A few days ago, Mark Goodman (the writer and director of Six Days in August) and I recorded a roughly twenty-minute interview with Martin Tanner up at KSL NewsRadio in Salt Lake City. Our interview will air tomorrow (Sunday) on his regular KSL program, Religion Today. But it’s already available in podcast form: “Six Days in August”
Yes, I’m going to remind you right now that the 2021 Interpreter Foundation theatrical movie Witnesses is available for your viewing, right now, at absolutely no charge. This will remain so until Thursday of next week, 10 October 2024. And I’m especially pleased to report that this availability extends to international viewers. I asked whether this was so and, thus far, I’ve heard from people who have been able to access it in Australia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Norway, Canada, and even Qatar (not to mention Alaska). Getting our films out to audiences beyond the borders of the United States has been a perennial challenge. You can watch Witnesses at https://vimeo.com/824199556/ecefc622ed.
And, yet again, I remind you of the “sneak peek” early screenings of Six Days in August that will be presented along Utah’s Wasatch Front at 7 PM this coming Monday evening. Cinemark theaters in Salt Lake City, Farmington, Ogden, Draper, American Fork, Provo, Sandy/Midvale, Orem, and West Jordan will participate in this event. If you wish, you can purchase tickets for these showings at Six Days in August – Early Access.
(Still photograph courtesy of gaffer Rhett Fernsten)
Now, you might well ask, if the Interpreter Foundation really wants its films to be watched by as many people as possible, why doesn’t it simply always make them available at no charge?
It is true that the Interpreter Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit foundation. Its officers are not paid. Its writers are not paid. My wife and I have not been paid and we will not be paid for our work — which, I modestly report, is considerable — as co-executive producers for Witnesses, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, and Six Days in August.
However, making movies takes money. Lots of it. Actors and crew need to be paid; it’s how they make their livings. They are professionals. Moreover, although our producer and writer/director and assistant director have been remarkably generous and frugal, they need to be paid; this is how they earn their daily bread. Costuming actors isn’t cheap. Transporting crew and actors to movie sets is expensive. Utah simply doesn’t look like the banks of the Mississippi or Kirtland or Palmyra or England; the landscape is wrong, the trees and the foliage are wrong. (So, while we filmed some interior and other scenes in Utah, we also worked in eastern Canada, New York, Kentucky, and Idaho.) Renting venues for filming is expensive. Hiring local and often non-Latter-day Saint crews is expensive.
Insurance and specialist legal advice are required. Obtaining the right equipment is expensive, as is regularizing the sound and the color between different individual cameras and microphones, editing, creating and incorporating the soundtrack, publicizing the film when it’s complete, creating websites and trailers and posters, and on and on and on.
When people have given money to Witnesss and Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon and Six Days in August, we’ve always made it clear to them that the money they’ve given isn’t an investment. They won’t be reaping a profit. They won’t be seeing their money again.
It would be a rather different matter, of course, if our goal were to make only a single film. We could simply accumulate the funds to make it and then release it at no charge. But that isn’t how we conceive what we’re doing.
Our model is something like the Perpetual Emigration Fund or, more recently, the Perpetual Education Fund. Money that came in from Witnesses and Undaunted (over and above the expenses that needed to be paid) has gone toward Six Days in August. And our plan is that any money that comes in above expenses from Six Days in August will go toward an accompanying docudrama — for which we’ve already done about a half dozen interviews with historians and for which we’ve already been creating video footage along the way — that, we hope, will follow it in something like a year, as well as toward yet another freestanding film project on the same scale (which we haven’t yet identified).
That’s an additional reason for our hoping that you will go to see Six Days in August for yourselves, and that you will encourage (and even take) family, friends, and neighbors to see it. Beyond the value of the film itself — we hope and believe that Latter-day Saints (and perhaps others) will find it both informative and testimony-building — we want it to do well enough financially that we can continue with further filmmaking.
The opening weekend of a film is especially important in the movie theater ecosystem. (Curiously, under the arcane rules of the movie industry, our two “sneak peeks” — the past ones on 26 September and the ones on Monday — apparently count toward opening weekend figures.) If a movie does well on its opening weekend, that gives its distribution efforts enhanced persuasive power with additional theaters and it assures a movie’s continuing presence in the theaters where it opened. Six Days in August opens on Thursday evening, 10 October. It will continue over the following weekend and for an undetermined number of weeks thereafter. Our window is, we calculate, rather small, because the big holiday movies from Hollywood will begin to be released in not too many weeks from now. (I began seeing Christmas-themed commercials on television already in mid-August.) That will put pressure on theaters to find screens for them, and movies that haven’t done well, or that (as all movies eventually do) have begun to fade, will necessarily surrender screens to the new potential hit films.
So we ask you to see Six Days in August early. In fact, rather in the manner of a classic Chicago political machine mobilizing its voters, we would love it if you were to see our film not only early but often. Take other people. If you feel that you can, speak highly of it to other people. (If you don’t feel that you can, please forget that you ever saw it.) Recommend Six Days in August on social media. Encourage others to go. Spread the word. On a very basic level, if we want to encourage good Latter-day Saint cinema, we have to support it. We have to demonstrate that there is enough of a market for it that it’s viable. Are we content to let our faith, our church, its history, and our way of life always be portrayed by such works as September Dawn, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Under the Banner of Heaven, Heretic, and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City? I certainly hope not!
Please go to the official website of Six Days in August to find a place near you where the film will be playing. Buy tickets there. If it’s not playing near you, please locate the button on the website and request that it do so. (The request will take only a few seconds.) Invite friends and neighbors to request it, as well. We take such requests very seriously. We will make every effort to get the movie near those who want to see it.
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