon local kids were descending on the set with milk bottles, tin cans and paper sacks filled with crickets. One complaint: Light sleepers in camp were kept awake by the moonlight chirps of the collected critters.
- During the filming of the famed "crickets and gulls" sequence for the film's big climax, two starving children - played by 11-year-old Dickie Moore and 6-year-old Ann Todd - were to be shown eating crickets. The young actors were provided with licorice to simulate the action, but instead actually grabbed up some crickets and put them in their mouths! When director Henry Hathaway saw them, he shouted, "Cut!" and approached the kids. "We decided we wouldn't fake," said young Moore. "Tyrone Power doesn't," he added, citing an instance when the star declined a stunt rider for a horseback scene.
- Hathaway was perplexed by one element of the "crickets and gulls" scene, the moment when sea gulls fly en masse into the fields and eat the marauding crickets. The field scenes were a snap, but what about the sky being filled with gulls? In what was described as "miraculous," reel life imitated real life. Hathaway was filming a romantic scene with Power and Darnell in Lone Pine when the crew began shouting, trying to alert the director that thousands of sea gulls were flying out of the north. Hathaway turned his cameras on them and used the multitude of birds blackening the sky in his film. (Later, he discovered that the gulls were migrating from a rookery at Mono Lake, north of the Lone Pine site, to the ocean.)
- As reported in the Aug. 12, 1972, Church News, Dean Jagger eventually joined the Mormon Church - some 32 years after portraying "Brigham Young." He was the only member of the movie's cast to do so. (He died in 1991 at the age of 87.)