A new film and our forthcoming film

I was very pleased to read this positive review — it’s the only review that I’ve seen, thus far — of The Other Side of Heaven 2:

“Review: Gently powerful ‘Other Side of Heaven 2’ shows a onetime LDS missionary facing new challenges as mission president in Tonga”

I haven’t yet seen the film myself, but I may do so tomorrow.  Both because I’m interested and because of my connection to the man behind it:  Mitch Davis wrote the initial script for our Witnesses film project.

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Incidentally, there’s something else that I should probably say about that film project:

There’s a fellow who has devoted considerable effort to defaming and demonizing me over the past decade and a half.  I call him my “Malevolent Stalker.”  (He attacks me from a position of deep anonymity.)  He’s a clever boy — well, of course, he’s no longer young anymore, since he’s been at this particular gig for approximately fifteen years — and sometimes even I am impressed by the cunning cleverness with which he cherry picks and twists and distorts and consistently misreads things that I’ve done and said.  In order to find material that he can exploit against me, he’s located decades-old second-hand accounts about my days as an unmarried student in Israel, combed through IRS records, and burrowed into my then pre-teen son’s Christmas wish list on Amazon.com.  To me, anyway, such obsessive behavior is unspeakably bizarre.

There’s another fellow, though, a relatively late and distinctly less talented arrival, whom I call my “Mini-Stalker.”  He plainly wants to grow up to be a Malevolent Stalker in his own right.  Accordingly, like the real Stalker, he posts anonymously.  But he’s considerably lazier than his hero.  He simply makes things up out of thin air — inventing fictional trips to Israel with me, for example, or creating fictional but lunatic quotations and attributing them to me.  It’s the same malice, obviously, but it lacks the Malevolent Stalker’s craftiness and guile.

One of his more recent stunts has been to claim inside information about our Witnesses film project, alleging that it’s a fiasco and a failure and that our fundraising for it has had disastrously poor results.  He claims to have informants within the Interpreter Foundation and offers at least one very specific figure about our finances.

Somebody is lying.  If he really has one or more “informants,” he’s the victim of deception.  He’s been lied to.  I know every single person — there aren’t that many — who is involved in the Witnesses project.  I know every single person who knows the financial specifics.  There are, perhaps, four.  They would never have told him that our fundraising has been poor, because it hasn’t been.  It has, in fact, been extremely encouraging, for which I’m grateful.

If I had to place a bet about who is lying, though, my money would be on the Mini-Stalker himself.  I doubt that any “informant”exists.  Not even a bogus one.  Lying is the Mini-Stalker’s métier, his modus operandi, his weapon of choice.

Members of our team have been scouting out potential filming locations in eastern North America and in Utah.  We’ve been reviewing and tightening up our script.  We’ll soon begin to consider casting decisions.  I’m very excited about how things are going.  I just wish that I had more time, personally, to devote to the project.  However, I don’t want to be a bottleneck or an obstacle, so there will be times, for instance, when I’m simply not going to be able to be there for the filming.