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You Say You Want a Revolution, Part 3
In a recent post, we revisited fifty years ago, a cultural turning point with many similarities to today’s, a tumultuous, angry year when much of Hollywood saw mass audiences respond to Easy Rider and M.A.S.H. But inadvertently, it triggered a powerful law-and-order backlash whose inexhaustible fury would ensure that Archie Bunker, General Patton, Dirty Harry, Popeye Doyle, Vito Corleone, and Charles Bronson would provide the most iconic screen moments of the early Seventies.
To understate things, it sure seems today like a lot of people in this country, tens of millions of media consumers, are frustrated by their relative powerlessness. The Woke Market is not as big or bigger than the rest of America put together, and yet you’d never know that if you looked at a list of current films or TV shows. We can debate the reasons why, but there’s clearly an unsatisfied need to hotwire a path to cultural change, because whatever market mechanism is sending a corrective signal to the media, it’s not reaching enough of a real response.
The two articles so far in “You Say You Want a Revolution,” which began in June, and continued with part 2 in July, are invitations to imagine how to move towards a healthier culture, unabashedly aiming at putting ideas into practice, not proving them in theory. It’s an ongoing Ricochet conversation that seeks to move the ball a little farther down the field each time. We suggest specific examples of possible projects and ask you to dream up other, better ones.
Praise and shame; it never goes out of style. The Left’s playbook is a strong one: Attach your story to emotion, to a lasting, if not inextinguishable cause that nearly everyone can understand: For example, hard-line prewar segregation versus the rise of an oppressed people. Or women finally getting an equal chance at work, but at a time when they were more sexualized than ever. It’s not tough getting dramatic and colorful stories out of those raw ingredients, which have persisted as film material for roughly half a century. There are conservative variations on the stories just described, but by and large, they are considered liberal stories. They’ve proven that they have staying power, like it or not. They could be milked almost indefinitely.
What could be the equivalent on the Right? There are plenty of possibilities and you’ve already seen many of them discussed on Ricochet. Resentment over endless generations after generations of identity politics. Questions about the continuing relevance of affirmative action. Or even the seemingly incurable social-cultural abyss between groups of American whites who might as well live on different planets.
Not: Abstractions about the free market. “You didn’t build this.” “Ownership society.”
Those are only some of the deep and lasting emotions that a new direction in culture could turn into powerful screen stories. We’ve identified a few “causes”; now, we have to create or choose the specific projects that will embody them. When I posted the first in the series, @SkipSul said that in an age of many fragmented media choices, we’d be foolish to swing for the fences and bet everything, tentpole-style, on a handful of once-in-a-lifetime, win or lose it all kind of message-laden films. SkipSul, as usual, was right.
Nobody knows what will “hit,” so produce dramas, comedies, action pictures, documentaries, even dating movies appropriate to the chosen mission. A production slate is always needed. For a century, a studio putting everything on a single roll of the dice has been a prescription for disaster: Cleopatra, Heaven’s Gate, and Waterworld. Yes, Mel Gibson (a troubled man with undeniable gifts) got away with it on The Passion. No, that doesn’t mean you’re a sure thing to get away with it when your current project finally meets its audience in 2021 or 2022.
Netflix, despite its financial ups and downs, is becoming Hollywood’s new business model. The Industry has a suicidal tendency to go with bet-the-house tentpoles, but Netflix and Amazon focus on an annual collection of lower-budget productions with growth potential if any one of them should catch on.
This new scattershot approach should have some relevance to social conservatives. Bluntly, if you were, for example, devoted towards extending the beneficial effects of the LCMS (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) and a wealthy member of the church donated a lot of money towards its media ministry, you could produce one mid-sized theatrical movie about Martin Luther. For the same sum, you could present an array of online “products” at as many levels as possible—kids, pre-teens, teens, young adults, families, and the elderly.
So you’ve decided what movie projects are missing from American life, and you’ve got writers and actors who are ready to make them. At this stage, to get them made and sold, it’s not like you’d need a rich pal: It’s worse. You’d probably need a couple of them, with different skill sets that don’t always overlap. The impresario, the super-salesman, and the keeper of the faith are not usually the same guy, and you need them all. The impresario is the showman, the braggart, the dynamo with a thousand contacts who can keep a production pipeline organized. He or she works in collaboration, and creative tension, with the head of sales. The impresario knows what artists and entertainers want to do; the sales boss only cares what people want to buy. Sales bring in the money, production spends it. You’d also be wise to have a Keeper of the Flame; someone of eminence who deals with Wall Street, the banks, the lawyers and the auditors.
Where could you even start such a process? Do it the way the pros did it—and by the pros, I mean the progressive Left. Make a handful of successful small projects and prove that developing a wider market is possible. That’s how the Sundance Institute changed Hollywood. It started with a “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” symbiosis. Robert Redford was the handsome prince. Harvey Weinstein was the ugly hunchback behind the throne. Redford’s holy, immaculate non-profit created a forum; Harvey’s down-and-dirty Miramax skillfully exploited the opportunity. The two were inseparable. Think of the synergy of Intel and Microsoft, or (once upon a time) Apple and Motorola, Sundance, and Miramax. Sundance discovered and encouraged new social trends; Miramax weaponized them and made a fortune.
My electronics analogies aren’t up to @hankrhody quality, but here goes: you know how amplification works? In a heated vacuum tube, or a transistor, a strong flow of electricity is interrupted and shaped, controlled by a much weaker one. Studios, TV networks, streaming platforms capable of serving millions of simultaneous streams; that’s big money by anyone’s standards. Yet, rather like the Church acting as a throttle (at the best of times) on Medieval kings, intellectual institutions like AFI (the American Film Institute), AMPAS, (the motion picture academy) and the Sundance Institute, all with a relatively modest financial profile, manage to lead the big money boys around by the nose. Prestige, praise, blame, and shame; that’s how the non-profit “clergy” of Hollywood work their cultural magic. I’ve got no right to distance myself; for decades, I was in it up to my neck. There’s no more efficient way to change Hollywood movies than to be in charge of praise and shame.
When Leonard Nimoy read about the astonishing grosses of Star Wars in 1977, he would recount later, he smiled and waited for the phone call, knowing that Paramount Pictures would suddenly realize, “Hey, we’ve got one of those!” When you look at the AFI or other cultural arbiters, conservatives should remember, “Hey, we’ve got one of those!” and work with @titustechera to make it a more powerful instrument of change.
Published in General
I think there is an opening for stories that might appear anti-conservative on their face, actually containing subversive messages. For example, a guy plans an attack or robbery or takes hostages or some other trope of gun-crazy white guys, and then explore what drove him too it. If they can do this against crooked cops in The Negotiator, or banks in Hell or High Water, then you can point at liberal government policies, trade policies, etc.
Not until about an hour and seven minutes in.
That’s the emotional spur that could last a generation; anyone and everyone with even the slightest doubt about dramatic cultural drift is going to remember this for a long time, and if criticism of the era’s demented excesses becomes acceptable (like the insulting portrayal of foul-mouthed protesters in Forrest Gump), it’ll be the story-motivating equivalent of one of those flaming oil wells that takes a Red Adair to put out.
Also, Netflix can run out of money. Amazon won’t.
Story is the whole game.
Some of the biggest successes of the Seventies and Eighties were conservative-ish films and TV shows that blended liberal premises, like The A-Team, the kind of rollicking action-comedy with armed forces veterans as the heroes. Conservative, right? But they were also screwed by “the government”, separating the heroes who went to Vietnam from the allegedly evil men who sent them there. Everybody gets something out of it. Or Rocky, with its underdog racial roles reversed, and its theme of individual achievement. Is it a liberal movie with a conservative feel, or the other way around?
Story matters.
Story is the whole game.
I can’t quote everyone whose comments here I agree with because there’s too many. I don’t have much to add to this thread other than to say it resonates with a conversation I’ve been having with some of my friends about the power of stories to shape opinion. (It started around the time I found Ricochet last summer and stumbled on an article by Titus T about films from 1968 I think.)
A good story beats everything. That’s why we have the saying ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story’. The left have known this for years and used it to great advantage. The feels win over the facts every time.
Here’s an example. There is a great appetite for people to watch misery dramas based (kinda) on real life events that arouse anger against injustice. I started a new job recently and the film The Magdalene Sisters cropped up in 2 conversations with 2 different people in the same week. Not a recent film but clearly made an impression as one conversation shows. I was talking to a younger colleague, a lovely thoughtful person of 25. I’m going to Poland on my holidays and she asked me if I’d go to Auschwitz. I’ve already been there so I started to talk to her about it. At some point she interrupted to make a comparison with the Magdalene film and the documentation of the atrocity in Auschwitz. I found that ready association of ideas, innocently proposed by a person with no personal animosity but informed by the culture she consumed an example of how the propaganda war was won a long time ago.
I’m not saying that films about abuses by religious orders shouldn’t be made. But conservatives need to be the ones telling those stories. The truth and nothing but the truth needs to be told.
And yes a good subversive comedy would be like rain after a long drought!
I’m convinced that the best stories — as you say, the ones that ring true for an audience — are ultimately conservative. Conservatives don’t need to write good conservative movies. They need to just write good movies. They’ll end up conservative by default.*
*Not always true, of course, but I’ll always bet that way.
Double plus like.
Bill Whittle has been active in this space for quite some time, with some modest success. “The Arroyo”, I think, was borne from this same concept. As is Declaration Entertainment, the production company putting this stuff out, but I think that’s defunct.
Eyeballs only focus when the story’s any good, or entertaining enough. Anything thrust through to the consumer of that media, that isn’t a natural part of the storyline, will bump the consumer – it’ll be obvious, and take them out of the story.
Like all things, tell the truth as best you can – even if it’s a comedy – and it’ll resonate. Otherwise it’s preaching, or bias, and you lose half the audience.
When we chose films for the Freedom Film Festival, often about awful, untold stories of the Iron Curtain era, my goal was to have audiences walk out of that theater as stunned and silent as they were after Schindler’s List, but with one difference: Incredulity that they’d never heard of this film before, leading to wonder: why didn’t the critics ever tell me? How much else are they not telling me?
The goal was never to have them walk out going, “Woo hoo! Boy oh boy, that’s the most right wing thing I’ve ever seen!”
Stop being so smart, Gary. :-)
A similar reaction is had when I talk about 100 million people dead in the 20th century under Communism. At first they don’t quite get the scale of it, then I talk about the Holocaust. Then I list off the countries – USSR (not a country, but you get it), China, Cambodia, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba. It’s as real as breathing, just like what was portrayed in Schindler’s List is.
Not sure how to penetrate the culture, to raise awareness, that kind of thing. It’s certainly not being taught in schools enough, or more fully. We have time for social justice stuff; we apparently don’t have time for the biggest murderers in history.
Here’s how we put it to the Directors’ Guild of America at one of our 2002 events:
Streaming services aren’t the only big change in movie making right now. Here’s a video showing how future directors will be able to see and alter some computer imagery effects on set.
Thanks Gary!
Fascinating. I didn’t know about any of those films.