"The Latter-day Saint story has to be in the top five story fascinations in American religious history. Mormonism is America's most rooted religion. Joseph Smith's great contribution is capturing a version of the American story and projecting it into the future." -- Martin Marty, director, Public Religion Project, University of Chicago Divinity SchoolThe American story. A complex interweaving of persecution and revolution, tragedy and triumph. They're all the ingredients Heidi Swinton found herself dealing with when she set out to tell the story of LDS Church founder Joseph Smith -- not to an audience of believers, but simply to those who would hear.
Two years and more than 30 drafts later, the tale has taken shape on film as a new two-hour documentary account of "the most successful American prophet we've ever had," said Pulitzer-prize winner Gordon Wood of Brown University.
"American Prophet: The Story of Joseph Smith" chronicles the early rise of Mormonism through a portrait of the "plowboy prophet" who "established a religion that has not only lasted but flourished and has grown to become the most powerful, uniquely American religion," said Wood, one of a stable of non-Mormon historians interviewed for the piece.
Scheduled to premiere locally on KBYU-TV, Channel 11, Sunday, Sept. 26 , at 8 p.m., the PBS special is part of the national Public Broadcasting System's "History's Best" series. Narrated by Gregory Peck, the visual portion of the story is told through a diverse series of paintings, lithographs, photos, drawings and video illustrating Smith, his followers and scenes from the early history of the LDS Church.
Swinton, a local author and screenwriter, first teamed with producer/director Lee Groberg to create the 1997 award-winning PBS special, "Trail of Hope," which chronicled the Mormons' mid-19th century migration west. The program shattered PBS fund-raising records and was ranked as the most-watched public television program that summer. Following the success of that effort, the duo approached PBS officials with a list of suggestions for other projects. When Groberg presented the ideas, they said, "Why don't you do something else on your church?' " So, that's what they set out to do.
"Trail of Hope is really the sequel to Joseph's story," Swinton said. "It's like we did the Star Wars thing, with the order mixed up."
Aired during the same summer the Mormon trek was being re-enacted by hundreds of pioneer wannabes, "Trail of Hope" had a timing advantage that piqued many viewers' curiosity because media coverage of the trek was intense. The Joseph Smith story doesn't have the same type of built-in immediacy.
Yet, Swinton says, the time seems right. LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley has had a strong profile in the media recently, church membership recently surpassed 10 million and scores of LDS temples are being built worldwide. As renewed interest in religion generally has scholars speculating about whether the world is in the midst of another "great awakening," many believe curiosity about the church has never been greater.
In that context, "America has no match for Joseph Smith in the drama of forming a new religious community," said Martin Marty, director of the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago. "No one matches him for the 6 million here about and for the 12 (million) and soon 20 million around the world who keep attesting him day by day and building community day by day."
Even so, "I'm sure there were points at which there might have been a little bit of skepticism (at PBS)" over the subject of Joseph Smith, Swinton says, noting the difficulty of portraying objectively a man who, during his lifetime, was so dearly loved by some and so deeply despised by others. But time and perspective have allowed the enduring nature of the work Smith established to speak for itself in many ways, she says, noting that it wasn't difficult to find historians who don't believe in Mormonism but can't discount its impact.
Interspersed with a patchwork of journal accounts by Smith's contemporaries is footage of scholars responding directly to Groberg's questions about the fast-growing, worldwide religious movement Smith founded and formed in less than 25 years. Swinton is convinced that "the story fell together with the strength of the scholars who see Joseph today through the historical perspective of what he accomplished during his lifetime . . . and as a significant contributor to the American experience.
"They talk about his influence economically, politically, socially, as a builder and an educator. Many of them are comfortable talking about his religious involvement and his teachings and what he understood, how he saw things.
"Joseph Smith has a credibility today that he didn't have during his lifetime with a lot of people. That's the piece these scholars bring to the puzzle that's never been there before. And we didn't have to drag that respect out of them -- they just said it. We didn't have to manipulate it at all, and that was a surprise to a lot of people."
A journalist by training, Swinton said she was determined to portray her subject in his richness as a real person, rather than as a one-dimensional icon outside the context of his times. "A lot of people said we should portray the kind of image you get with him riding his horse, leading the Nauvoo Legion." But Smith had "so many layers to his personality, you can't tell about one without understanding the others.
"Our goal was to be balanced, to present a story that gave recognition to the problems and difficulties and commentaries that were not always positive. And there was a lot of it to sift through. We've got statements in there that are negative about Joseph Smith. For some people that will be difficult, unless they recognize that this is a fullness of his story. No one's entire life runs down a track where everyone stands and salutes you."
Swinton, whose fourth great-grandfather was George A. Smith, a cousin to Joseph Smith, says her own LDS background left her wondering at times whether she could do the project justice for an audience "well beyond those who already know the story. In the church, it's been told over and over by believers to believers. But sometimes you had to say things that 'churchspeak' would say one way, but the broader audience wouldn't be able to hear and understand it."
Consequently, Swinton said, "I took a lot of long walks around the block trying to decide" how best to portray particular parts of the story.
The most delicate was polygamy, a doctrine Smith said was revealed to him by God and which he and selected other early church leaders practiced. The practice was discontinued by a subsequent prophet more than 100 years ago, but as one LDS scholar in the film acknowledges, "Folks came eventually to identify Latter-day Saints with polygamy in such a way that even today, sometimes the first question a Mormon man is asked is, 'How many wives do you have?' "
That tendency to equate an entire religious movement with one issue was difficult, Swinton says. "The problem I've had with people approaching Joseph Smith is that often they choose a part of the story and that becomes the whole story. We tried to allow the whole story to propel itself forward through many of those component parts."
While the PBS documentary will certainly be the most visible part of the story, Swinton says two hours of television didn't allow for all of the context available. As with the "Trail of Hope," Swinton has written a companion book for the series that incorporates its script, along with material that had to be edited out of the video production. The book was published by Shadow Mountain, an imprint of Deseret Book.
Produced through Vermont Public Television, the project was funded by a grant from the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation and is scheduled to air nationally Nov. 26 at 9 p.m. (EST).