As liberals have known for over a century, small, bold investments in the culture can have a huge impact. In 1975, a show called Saturday Night Live, launched on a shoestring budget and aired in a “dead spot.” It changed the culture. Rolling Stone magazine was produced for $7,000 in 1967. U2 started in a living room in Dublin.
We are hoping to build something, if not as huge as U2, at least with some cultural power next year when we hold an Anti-Communist Film Festival. I’ve written a series of articles about the festival for Hot Air, and I want to end the year with something I have discovered that may surprise some conservatives.
Hollywood loves the idea of the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
I admit it, I’ve been surprised. Obviously, the entertainment industry leans left - far left - and I expected resistance when I began reaching out to people in the industry. I expected chuckles and sarcasm. I would be the crazy right-winger holding some reactionary political rally in a movie theater.
I was wrong. Hollywood is about making money, and when you approach them with the prospect of a popular film festival at a full theater and the chance to promote their products, they become real friendly real fast.
However, there’s something else. The people who manage special events at theaters like the one we hope to rent and sit in cubicles at Warner Brothers and Sony, providing information on fees and logistics for licensing films, are regular Americans like the good people who read Hot Air. Reports of the economic spiral that Hollywood is in right now often discuss the mechanics, set designers, and other creatives who are struggling as fewer and fewer people go to the movies. These are the kind of people I have been in contact with this year as I try to get the Anti-Communist Film Festival off the ground.
They are good people. Not all of them are liberals. Many instantly saw the appeal of the festival. When I mentioned to the manager of one theater that we planned on showing The Lives of Others, she lit up with delight. “That’s one of my favorite films,” she said.
This year, conservative thinker Ryan Anderson, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, recently published an essay in First Things magazine. “The Way Forward After Dobbs” outlines what is needed to transform American culture. “We now need culture-forming, opinion-shaping organizations,” Anderson wrote. “What might this entail? We might task a small group with studying how other groups have succeeded in their domains, and devising a plan for meaningful reforms in new areas.”
Anderson observed that “cultural progressives have constructed a massive infrastructure that supports up-and-coming left-wing graduate students, academics, and researchers who are willing not only to teach at all levels, but also to testify, give interviews, write reports, and engage politically to advance their social values. There is no comparable support for socially conservative scholars on the right.”
What is needed, he continued, is a “cultural incrementalism” that “can be broad-spectrum: new TV shows and movies that aren’t hokey after-school specials, policies to protect kids from the harms of social media and online pornography, and effective church ministries. The task is enormous. But we haven’t devoted enough time, treasure, or sophistication to it.”
The Anti-Communist Film Festival is exactly what Anderson is looking for. It would be helpful if, unlike the Hollywood insiders I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with, he and other conservative A-Listers were not so silent on the matter. I am the one they’ve been waiting for.
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