The Lost Book of Mormon by Avi Steinberg

Author:Avi Steinberg [Steinberg, Avi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53570-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Later, in our hotel lobby, Jon told me about how close he’d once come to getting shark-attacked. The shark had just kind of bumped him, given him a little head butt but nothing more. These encounters were not uncommon among serious surfers, he told me. Still, Jon knew the odds were against him. He sighed. “That may be the closest I’ll ever get.”

With some rare downtime to kill, I wandered over to the front desk and asked to see the Mel Gibson suite. To my dismay, the request was denied. But as I returned to my room on the third floor, downcast and cursing my fortune, I came upon Miguel, a friendly bellhop, just a few paces from my intended destination. I mustered up the courage and pointed to the plaque on the suite’s door and, in a Spanish-sounding dialect of my own making, asked if he might show me in. I produced whatever amount of currency seemed appropriate, then added some more, and conveyed it to Miguel, attempting a nonsleazy nonchalance which might suggest that bribery was just part of my normal, gentlemanly modus operandi. Everything about his swift reciprocity indicated that Miguel had done this before.

Mel Gibson had apparently camped out at our hotel during the months he was on location filming his Maya slasher flick, Apocalypto. As it turned out, the movie was of special interest to Book of Mormon buffs. Many bloggers, especially the cinematically inclined, regarded the film as an unofficial Book of Mormon movie—and what’s more, the best one out there. (Corianton: A Story of Unholy Love, a very racy Book of Mormon movie from the 1930s, before Hollywood standards existed, is hard to find and arguably not very good.) For today’s fans, Gibson’s aesthetic has exactly what Book of Mormon films sorely need. A post on an online discussion forum summed up this view in its subject line: Why Does the Church Always Produce Crappy Films? “As missionaries,” the contributor wrote, “we used to have only about three or four Godawful VHS movies to show … I was always embarrassed to show those to anybody. They sucked ass.”

Why, he asked, couldn’t there be a good Book of Mormon film like Mel Gibson’s The Passion?

Another guy, identified only by an avatar of Darth Vader, concurred that The Passion of the Christ was a great film. “I know it was anti-Semitic at times,” he conceded, “and Mel Gibson is a total prick, but that film moved me like no other religious movie has. But there is no way an active Mormon could have made that film.” But Apocalypto, which he described as a movie “about the Lamanites in Mesoamerica,” that was a brilliant movie. “But once again, there is no way a Mormon could make a Book of Mormon–themed film as good as Apocalypto.” The consensus among Book of Mormon film geeks seemed to be that Mel Gibson had come as close as anyone to making a believable film about Book of Mormon people. This had certainly been Maggie’s view when I’d asked her about it the day before.

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