PHOTO ESSAY

It is only a building in Evermore Park in Pleasant Grove Utah, but when we walked in, suddenly we were in Nazi Germany. Noted film maker T.C. Christensen and crew had transformed the building interior into a train station, with Nazi flags flying ominously, a Fahrkarten (ticket booth), a touch of fog in the air, people dressed like they walked right out of the 1930’s and men in Nazi uniforms.

It was honestly a bit chilling to resurrect the Nazi soldiers with their guns, surveying the people in the train station.

T.C. is making a film called 1939, that is the story of Norm Siebold who had the momentous task of gathering the missionaries out of Nazi Germany just as the borders closed when Germany attacked Poland. Mission President M. Douglas Wood heard that during the evacuation a number of missionaries became stranded along the Dutch border. They were penniless, unable to cross to safety, and unable to return to Germany. He assigned Norm to get them all to safety as soon as possible.

According to Terry Montague, who researched Norm’s story for her book, “Mine Angels Round About: West German Mission Evacuation of 1939, “Norm accomplished his mission by riding trains along the Dutch border. At the cavernous train stations, he climbed atop baggage carts and whistled the first four notes of the hymn, Do What Is Right.”

“He found the missionaries a few at a time. Together they headed north to the border of Denmark, sometimes sneaking aboard over-crowded cars. They slept little and had almost nothing to eat. They were arrested, interrogated, and threatened on several occasions and put off trains more than a dozen times.”

It’s a thrilling story, but something about it specifically talks to T.C. and that is the miracles that marked the finding of these missionaries and getting every one of them to safety.

One day, T.C., who is noted as a gifted Director of Photography, and had that credit on scores of movies, finally decided to make his own films, instead of shooting everybody else’s. It was a turning point in his life. That day had come. He saw that he wasn’t getting any younger, and if there was a time to make that leap, it was now. Since then, he’s made seven movies including, 17 Miracles, Ephraim’s Rescue, The Cokeville Miracle, Love Kennedy, and The Fighting Preacher. His stories are particularly about Latter-day Saints, and he likes to dig out moments in our shared history that deserve a larger telling.

What he looks for is not only a good story, but one that can be shaped and structured into a film. His favorite part, by far, “is representing some kind of miracle.” He said, “When we did 17 Miracles, I figured it out. I think we shot for 19 days and we filmed something like 30 miracles. That is about two every day. The crew would show up and ask, ‘What miracle are we shooting today?’

Extra meaning was infused into the set of 1939 because many of the extras are descendants of the American missionaries who were struggling to get out of Germany. It is the kind of touch that T.C. is so good at. Norm Siebold’s grandson was in the mix of people in the train station, playing the role of one who hoped to get out of Germany.

T.C. said, “I think one of my gratifying, most favorite parts of this process is when people come out of the theater and say, “How did I not know that story? I love that story and I never heard it before. I never read it. Nobody told it to me.”

“When I watch one of our finished films,” said T.C., “I don’t watch the screen. I’ve seen it 1,000 times. Instead, I watch the audience and note when a film really starts to grab people. When I shot Testaments for Kieth Merrill, it was when the Savior began to perform miracles. I realized, I think there’s an important idea there.”

T.C. said, “I think the reason that most films we see don’t include miracles is that directors have come to count on special effects and give imagination to a superpower world. The miracles we talk about are 10 times more powerful. I don’t like to go to superhero movies where so much is fake, and not based in human emotion. They tell the same story over and over again.”

T.C. Christensen’s films are heavily researched. For The Fighting Preacher, he was able to use the help of Rand Packer’s book, and for 1939, Terry Montague’s book provided a rich background.

T.C., who is funny, claims, “It would be too big of a thing to write these scripts without this help, and I am basically a lazy person. I am too lazy to create a film that demands all that organization and lost days.” He says that in the midst of shooting this 1939 film night and day on a highly organized schedule.

Why don’t we have more Latter-day Saint film makers using our rich history to make movies? T.C. said there’s no question why we don’t. It is because film making on a smaller scale is a very difficult business model. He has been able to create seven feature films with enough funding to go from one to another, so he hasn’t been stuck in that situation.

In a tense business, T.C. also has learned how to maintain a good atmosphere on his shoots.

He can also inspire all these good, Latter-day Saints with such good, light-filled countenances, to change into Nazis as soon as the camera rolls.

The extras on the set know their places.

The Nazi’s are ready to terrorize the crowd.

You’d think you were in a Nazi train station, if you didn’t see the camera.

T.C. instructs the film’s star, Paul Wuthrich, where in the station he is to climb up and begin whistling, as if he were finding the missionaries. Paul also played Joseph Smith in an earlier film called Witnesses.

The man who plays Norm is holding a German newspaper from that time period.

While the filmmakers make the set ready, a Nazi reads a German newspaper.

The room is fogged for an extra measure of verisimilitude.

Soon Norm Siebold (played by Paul Wuthrich) will begin his whistling, The hymn becomes a secret code that the Nazi’s won’t notice, but a Latter-day Saint missionary will.

People walking around the station don’t really notice what is happening, but a familiar Latter-day Saint tune is a perfect signal.

Soon, two missionaries are found in the train station. For those eager to see this film, there is unfortunately not a date for release yet. Since COVID, T.C. hasn’t put a film in the theater, so he has another one, already finished, which will be released earlier, closer to the time of the Olympics. This one is about Alma Richards, the gangly, high jumper from Payson, Utah, who won the gold medal. Stay tuned.