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In Defense of My Friends

In Defense of My Friends

Last updated on: June 11, 2025 at 1:19 pm by Dan Peterson

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In Defense of My Friends 2025-06-11T13:19:19-06:00 Dan Peterson

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At Lake Atitlán, in Guatemala, which some scholars have identified as the Book of Mormon’s “Waters of Mormon.” From left to right: Larry Ainsworth (a member of Interpreter’s board of directors), Brant Gardner (a noted scholar of the Book of Mormon and now an Interpreter editor), Steve Densley (Interpreter’s executive vice president), and an unidentified vagrant who photobombed the scene and then escaped, running and hopping and laughing maniacally.

An important new entry in an important series of blog posts has just gone up on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “The Heartland Versus Mesoamerica Part 9: Population Density and Social Complexity,” by Brant A. Gardner.

Three men in a river, on the set of the Interpreter Foundation’s “Witnesses” film project early in the filming process at Genesee Country Village, in New York: From left to right, Russell Richins (producer), James Jordan (assistant director), and Mark Goodman (director)

(Still photograph courtesy of gaffer Rhett Fernsten)

“A lie,” Mark Twain (along with a number of others) is incorrectly alleged to have said, “can travel all around the world before the truth has got its boots on.”

I doubt that the handful of merry madcaps over at the Peterson Obsession Board who have dedicated their lives to lying about me and all my evil but ridiculous works have, even remotely, such reach. Still, though, and despite the fact that I do so without any real hope of curing them of their willful delusions, I think it occasionally worthwhile to openly contradict some of their false allegations. I do it again today:

Yesterday, in a blog entry entitled “Some Good News for the Interpreter Foundation,” I indicated that Interpreter’s 2024 theatrical film Six Days in August had just won three 2025 Telly Awards — silver awards in the categories “Narrative Film” and “Historical Film” and the bronze Telly in the “People’s Choice” category. (A news release about the prizes has now appeared on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Six Days in August Wins Three Global Media Awards.”)

I knew, of course, that my mentioning these awards would be met, at the Obsession Board, with mockery and denigration. It was a certain as the rising of the Sun in the morning. Utterly and entirely predictable. It’s what they do.

They’ve pointed out that the Telly isn’t an Academy Award, that Tellys aren’t presented at the Festival de Cannes — I was shocked to learn this — and that, after all, we didn’t win gold. They’ve also gone on to allege that we simply bought the honors and that, accordingly, they’re not only meaningless but actually, properly understood, quite embarrassing.

Personally, I knew nothing of the Telly Awards — had never so much as heard of them — until Witnesses won a bronze Telly a while back. I learned then that, if we wanted a statuette representing a win in the competition, we would need to buy it. I also knew that the Interpreter Foundation hadn’t submitted either Witnesses or Six Days in August for consideration for a Telly, and I knew that we hadn’t paid any submission fee. (As president of the Foundation, I have full access to our financial records.) So I wrote to our friends and colleagues at RedBrick Film Works. Had they submitted Six Days in August for consideration? Had they paid a submission fee?

It turns out that, yes, the folks at RedBrick Film Works had paid an entry fee for the Telly Awards competition. and that, yes, they had submitted the film for consideration. It’s their industry, after all. They’re professional filmmakers. They have a right to submit a film for a possible award, and an interest in doing so.

But it needs to be clearly understood that, at least according to our colleagues at RedBrick, the mere act of submitting a film for consideration and paying the accompanying fee does not, in any way, guarantee winning an award: “We (as in the RedBrick contingent) have submitted films in the past to various festivals/awards and gotten nothing in return (including the Tellys).”

It also needs to be clearly understood that, as one of the RedBrick folks informed me,

Paying to enter is the case with 99% of all industry awards and festivals (and not just in the film industry). In fact, the only award I am aware of in the film biz that does not require an entry fee is the Academy Awards. Even the Golden Globes and the Emmys require an entry fee. There is nothing out of the ordinary — or untoward — about the process.

I also looked up what the Telly Awards people had to say about themselves:

The Telly Awards honor excellence in video and television across all screens. Founded in 1979 to honor local, regional and cable television commercials, with non-broadcast video and television programming added soon after, the award has evolved with the rise of digital video to include branded content, documentary, social media, immersive and more. The Telly Awards today celebrates the best work in the video medium in an exciting new era of the moving image on and offline.

The Telly Awards annually showcases the best work created within television and across video, for all screens. Receiving over 13,000 entries globally from 6 continents and all 50 states, Telly Award winners represent work from some of the most respected advertising agencies, television stations, production companies and publishers from around the world. The Telly Awards recognizes work that has been created on behalf of a client, for a specific brand and/or company (including your own) or self-directed as a creative endeavor.

So I’m going to push back a bit against efforts to devalue the recognition that has come to our friends at RedBrick Film Works. It’s one thing to express consistent contempt for me and all of my rotten, immoral, mean-spirited, and ludicrous deeds. I obviously deserve such scorn. If I may, however, I want to register an objection to the breeziness with which the Usual Suspects over at the Obsession Board casually seek to inflict collateral damage upon others, for the crime of simply being associated with me.

I’ve heard, by the way, that our friends at Emmaus Road Productions also won a silver Telly for their film The Good Samaritan. I hope that’s the case. And, if so, these awards, taken together, mark a good development for Latter-day Saint filmmaking. And also, if so, it won’t be the first award that they’ve captured. (And thereby hangs a tale, to be told someday.)

In the meantime, I encourage my Malevolent Stalker and his Mini-Me and the small band of their disciples there to submit their own feature films for quality awards in the movie industry. If they win anything — even something so lowly and contemptible as a mere bronze Telly — I promise to report on it here.

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