(Originally published in 2010 on StandardBlogs)
A lifetime of activity in the LDS Church provides more than just an average acquaintance with “The Pearl of Great Price.” You become very well versed in the urban legends of Mormonism. One of the favorite urban legends I heard growing up in Southern California LDS wards was that the late, great director Cecil B. DeMille (“The 10 Commandments”) wanted to make a movie about the Book of Alma in “The Book of Mormon.”
If you’ve never heard of Cecil B. DeMille, that’s OK. In the last couple generation or so, I’ve heard a variation on the DeMille/Alma story. It’s actually the great, living director Steven Spielberg who wants to make a movie based on the book of Alma. If you haven’t heard of Spielberg, maybe in 10 years it will be director Peter Jackson who wants to Alma on the big screen?
The only big-screen film version of “The Book of Mormon” I’ve seen is the low-budget, really bad “Book of Mormon Movie Part I,” which should have been subtitled “Beach Blanket Lehi” for all its depth. True confession: I own that film, and have watched it a few times. The dialogue is so bad that I have a hard time believing that my church would have wanted the production company to make the film. I guess that means perhaps that “The Book of Mormon” is in the public domain, like other classics such as Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” or George A. Romero’s film “Night of the Living Dead.” That must be the reason so many cheap cartoonish versions of Alma are available through Living Scriptures, Liken the Scriptures or the LDS Church Distribution Center.
Back to Mormon urban legends: There used to be a fun website that tried to decipher all the Mormon legends out there. The site no longer exists so I won't mention its name. It did not get them all, since there was no listing for DeMille, Spielberg, Alma, etc., but the site claimed an answer to the big “is Alice Cooper a Mormon” debate. I’ve been hearing this one since I was old enough to know who Alice Cooper was. The answer, according to the site was … a sort of yes. You see Cooper, whose real name is Vincent Furnier, has a dad named Ether Moroni. With a name like that, right … RIGHT. The Furniers belong to an obscure Mormon castoff sect called The Bickertonite Church, also known as The Church of Christ. The church claims The Book of Mormon as its own scripture.
There’s very few members of this “Mormon” church, and I doubt Cooper attends, but dad Ether Moroni was alleged to be an elder in the Bickertonites and, get this, the defunct site said Cooper’s grandad was an apostle in The Bickertonite Church. Now that’s a religious pedigree to be proud of!
There were more questions answered on the site. You "found out" if Elvis read “The Book of Mormon” or if the late LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball was the model for “Star Wars’” Yoda.
-- Doug Gibson
The Bickertonites are headquartered in Pennsylvania and are, in fact, the third largest Restoration church in numbers.
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