When Hollywood Wants Good, Clean Fun, It Goes to Mormon Country - NYTimes.com: The typical B.Y.U. student doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Hollywood. Mormon culture tends to see the entertainment industry as both a reflection of and contributor to our “morally bereft society,” as one alumnus put it. Many of the students I met rarely, if ever, watch R-rated films and could name the handful of exceptions they had made. One 27-year-old junior remembered seeing the Civil War drama “Glory” in high school. Another was working part time at a company in Salt Lake City that cleaned up Hollywood films and released family-friendly versions on DVD. Recently, the student told me, he digitally replaced a cigarette in a character’s hand with a pretzel.
The B.Y.U. program is designed to be a similar kind of ethical counterweight: it’s trying to unleash values-oriented filmmakers into the industry who can inflect its sensibility. “Without being preachy about it,” Adams told me, “if we can add something to the culture that makes people think about being better human beings — more productive, more kind, more forgiving — that’s what we want to do.”