Latter-Day screens: a history of Mormons and the movies.

Demographically outnumbered by Catholics, Baptists, and United Methodists, (1) and internally fragmented into nearly fifty denominations, (2) followers of Mormonism, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, or "the Church"), (3) might be said to exert more direct media influence than any other religious group in the United States. One significant measure of Mormonism's new self-confidence and continuing cinematic savvy appears in the emergence of indie films specifically targeted at a LDS audience, with significant crossover potential as well.

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The broader implications of these developments lie in the stereotyping of Mormons as white, conservative Christian others; a secret kingdom of repressed violence and incestuous sexuality living in the heart of Middle America. Such otherness has clearly characterized the history of Mormonism since its founder Joseph Smith Jr. claimed to have divinely received and translated The Book of Mormon in 1830. The subsequent persecution of Smith and his followers reached its zenith in the Missouri governor's official "Order of Extermination" in 1838 and Smith's subsequent violent death at the hands of a mob, the invasive Utah War of 1857-58, and two decades of Congressional anti-polygamy legislation that precipitated Church bankruptcy upon passage of the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act. (4) Whatever the theological differences between Mormonism and mainstream Protestant and Catholic denominations, LDS otherness appears to have been defined around specific points of cultural negotiation and contention. Mormons have been simultaneously feared and envied on the basis of a perceived sense of group cohesion extending to the point of tribal and even conspiratorial tightness.

Among the earliest Hollywood films, explicitly anti-Mormon themes and titles coincided with a rising tide of anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and anti-Catholic bias that found another counterpart in stricter Jim Crow laws and institutionalized lynching in the Southern U.S. Furthermore, Utah was not formally admitted into the Union until 1896, six years after LDS President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto that renounced plural marriage "for the current dispensation." (5) Popular magazines still discussed "The Mormon Problem"--specifically migration into Mexico in numbers sufficient enough to possibly justify the establishment of an independent LDS state that could legalize polygamy. (6)

Moreover, the literary precedents for anti-Mormonism had already been set by Robert Louis Stevenson's short novel The Dynamiter (1885) and the first of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes murder mysteries, "A Study in Scarlet" (1887). The popular western writer Zane Grey's 1912 novel Riders of the Purple Sage was so full of references to Mormon sexual bondage and political ambition that Church President Heber J. Grant denounced it publicly. In 1912 American producers released a Danish feature titled A Victim of the Mormons, (1910, by the Nordisk Film Kompagni) which had done well in Britain. Despite official LDS protests the film was quickly followed by The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1912), which referenced the 1857 Church-ordered or inspired butchery of some 120 disarmed men, women, and children passing through Utah on their way to California. The commercial success of both movies inspired a trend that went on to include The Danites (1912, by Francis Boggs), The Mormon (1912, by Allan Duran), A Mormon Maid (1917, by Robert Z. Leonard), and a film version of Riders of the Purple Sage (1918, by Frank Lloyd). One of the last, silent examples of the genre, Trapped by the Mormons (1922, by H.B. Parkinson) was a British production that has been recently remade in a campy version by Cherry Red Productions titled Trapped by the Mormons (2004, by Ian Allen). Mormon film historians have credited this rash of cinematic propaganda to "heightened sensitivity to the potential of film for reaching, educating and influencing vast audiences," (7) to the point where Church authorities openly discussed the issue at their 1912 general conference. In any case, the trend appears to have spent itself by the end of the 1930s, as did anti-Mormon sentiment in western Europe.

At this point, Church leaders, who had preferred to stay behind the scenes in terms of applying direct pressure on the film industry, found an extraordinary opportunity in the newly-consolidated Twentieth Century Fox. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, with his penchant for adventure stories and Americana, was well aware of the success of Cecil B. DeMille's first silent, but Technicolor, version of The Ten Commandments (1923), which included a spectacular parting of the Red Sea. Zanuck took personal interest in the making of Brigham Young: Frontiersman (1940, by Henry Hathaway) and actively consulted with LDS President Grant during the writing of the screenplay. The resulting feature-length film depicted the second Prophet of the Church as a kind of American Moses who led his people across frozen and swollen rivers, denounced the seductive lure of gold, was unsure of his relationship to the divinity, and delivered impassioned speeches on the blessings of freedom of religion. The film, with a star-studded cast and spectacular western vistas, was a popular hit. The subject of polygamy arises in matter-of-fact fashion, as Brigham Young praises his first wife for her understanding, and guide Porter Rockwell calculates reproductive rates. The pinnacle moment on the matter comes when trail scout Jonathan Ken proposes marriage to an "outsider"; she hesitates by waiting for him to explicitly renounce polygamy, which he avoids doing. (8)

Partly due to the success of the film, Church leaders fostered the expansion of the College of Fine Arts at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, to eventually include Theatre and Media Arts. BYU established its own movie production facilities in 1953, and quickly embarked upon a steady program of filmmaking in terms of its institutional mandate "to assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life," and the mission of a BYU education, "which should be (1) spiritually strengthening, (2) intellectually enlarging, and (3) character building, leading to (4) lifelong learning and service." (9) With full resources at their disposal, BYU faculty and students began churning out a steady stream of one-reelers. Some were, and still are, fairly narrow in scope in terms of the history of the Church and its prophets, the building of LDS temples, and even animated stories from the Book of Mormon; others aimed at and achieved wider circulation. The latter include Cipher in the Snow (1973, by Keith J. Atkinson), about an unknown boy who dies of sheer neglect; John Baker's Last Race (1976, by Douglas G. Johnson), concerning an athlete dying young; and Johnny Lingo (1969, by Wetzel O. Whitaker), recently remade as The Legend of Johnny Lingo (2003, by Steven Ramirez). The didactic purposes of these films are clear in terms of promoting the virtues of "strength, courage, and faith ... compassion, understanding, and forgiveness." (10) Pioneers in Petticoals (1969) even alludes to the dangers of "hippie" culture, warning young women who raise their skirts and plunge their necklines that such displays may lead to rape.

Much of BYU production in this period begins to look over its shoulder at charges of cultism leveled against the Mormons by Baptists and Evangelicals. Ex-Mormons Ed Decker, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, and Equal Rights Amendment-advocate Sonia Johnson attacked the Church on the basis of its authoritarianism, the mysticism of its rituals, and its polytheistic cosmology. Widely circulated in Christian bookstores, videos such as The God Makers (1982, by Ed Decker) provided self-styled exposes of a religion still embarrassed by its slow response to the civil rights movement and its long delay in allowing blacks to finally join the priesthood. Even the faithful were warned against viewing such videos for fear of jeopardizing their testimony that "this Church is true." (11)

While the Church itself has always refused to engage directly in doctrinal disputes, LDS leaders were inevitably cognizant of the positive associations generated by the popular success of its star entertainers. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir scored a successive number of gold and platinum albums, while the Osmonds hit the charts in the early 1970s. Prolific Mormon fiction writer Jack Weyland began earning an international readership, and his 1980 novel Charly, published by the Church-owned Deseret Books, became an "instant classic." (12) Weyland's stories were readily translated into film scripts, culminating in a cinematic version of Charly (by Adam Thomas Andregg) in 2002.

The reputation of the Church also benefited from a strong connection with Disney enterprises. Based on an impromptu concert, the Osmonds were hired as Disneyland singers in 1962. A number of LDS artists had found significant work for Walt Disney Productions and later applied their professional skills to a series of animated cartoons that illustrate the Book of Mormon (produced by Living Scriptures Productions). Always on the lookout for family-friendly content, Disney Home Entertainment later bought the rights to Elder John Grober's memoirs from his missionary years in Tonga (In the Eye of the Storm, 1994) and filmed it as The Other Side of Heaven (2001, by Mitch Davis). The film is remarkable partly because of its implicit ecumenism. Its screenplay consciously emphasizes a generic, chaste, heteronormative, and exclusively monogamous Christian sexual morality, while minimizing Mormon theology. When Grober first arrives on the island, his proselytizing is frustrated by an antagonistic Protestant minister. By the end of the film, the older man literally sacrifices himself for his Mormon rival-turned-counterpart, who then honors the man at his funeral.

Such Christianizing of Mormonism, or of a repositioning of peculiarity in favor of a greater universalism, took place as the Church was rocked by events such as the execution of Gary Gilmore and Norman Mailer's account in The Executioner's Song (1982, by Lawrence Schiller); a series of highly public defections, excommunications, and "tell-all" confessions about Mormon ritual and marriage ceremonies; the "Salamander Letter" scandal and Salt Lake City bombings; and infamous murders committed by fundamentalist LDS offshoots such as Jeffrey Don Lundgren and Ervil LeBaron. (13) Sections on "blood atonement" and the racial inferiority of blacks were deleted or seriously revised in the second edition of Bruce McConkie's definitive Mormon Doctrine (1991). Church publications began to adopt the "traditional family values" rhetoric of the ascendant Christian right, despite serious disagreements on divorce, abortion, and new reproductive technologies. Aside from the attendant scandals, staging of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City seemed to imply a tighter integration of Mormonism into the social fabric of contemporary American society. (14) Church authorities took advantage of the occasion by offering extra guided tours and a wealth of historical material to tourists and the press. The Wasatch Brewing Company chose the moment to publicize its new Polygamy Porter beer, with the prominently displayed slogans "Why Have Just One!" and "Bring One Home to the Wives."

Cinematically, the waters were being tested by BYU-trained director Richard Dutcher, who featured himself in God's Army (2000). Often cited as a breakthrough in Mormon filmmaking, the movie offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Church's most visible representatives, its door-to-door missionaries. These young proselytizers are depicted as idealistic, sincere, self-deprecating, conflicted, and occasionally silly and even cantankerous. Nationally syndicated critics praised God's Army for its strong acting and technical polish, and later noted that the film, which was made for some $300,000, grossed over two million dollars in box office receipts. Dutcher had shown that LDS-themed movies about faith could succeed, especially if they included a Christ figure who entertains doubts, but sacrifices himself in the end.

God's Army cleared the path for a number of other "serious" indie films about faith from a LDS perspective, none of which have generated the rancor associated with Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2003). Dutcher immediately followed up with Brigham City (2001), a western-style murder mystery set in a small Mormon town featuring the slowest, and possibly most effective, quick-draw scene in cinematic history. It stars Dutcher in a role reminiscent of Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952, by Fred Zinnemann), a flawed but ultimately righteous man forced to confront the shortcomings of the members of his own community. Nevertheless, non-Mormon audiences recognized a new take on the standard "serial killer terrorizes a village" formula.

Produced by his own Zion Films, Dutcher's first two films were able to take quick financial advantage of VHS and DVD distribution through the Church's own Deseret Book Company. Aside from the benefits of such an imprimatur, Zion Films helped show other Mormon filmmakers how to exploit another outlet, the Internet. By setting up its own Web site, Zion Films was able to generate e-mail subscriber lists, post trailers, and provide links to online Deseret marketing outlets. Moreover, Dutcher quickly partnered with Jeff Simpson, a former Disney executive and founder of the Excel Entertainment Group, which owns four record labels and a music and video distribution service. Excel has also used the film festival circuit to promote films such as Saints and Soldiers (2004, by Ryan Little), a World II Two epic in which a Mormon soldier serves as a Christ figure.

Current Dutcher projects include a recently released sequel to God's Army titled States of Grace (2005) and a biography of Smith to be financed by Larry Miller, owner of regional automobile dealerships and the Utah Jazz. In a parallel move, Gary Rogers, founder of International Television Productions, used the profits from his company's assets to co-finance his own The Book of Mormon Movie: Volume 1: The Journey (2003), the first of an anticipated eight-film series. Publicized as the LDS equivalent to Demille's 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, its limited, regional theatrical release strategies recall the "four-walling" of the 1960s and 1970s that evaded the demands of multiplex owners.

Yet, another tack has been taken by Halestorm Entertainment, established in 2001 in Provo. Halestorm's first venture, The Singles Ward (2002, by Kurt Hale), was a fluffy story about a divorced Mormon comedian trying to navigate his way out of bachelorhood. This situation comedy contains some of the screwball and slapstick elements that remain central to the Halestorm formula--especially a plot line based around a bumbling man in love with a sophisticated, strong-willed woman. Halestorm has been astute enough to market through its own distribution arm, which also sells Christian rock music, again via Deseret Publications and Internet links to LDS singles sites. Such niche marketing to home video audiences has enabled the company to pump out a string of hit comedies such as The R.M. (2003, by Kurt Hale), It's Latter-Day Night! (2003, by Paul Eagleston), The Best Two Years (2003, by Scott S. Anderson), The Home Teachers (2004, by Kurt Hale), Baptists at Our Barbecue (2004, by Christian Vuissa), Sons of Provo (2005, by Will Swenson), Mobsters and Mormons (2005, by John E. Moyer), and Suits on the Loose (2005, by Rodney Henson). It has even risen to the point of building Utah's only full-service production and post-production facility in Provo, which will allow it to dominate filmmaking in the entire Intermountain West.

Halestorm projects the upbeat and even fun aspects of contemporary Mormon culture--especially the parts that integrate religiosity and popular culture through the commodification of symbolic representations. Deseret bookstores are replete with far more than leather-bound copies of sacred scripture. They now feature kitschy items such as plastic Book of Mormon action figures, full-length T-shirts emblazoned with statements such as "Modest Is Hottest," and a variety of CTR ("Choose The Right") paraphernalia. The message that it is cool to be "Mo," is also transmitted by Web sites devoted to singles chat, as are fashion and dating tips for young LDS women.

But in flirting with coolness, Mormon cinema, even with its light-heartedness and rock versions of venerable Church hymns, finds itself caught in the ambiguous zone between denial and triviality. No amount of cinematic hipness has erased the 1998 censure of BYU by the American Association of University Professors for lack of academic freedom, and Mormons still find themselves excluded from the World Council of Churches. LDS strictures against homosexuality come back as the return of the repressed in a film such as Latter Days (2003, by C. Jay Cox) and the mini series version of Angels in America (2003, by Mike Nichols), in which the theme of patriarchal sexual slavery reemerges but with gay men, rather than heterosexual women, cast as the victims of subjugation. Female assertiveness also remains problematic. In the LDS version of Charly, a Utah computer geek is clearly outclassed by an uninhibited New York City artist. She finally falls in love with him because of his Mormon belief in eternal love; he overcomes his repulsion at the idea of marrying someone who is not a virgin. But her conversion, after reading the Book of Mormon, is still tainted by the issue of the actual level of her "temple worthiness," versus clinging to some of her old ways. True, she does paint a portrait of a weeping Jesus, but at the exhibition opening she wears a black dress with enough of a plunging backline indicate the small likelihood of her wearing the temple garment required to participate in ritual ordinances. Although she is a "whore" who becomes a Madonna figure by giving her husband a son, Charly dies of cancer in the end. On a similar note, the female lead in Andrew Black's remake of Pride and Prejudice (2003) bares enough midriff that LDS audiences will note the absence of temple garments, and her relationship to the male lead remains undefined in terms of religiosity.

That Mormon audiences read meaning into such nuances is partly evident through the increasing self-referentiality of LDS-themed films. In The R.M., for example, BYU students swoon over the novel Charly and take offense at the bathroom scenes in God's Army. In the genre-parodying The Work and the Story (2003, by Nathan Smith Jones), the title itself represents a pun on The Work and the Glory (1996, by Gerald N. Lund), a historical novel about the prophet Smith. LDS Web sites regularly laugh at Johnny Lingo while the mockumentary American Mormon (2005, by Jed Knudsen) takes Mormon stereotyping into the streets with a series of offbeat interviews. As LDS theological differences become subsumed to matters of ethnic coding and style, some branches of the new Mormon cinema appeared positioned to keep the hard questions of Church doctrine, sexual mores, and scandal at bay. It remains to be seen if such movies become too bland and assimilationist to please Church authorities and, more importantly, paying Mormon audiences.

In his famous 1996 essay on "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation," Stuart Hall remarks that "Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformations and difference," and therefore cinema can be valued and explored "not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover who we are." (15) Mormon identity, shaped inside its own desire for stability within a spiritual "Zion," has birthed an independent cinema in which creative energies and moral constraints mirror each other while also vying for domination. Mormon cinema is worthy of greater attention given the larger interplay of religion, ethnicity, identity, and consumerism that characterizes Harold Bloom's "Post-Christian" American society. (16)

PETER WOLLHEIM is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Boise State University in Boise, Idaho.

NOTES

1. The Church itself only counts members as those who have been baptized, normally at eight years of age. It does not discriminate between active and non-active members, but excludes even large splinter groups such as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. However, so august an observer as Harold Bloom predicted that 12 percent of Americans will become Mormon by 2020. See The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 90.

2. The 1989 edition of J. Gordon Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989) lists forty-seven distinct groups identifying themselves as LDS or related offshoots.

3. Terminology is often a matter of great emphasis. In the past LDS authorities issued official dicta concerning the impropriety of references to the "Mormon Church," and briefly floated "The Church of Jesus Christ" as a substitute title. In recent years they have become more liberal about the former but pulled away from the latter.

4. Two excellent sources on LDS history are Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-Day Saints (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and Richard N. and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (San Francisco: Harper, 2000).

5. See Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1979), 577-579.

6. See Brian Q Cannon and Jacob W. Olmstead, "Scandalous Film: The Campaign to Suppress Anti-Mormon Motion Pictures, 1911-12," Journal of Mormon History (Fall 2003), 42-76.

7. Ibid.

8. For more on the film see Davis Bitton, "Brother Brigham on the Silver Screen," Meridian Magazine (July 11, 2002).

9. Catalog statement, Brigham Young University, 2006.

10. See Sonia Johnson, From Housewife to Heretic (New York: Doubleday, 1981); Kaziah May Hancock, Prisons of the Mind (West Jordan, UT: Desert Blossom Publishing, 1987); Anson Shupe, The Darker Side of Virtue (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991); Deborah Laake, Secret Ceremonies (New York: Island Books, 1993).

11. "This Church is true" is a formulaic phrase used by LDS members when concluding their personal statements at weekly Testament Meetings.

12. Cover promo material, VHS and DVD versions of Charly.

13. Among the made-for-TV movies that came out of this period are Children of Fury (2000, by Charles Haid), Prophet of Evil (2001, by Jud Taylor), The Executioner's Song (2001, by Lawrence Schiller), and Shot in the Heart (2002, by Agnieszka Holland).

14. See Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).

15. In Houston A. Baker Jr., et al, eds. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 210-222.

16. Bloom, 90.