West Hollywood
THE PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER is a modern architectural icon, a massive shard of cobalt glass looming over West Hollywood. "The blue whale," as locals call it, houses showrooms for some of Southern California's most overpriced interior designers. But on the first weekend in October, a tiny corner of the complex served as the gathering place for the unlikeliest of Hollywood displays: the Liberty Film Festival.
For a Hollywood event, this conservative film festival was remarkably spartan: no lavish parties with ice sculptures, no fountains of champagne, no sushi. Indeed, no food at all. But the lobby outside the theater auditorium buzzed with busily networking Hollywood wannabes, has-beens, and civilians. (Pure civilians are rare in L.A. However distant their day job, most everybody has a script or headshot tucked in the bottom drawer of the modular desk in their office cubicle.)
Govindini Murty--the festival's co-founder, an actress and writer whose cofounder is her husband, Jason Apuzzo, a director and writer--said they whipped together this Sundance for conservatives in about three months. A think tank called the Foundation for Free Markets cosponsored the event but didn't have the kind of money studios regularly pony up for even the premiere of a David Spade movie. Most of these films had appeared a few weeks earlier at the American Film Renaissance in Dallas, which proudly (and properly, as far as I know) dubbed itself "the first conservative film festival in the country." You know that the conservative filmmaking community has come of age when you start hearing dark whispers of infighting between sub-subgroups.
What people at the Liberty Film Festival seemed to relish more than the films themselves was the opportunity to declare to the world--or at least the people at the festival--that they are conservatives and proud of it. At times the lobby resembled another popular Hollywood institution, the AA meeting: "Hello, my name's Bob." "Hi, Bob!" "I'm . . . I'm a conservative!" One woman told me in a sudden spasm of frankness, "I used to work as a writer for NPR," shaking her head in disbelief. "But I turned conservative two years ago. I could never let anybody else know."
It's no accident the organizers opened the festival with a comical short film, Republican Jew, produced by an entity calling itself "A Career Suicide Production." But not everybody feared being exposed. Ted Hayes, who said he is "the only black homeless activist in America who is a conservative Republican," held court in one corner of the lobby, his Rastafarian hat and dreadlocks standing out in the otherwise fairly buttoned-down (for Los Angeles) crowd.
Many attendees were what David Zucker, producer of the Airplane! and Naked Gun movies, called "September 12th Republicans." Andrew Breitbart, coauthor of Hollywood Interrupted and a panelist in a discussion entitled "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," had the audience howling as he spoke of his hunger to meet fellow Hollywood conservatives: "I need a support group. When I find another [conservative], I just want to hang on to that person. I want to take them home and stay up with them until four in the morning, until my wife drags me away."
LIBERALS WHO FLOCKED to see Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 report that more than the film itself, they were exhilarated by the communal experience of sitting in an auditorium filled with likeminded people who all cheered and booed at the same things. So, too, but in reverse, at the Liberty Film Festival. Attendees loudly jeered whenever a liberal icon such as Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy appeared on-screen, and they energetically applauded every on-screen Republican. "It was thrilling to be in an audience that would applaud when Ed Meese was on the screen," said Douglas Urbanski, a prominent producer and talent manager who appeared on the panel with Breitbart.
"It was very emotional. I had women coming up to me with tears in their eyes," co-organizer Murty told me. "There is an enormous public out there who feel their views have been despised, who've had their patriotism ridiculed," Murty said. "It was such a relief for everybody to have other like-minded individuals to talk to."
As for the films themselves, they often seemed an afterthought. Many of them approached their subject-matter from an almost purely rational standpoint, trying to reason with their audience rather than to move them. Several were nothing more than a parade of talking heads and some stock footage, coming across more as a segment of C-SPAN than a feature film. These may play well with the wonk crowd and diehard Fox News viewers. But film is a visceral medium, and too many of the filmmakers failed to take advantage of its enormous potential to reach the gut of its audience. In the Face of Evil, the film in which Reagan's pugnacious attorney general briefly appears, was one notable exception. Two years in the making, it had the benefit of the longest lead-time of any film exhibited, and it was the most polished entry.
It was also the most epic in scope, covering the forty-year history of Ronald Reagan's struggle against communism. Through a concert of imagery, music, and language, it displayed a level of emotional depth that eluded most of the other entries. Rather than make a traditional documentary, writer and director Stephen K. Bannon gave his material the structure of a fictional narrative film, including a plot and a character arc. "You have to find a way to give your audience access," he said. "I approached this as a horror film. I said, 'Let's set up the monsters first,'" by which he meant communism, fascism, and the other fatal -isms of the twentieth century, or what the film calls "The Beast." In the Face of Evil is based on the book Reagan's War by Peter Schweizer. Bannon urged filmmakers to mine conservative books for good stories. "There's a lot of great literary material out there," Bannon said. "It all comes down to great storytelling."
MICHAEL MOORE cast a broad shadow across the festival. Four of the twelve original feature-length films were direct responses to his work. And most of the others were inspired by his style and attitude. "Michael Moore is sort of the godfather of this festival," quipped film critic Michael Medved, who introduced a showing of The Ten Commandments to close the festival. "Michael Moore is the best propagandist since Goebbels," contended Urbanski, who, in one of those only-in-Hollywood coincidences, actually used to be Moore's manager.
Two of the festival's films tackled Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 head-on. Celsius 41.11--"the temperature at which the brain begins to die"--was coproduced by Citizens United. Confronting Iraq was brought to you by the good folks at Accuracy in Media. Both films are essentially talking-head vehicles that trot out one pundit after another to shoot down the various claims and contentions of Moore's opus. Celsius 41.11 features the likes of Charles Krauthammer, Mansoor Ijaz, Michael Ledeen, and Fred Barnes. And nearly every pro-war pundit who isn't in Celsius 41.11 can be found in Confronting Iraq: Victor Davis Hanson, Bernard Lewis, Christopher Hitchens, Frank Gaffney, and so on.
While it is heartening to see them take Moore to task for his many inaccuracies, these films address Moore on a rational level. But Moore's case isn't rational. When he shows Lila Lipscomb (the grieving mother of a soldier who died in Iraq in a helicopter accident) in a tight shot with an American flag fluttering overhead and the Washington Monument in the background, and she sobs, "I finally have a place to put all my pain and all my anger," we're not in the world of CNN; we're in a Lifetime movie.
LIONEL CHETWYND, the creator of Celsius 41.11, agreed that many of the films, including his own, dropped the ball in the field of emotion. But the Oscar-nominated screenwriter didn't have the luxury of time that Bannon enjoyed. Instead of two years, Chetwynd had just seven weeks to make his movie, from start to finish. With a long list of impressive credits, including The Hanoi Hilton and Ike, Chetwynd was the most distinguished filmmaker to exhibit at the festival. Though it seemed an impossible task--to start making a movie in the middle of the summer, take on all of Moore's major arguments, and complete it in time to be widely seen before the election--he and his team pulled it off. And under the circumstances, they did an admirable job.
THE FESTIVAL'S TWO OTHER FILMS to tackle Michael Moore were probably the hottest tickets of the weekend: radio talk-show host Larry Elder's Michael and Me and newcomer Michael Wilson's Michael Moore Hates America. These two have much in common: Both filmmakers are libertarians making their first feature-length movie, they each focus on Moore's previous film, Bowling for Columbine, and each adopted a more intimate, personal approach, to some extent paralleling Moore's folksy style.
Elder's documentary is a little less polished but makes up for it with flashes of humor and poignancy and remains focused, concerned entirely with the Second Amendment and gun-control issues. Wilson's film ranges wider, dealing with issues of economic freedom and, most intriguingly, the ethics of documentary-filmmaking, spotlighting the techniques Moore uses to deceive his audience through interviews with some of his "victims." Edgier than the others, Wilson's work will undoubtedly hold the most appeal for younger audiences.
BOTH URBANSKI and Medved singled out videographer Evan Maloney as one who displayed real potential. For more than a year, Maloney has been posting his popular digital-video shorts on his website Brain-Terminal.com. He specializes in exposing the inanities of the antiwar left, especially at "peace" rallies. The results are alternately hilarious and frightening. Maloney is presently making Brainwashing 101, a feature-length documentary about political correctness and speech codes at college campuses around the country. He previewed the half-completed work-in-progress at the festival, and even in this rough state it proved compelling.
But will any of it matter? "Among the conservative movement there's been almost a contempt for the movie industry," Medved observed. "Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley never took it seriously. But young people growing up in this movie-saturated culture understand its importance." And yet, many of the festival's films were far too drab to appeal to a wide audience. "The entertainment factor is really crucial," Medved insisted. "It's been such a long time since people have tried to blend conservative messages with entertainment value."
Tired of banging their heads against the studio gates, some advocate creating an alternative to the Hollywood studio system. "We can create an alternative infrastructure," Breitbart argued. After all, conservatives have done it before in publishing, the Internet, and radio. With the advent of digital video cameras, DVDs, and computer editing, the costs of making a digital movie have plummeted to near-zero. Apuzzo and Murty, the festival organizers, exhibited a micro-budget noir thriller, Terminal Island, which they made for less than the price of a six-year-old Honda Civic.
But others opposed the creation of what Chetwynd disparaged as "a conservative filmmaking ghetto." Following that route, he argued, "means accepting that you don't belong in the mainstream." One would think that if anything would convince the studios of the commercial possibilities of conservative film, it would be the phenomenal success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ. But so far the studios appear to cede the field to independent Christian film companies.
POLITICAL NONPROFITS generally raise more money when their side is out of power, as passions grow more fervid and activists get more active. If John Kerry does manage to win on November 2, one repercussion may be, ironically, a real flowering of conservative film. In either case, dueling documentaries from both sides are here to stay. For their part, Murty and Apuzzo are already planning next year's follow-up, which they predict, in true Hollywood huckster fashion, will be bigger and better. "A lot of people told me they were inspired to go out and make their own movies," Murty says. "I say to them, 'Go and make your movie, and we'll show it.'"
Andrew Leigh is a writer in Los Angeles.