The Right Stuff
BUNCH, SONNY
The Right Stuff Conservatives decide if you can't beat Hollywood, join it. by Sonny Bunch It's hard to know exactly what to expect from a film festival that caters to conservatives. Will the...
...The four-day festival wasn't limited to documentaries...
...One evening's program featured a short that revolved around a man whose young daughter dies because he leaves her alone in the family pool so he can engage in a homosexual affair and a feature film named Weirdsville...
...Editors who will work for scale who have edited major motion pictures and documentaries...
...If people want to come and see a serious film and go have a cocktail afterwards and socialize and network, from a business standpoint, that's very important...
...Hollywood demonizes entrepreneurship and business ventures," Muccio told me before the show, pointing to examples like the evil Mr...
...He has a bevy of talent at his fingertips...
...You take someone like Robert Green-wald, who makes his anti-Wal Mart documentary...
...I think a festival is a festival, and it should have a festive atmosphere," Hubbard mused...
...And to be rewarded at the end with a standing ovation made it a night I'll never forget," he said...
...Will the program consist of films made by conservative filmmakers...
...There's no talent [on the right...
...Potter in It's a Wonderful Life and the conniving Gordon Gekko from Wall Street...
...And after-parties are the key to a great film festival...
...When you have something serious on Wednesday night dealing with business and something serious on Friday night dealing with the political climate on universities, Thursday you've got a break from serious topics and can come and laugh and attend an after party and just be entertained...
...What even makes a movie conservative...
...The audience certainly did enjoy itself...
...His philosophy is pretty simple...
...AFR has been hosting film festivals Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at The Weekly Standard...
...First and foremost, you've got to entertain...
...Having spent four years working on this film, it was easy for me to forget how much of an emotional impact these stories have when you first hear them...
...Part of our mission is to reach out to young people, and it was definitely a heavily youth-centered audience...
...Jim Hub-bard says he wants the name recognition of a Sundance or a Cannes while maintaining the political sensibility of Middle America...
...We're a mainstream film festival...
...across the country since 2004, but the Hubbards hope to set up permanent shop in Washington and push the festival into the mainstream...
...Petitions, reactions, boycotts, things like that aren't the right approach," says Hubbard...
...Our mission, really, is to bring Hollywood back in touch with the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the American people," says Jim Hubbard, who, along with his wife Ellen, heads the American Film Renaissance (AFR), a small outfit looking to make a big impact on the world of film...
...It's where the people are introduced and the deals get done...
...It was a fun, entertaining film, people laughed throughout...
...he can just get on the phone and call them up, and they'll work for practically nothing...
...And if you don't do that, you're going to hurt the side that you profess to want to help...
...That's our mission, in part: to give people who feel marginalized a place at the table...
...People are networking, filmmakers are networking with others, and you can't really do that in a movie theater...
...The 2007 American Film Renaissance kicked off at Washington's E Street Cinema to a standing-room-only crowd with a short documentary on eminent domain starring Drew Carey...
...Consider Indoctrinate U, a documentary focused on the left-wing bias pervasive on college campuses today...
...We wanted to throw a curveball," said Hubbard when I asked him about that evening's programming...
...One of Hubbard's goals for AFR is "to give a place at the table to those groups in the country that traditionally feel alienated—at least for the last forty years anyway—have felt alienated from the entertainment industry...
...The film's director, Evan Coyne Maloney, was thrilled by the enthusiastic reception...
...The main attraction, though, was a feature made by the Acton Institute, The Call of the Entrepreneur...
...I think what you need to do is get into the marketplace of ideas and see to it that your ideas are heard...
...You've got to be a skilled artist...
...It focuses on a trio of heroin addicts who square off against a trio of Satanists while simultaneously attempting to steal a fortune from a man who has been crippled by an icicle...
...I enjoyed it immensely (the short a little less so), but I was confounded by their inclusion in the festival...
...The movie is essentially an hour-long infomercial for capitalism, but it fits Hubbard's prescription to a T. Shot in pristine high definition, The Call of the Entrepreneur was alternately funny, moving, and educational...
...Acton—described to great laughs by spokeswoman Michelle Muc-cio before the screening as "Like Cato [the libertarian think tank], but slightly more virtuous"—made this film because it believes that business has received short shrift from Hollywood for many years...
...The Hubbards offered Indoctrinate U top billing, and it played to a raucous sold-out audience at the Kennedy Center...
...they were boisterous, enthusiastic, outraged at times and laughing hysterically at others...
...The Hubbards are currently producing two documentaries of their own and are hoping to nurture a cadre of young talent that will enter the industry and make it more hospitable for conservatives...
...There was another, programming-related reason to throw Weirdsville into the mix, Hubbard said...
...Earlier this year, one of the producers complained to me about the reception the film had received from festival programmers across the country...
...The American Film Renaissance aspires to more than a simple yearly gathering of right-of-center folks looking for a good time...
...The crowd got it...
...It's not often that you see a businessman doing much good in a Hollywood film...
...Working for almost nothing isn't quite in the conservative mold—what would the makers of The Call of the Entrepreneur say?—but Hubbard's underlying point is well taken: If conservatives refuse to engage Hollywood on its own terms, they have no right to complain when a bevy of antiwar, anticorporation, and anti-Republican films are unleashed on the public...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 5
