It's always wonderful to see a little film--one that was someone's brainchild, that was a labor of love, that was made on a shoestring and produced on a prayer--succeed.
September Dawn is one such film:
Today marks the national release of "September Dawn," a film adapted from her second book, of the same name, and for which she wrote the screenplay. It was [Carole] Schutter's first effort at a screenplay, and she says the process of turning the script into a major film - "September Dawn" stars Academy Award-winner Jon Voight, and also features Lolita Davidovich, Dean Cain and Terence Stamp - was a remarkably easy process. Even raising money was a relative breeze. In an industry where screenwriters measure their piles of rejected, reworked scripts in yards and financing is routinely excruciating, Schutter's experience does border on divine intervention.Schutter recites the statistic that just over 1 percent of screenwriters ever get a movie made. People she has come to know in the industry, she says, "have told me my story is a miracle - that somebody who has no idea how to write a screenplay gets a movie made."
September Dawn is the beneficiary of more than one sort of serendipity. Schutter had wanted to write a story "about a woman traveling by stagecoach across the West, who is attacked by Mormons disguised as American Indians." When she began doing research, she discovered that she didn't have to go any further than the facts of U.S. history to find a true version of what she had imagined would be a wild, created tale. She set her story in 1857, at the moment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which Mormons are thought to have massacred a group of settlers in the guise of Native Americans.
The jury is out on the quality of the film -- but the best way to decide about that is to see it. September Dawn opened in theaters across the nation on Friday.