Mountain Meadows movie being filmed
"September Dawn" is being touted as "a love story set during a tense encounter between a wagon train of settlers that faces off against a renegade Mormon group." Starring Jon Voight and Lolita Davidovich, the project began filming earlier this month in Alberta and is scheduled to shoot through mid-September.
Voight, the Academy Award-winning actor whose recent film credits include "Ali," "Pearl Harbor," "The Rainmaker" and "Mission: Impossible" is cast as the leader of the renegade party, with Davidovich playing the role of a wagon train member who stands up to the attackers.
Christopher Cain, who directed "Young Guns" and the "Magnificent Seven" TV series, is writer and director for the project, with a budget of about $11 million.
Few additional details about the film are known, including whether Cain based his story on historical accounts of the massacre or whether he drew the details from a spate of recent books and films about the event.
Kathleen McInnis, publicity director for "September Dawn," told the Deseret Morning News that Cain and other production people are "so busy with what's going on on the set right now, there's no time at this point" to answer in-depth questions about research for the film's screenplay or what sources were used in writing it. Such queries "may have to wait for a few weeks until we can get towards the end of production."
LDS Church officials, including President Gordon B. Hinckley, have worked with state and local authorities and historians in recent years to assuage lingering animosity and memorialize the victims. The church erected a monument overlooking the site of the massacre in 1999 and held a dedication ceremony to which descendants of those involved were invited. It also reburied bones of 29 victims unearthed during construction of the monument in a separate ceremony.
"All who knew firsthand about what occurred here are long since gone. Let the book of the past be closed. Let peace come into our hearts," President Hinckley told participants.
The massacre has been written about countless times by a variety of authors with a wide spectrum of viewpoints — many of them critical of church leaders — and has been the subject of renewed interest by scholars in the past decade. Several major works addressing it have been published recently, including one by local author Will Bagley, another by investigative reporter Sally Denton and a novel by Judith Freeman.
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