Growing up in Salt Lake I assumed that this movie and The Singles Ward were, like, major Hollywood releases because people talked about them in the same breath as regular movies. Weird to realize now that they're these bizarre little cultural nuggets that are completely baffling to most of the world, my adult self included. I hope you keep going with this blog, there's so much weird and charming mormon media to talk about.
Don’t most college students turn 21 in either their junior or senior year? Not sure if the movie specified the year but not realistic for college students to drink.
Such great notes from an "outsider," I really enjoyed this. You should know that the movie is a verbatim adaption of the play (yes, it was a play in the 1980s) which was lifted nearly directly from the book. As a result, there's a lot of stuff in there that's peculiar to early 1980s Utah Mormonism, including things like talking about being in committed relationships in junior high (that was a thing, believe it or not) or the central conflict revolving around Sam being upset that Charly wasn't a virgin (also a thing in the church, but harder to write about so Weyland chose a nonmember, but still pretty open minded of him at the time).
Also, your instincts about the lack of understanding of the three-act structure of movies is spot on. Jack Weyland was a physics professor who took correspondence courses to learn how to write. (My father-in-law was the editor at the Mormon magazine that accepted and published his first short stories, a fact my FIL often bragged about but also joked about regretting.) Weyland wrote his Charly novels in an emerging LDS market that was starving for anything fictional in Mormon settings. Through the 70s, most LDS publishers could not afford to take a risk publishing something other than mainline church doctrine or books of essays by leading authorities in the church. The same was true of church art, btw. But new printing technology was getting cheap enough and a few enterprising publishers like Covenant Communications and Seagull were starting to offer writers tiny advances to write books for a Mormon audience. This stimulated Deseret Book, the church-owned publisher, to take the risk and publish Charly as one of its earliest novels and DB and Weyland both hit the jackpot.
As an LDS member myself who was in high school during some of this time, we were so starved for content about us that most of us overlooked some of the obvious weaknesses. This is similar, I think, to the way a later generation of Mormons experienced The Singles Word, Sons of Provo, etc., all being so desperate for something relevant that they overlooked the cheesier aspects of the same. In fact, watching Charly as a movie when it came out was a bit painful because all the things we had happily overlooked were now harder to ignore.
I do think you're onto something about why these movies can't translate to non-LDS audiences or do so only superficially. There is nothing in any other faith tradition that prepares people for the idea that you and your spouse -- if you are lucky, blessed, and work hard -- will be eternally bonded and will co-create worlds together. You really can't understand how that affects the decision of who to marry. It doesn't even have to be an explicit plot point, it's in the water, it's constant subtext. And happily so, for many of us. But yeah, I can see how that wouldn't translate well.
Have you seen the original Johnny Lingo? Wondering what your thoughts on it are. I remember thinking it was hilarious as a kid. Watched it again recently and I can say it didn’t age well https://youtu.be/pfahoLfrddU
This ones an interesting specimen in that it’s not overtly Mormon at all but now that you’ve highlighted them has some of the same tell-tale blind spots
Growing up in Salt Lake I assumed that this movie and The Singles Ward were, like, major Hollywood releases because people talked about them in the same breath as regular movies. Weird to realize now that they're these bizarre little cultural nuggets that are completely baffling to most of the world, my adult self included. I hope you keep going with this blog, there's so much weird and charming mormon media to talk about.
Don’t most college students turn 21 in either their junior or senior year? Not sure if the movie specified the year but not realistic for college students to drink.
Such great notes from an "outsider," I really enjoyed this. You should know that the movie is a verbatim adaption of the play (yes, it was a play in the 1980s) which was lifted nearly directly from the book. As a result, there's a lot of stuff in there that's peculiar to early 1980s Utah Mormonism, including things like talking about being in committed relationships in junior high (that was a thing, believe it or not) or the central conflict revolving around Sam being upset that Charly wasn't a virgin (also a thing in the church, but harder to write about so Weyland chose a nonmember, but still pretty open minded of him at the time).
Also, your instincts about the lack of understanding of the three-act structure of movies is spot on. Jack Weyland was a physics professor who took correspondence courses to learn how to write. (My father-in-law was the editor at the Mormon magazine that accepted and published his first short stories, a fact my FIL often bragged about but also joked about regretting.) Weyland wrote his Charly novels in an emerging LDS market that was starving for anything fictional in Mormon settings. Through the 70s, most LDS publishers could not afford to take a risk publishing something other than mainline church doctrine or books of essays by leading authorities in the church. The same was true of church art, btw. But new printing technology was getting cheap enough and a few enterprising publishers like Covenant Communications and Seagull were starting to offer writers tiny advances to write books for a Mormon audience. This stimulated Deseret Book, the church-owned publisher, to take the risk and publish Charly as one of its earliest novels and DB and Weyland both hit the jackpot.
As an LDS member myself who was in high school during some of this time, we were so starved for content about us that most of us overlooked some of the obvious weaknesses. This is similar, I think, to the way a later generation of Mormons experienced The Singles Word, Sons of Provo, etc., all being so desperate for something relevant that they overlooked the cheesier aspects of the same. In fact, watching Charly as a movie when it came out was a bit painful because all the things we had happily overlooked were now harder to ignore.
I do think you're onto something about why these movies can't translate to non-LDS audiences or do so only superficially. There is nothing in any other faith tradition that prepares people for the idea that you and your spouse -- if you are lucky, blessed, and work hard -- will be eternally bonded and will co-create worlds together. You really can't understand how that affects the decision of who to marry. It doesn't even have to be an explicit plot point, it's in the water, it's constant subtext. And happily so, for many of us. But yeah, I can see how that wouldn't translate well.
Have you seen the original Johnny Lingo? Wondering what your thoughts on it are. I remember thinking it was hilarious as a kid. Watched it again recently and I can say it didn’t age well https://youtu.be/pfahoLfrddU
In my ongoing saga of posting random things in comments:
https://m.imdb.com/video/vi3842967321?ref_=m_tt_vi_1
This ones an interesting specimen in that it’s not overtly Mormon at all but now that you’ve highlighted them has some of the same tell-tale blind spots