Motion pictures came to the Mormon region just about as soon as they went anywhere else, with probably Utah’s first movie theater opening in 1905. Within 5 or 6 years thereafter, Mormons in Utah were beginning to make very brief motion pictures of Utah scenery, and what might be considered primitive documentaries or newsreel subjects (e.g., scenes from a general conference, a tour of Temple Square).

Mormons hit the big screen first in an unflattering way, with movies like The Flower of the Mormon City, Trapped by the Mormons, The Danites, The Mormon, and The Mountain Meadows Massacre appearing in 1911 or 1912. Broad interest in such movies perhaps spurred the Church to want to counter their negative image by presenting more positive ones – or, perhaps, as is often the case, the Church simply seized on new technology and new entertainment forms as new ways to present the Church message.

In any case, the Church participated in the production of the 1912-13 movie One Hundred Years of Mormonism, a visual depiction of the early events in Church history. Not everyone was satisfied with the result, but Church members, thrilled to see their own story on the screen in a form they recognized, were ecstatic. Despite its enthusiastic reception, we weren’t very careful … One Hundred Years of Mormonism was essentially lost, with no known print extant, until about 20 years ago someone in the Church archives recognized a miscatalogued piece of film as being a few minutes of One Hundred Years of Mormonism.

Hard on the heels of that movie, another Mormon film, with the backing of the Church itself, went into production. Shirl and Chester (he went by “Chet”) Clawson, often referred to as Mormonism’s pioneer moviemakers, began work on a movie of the Book of Mormon. Realizing what an enormous project that was, or perhaps recognizing that several shorter films might be more profitable than one very long one, the Clawson brothers decided to product the story of 1 Nephi, under the title Life of Nephi.

They hired William A. Morton, of the Church’s general Sunday School board, to write the scenario. When they couldn’t pay him the contracted fee of $400, however, Morton assumed ownership of the scenario and assembled his own production team. The Life of Nephi was first shown to the public in October 1915, again to more or less enthusiasm by the Latter-day Saints, but with a limited audience otherwise.

And just as happened to One Hundred Years of Mormonism, once Life of Nephi finished its public run, all prints of the movie disappeared. Vanished. Gone. But in another shared feature of One Hundred Years of Mormonism, Life of Nephi somehow survived, in part – in 2002, another archivist, examining the contents of a battered suitcase, discovered 39 glass slides bearing hand-painted stills from Life of Nephi, apparently used by William A. Morton in giving illustrated lectures on the Book of Mormon.

I’ve never seen a full set of the surviving images – I don’t know whether they have all been published. I’ve found two of the slides online:

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The filming angles and especially the costumes are distinctive, and it isn’t difficult to recognize other images from the movie when you see them. And you do see them. Morton not only used bits of his movie to illustrate lectures, he used stills from that movie in other tellings of the story of the Book of Mormon. Below are some samples of those images – without having seen the 39 glass slides I don’t know whether these black and white prints are duplicates of images in that set, or whether any of these images adds one more bit to what survives.

We’re a record-keeping people, all right, but we haven’t always been very broadminded in how we define the “records” of our life as a people. It wasn’t until about 1962 that someone contacted Joseph Fielding Smith, then Church Historian, with the revolutionary suggestion that the Archives collect and preserve some of the many film strips and movies then being produced by the Church. Bless his heart – President Smith immediately grasped the importance of preserving those films, and instantly put together a team, and found financing for them, and since that date our motion picture heritage has been preserved just about as carefully as our paper and ink heritage.

But no one thought to do that back in 1915. We’re lucky to have even these images from that early filming of the Book of Mormon story.

(Images here are not in narrative order of the Book of Mormon.)

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Wedding Scene in the Valley of Lemuel

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Lehi and His Family in the Wilderness
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Arrival in the Promised Land

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Finding the Liahona
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Sons of Lehi Drawing Lots

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Laman and Lemuel Seized Nephi and Bound Him Hand and Foot
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The Separation

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The Sons of Lehi Return with the Brass Plates
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Burial of Ishmael

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Nephi’s Vision

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Lehi Relating His Dream to His Family

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