The Chapel
An On the Sun Media Production.
A love story. A memorial. A beginning.
In February 1956, a young architect named Dick Jessup built a chapel by hand in the Arizona high desert — on a cattle ranch outside Mayer, at the request of a man who had lost his son.
Months later, Dick married Marilyn Smith Orme at the altar he had built.
The chapel still stands.
The Chapel is the true story of three families — the Jessups, the Ormes, and the Smiths — whose lives converged in one of the most remote and beautiful corners of the American West. It is a film about what people build when they are grieving, and what grows from the ground they consecrate.
For Dick Jessup, the chapel was personal. He had first come to the Orme Ranch as a boy of ten, in hopes that the Arizona air would heal his chronic asthma. It did more than that. He gained a family — and in Morton Orme, something even harder to name. When Mort died in February 1955, Dick picked up his tools. The chapel was an act of devotion as much as architecture. What happened next was the best of all.
Spanning from Long Island to Arizona, from the 1930s to 1956, The Chapel traces Dick Jessup’s journey from a sickly boy sent west for his health to the quiet, 6’2″ architect who became the heart of the Orme Ranch — and the husband Marilyn didn’t know she was waiting for.
In development — production planned for Arizona, 2026–2027