It's time for my semi-annual gripe about conservatives not funding and supporting their own artists.
For the past couple years, I have been attempting to raise funds for a documentary I am making about Whittaker Chambers. The project seems a natural for the right, and also has great potential to cross over into mainstream audience.
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The story of a communist spy who defected and then fingered a government official, replete with action sequences, great court scenes and even a subtext of homosexuality, is just plain good storytelling.
As of this date, I have raised $3,000 from my friends on the right. This is crucial money that is greatly appreciated. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that a conservative think tank or wealthy individual has not stepped up and offered to help me see this thing through. For what would be a rounding error for the Koch brothers, I could produce a polished, broadcast-quality film.
Frankly put, conservatives need to stop complaining about the popular culture and start doing something about it.
The great thing is, the technology has reached the point where it can be done inexpensively. For around $20,000 you can produce a something that could play in theaters, or at the very least be seen by people on Vimeo and YouTube. It would be a way of preserving the memory of one of the 20th century's greatest writers and anti-communists.
Because if the liberals have their way, in 50 years no one will know who Whittaker Chambers was.
But who needs that when we can have another book about the 1960s?
In 2004, the success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was heralded as a game-changer in liberal Hollywood. It in fact turned out to be a fluke. Some other similar religious films were released in its wake, but people don't go to movies to hear stories their already know (Gibson's name and politics is what brought the crowds into his film).
Instead, things just settled back to the status quo. It was incredibly frustrating knowing that conservative films could do well, and just watching as conservatives did nothing about it.
I vividly recall in 2006 when I heard about the movie 300, which was based on the comic book by Frank Miller -- the same Frank Miller who recently blasted the "trash" of Occupy Wall Street. 300 tells the story of valor in the face of tyranny. I knew, instantly, that it would be a hit. I also knew that the liberal press would be surprised that it was a hit.
Since 300, there has really been nothing. Conservatives made a mistake, thinking that if fluff like An American Carol or the Sarah Palin infomercial The Undefeated tanked, that means there no hunger for conservative films.
Ironically it is conservatives, who are supposedly good at businesses, who don't realize that they needed to start small and establish a few artistic and critical successes and then build on that -- and that in the end it can be quite lucrative. The budget for An American Carol was $20 million (it made about half of that back).
For that money you could start a small studio and focus on hiring truly artistic people who can deliver great stories: documentaries on Whittaker Chambers, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher. You could produce sequels to the great religious film Into Great Silence. A good model is Hammer Films, the legendary British company that became hugely successful in the 1950s producing horror moves. Most of them were made in one house, Down Place on the Thames River.
Hammer, of course, hired artists, not hacks, to make the movies, which is why they were so successful.
Conservatives seem to think in big, bombastic, ham fisted and even cartoonish terms when it comes to the arts. The website Christianmovies.com offers saccharine titles like The Perfect Gift and Marriage Retreat. They understand that part of the fun of movies is seeing the terrifying face of genuine evil, that it puts us in a position to actually see what sin looks like.
But none of them comprehend subtlety, or genuine artistry.
One of the images from Witness, Whittaker Chambers' magisterial autobiography, that has always struck with me has nothing to do with guns or clashing armies. It is when Chambers defects from the communist party after being a spy, and goes to Baltimore to gather his wife and daughter before fleeing to Florida.
He packs the car and as he closes the door for the last time, the phone rings. Word has gotten out. Chambers describes walking to the car, the hideous sound of a rotary phone clatter following him. That kind of soft touch is missing from, say, Left Behind II: Tribulation Force.
It's time for the right to get in this game. We could call the studio Right Hammer Films.
Mark Judge is a columnist for RealClearReligion and author, most recently, of A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll.
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