So, you want to win the culture wars? It would help to engage in a little culture

National Review, Dec 13, 2004 by Ross Douthat

I'VE never attended a major film festival, but it's a safe bet that none of them--not Venice or Cannes, not Sundance or Toronto--begins its Saturday-night screening with the Pledge of Allegiance. Or opens nearly every film with a "support-our-troops" montage of military photos, set to a pulsing rock beat. Or passes around collection boxes for the "Wounded Warrior Project," and invites filmgoers to write letters of encouragement to U.S. troops abroad.

Into this breach has stepped the American Film Renaissance festival, which debuted in Dallas this September in a strip-mall movie theater sandwiched between sprinkler-fed subdivisions and a Smoothie King. Billing itself as "the nation's first and only conservative film festival," the AFR weekend was a cheerfully ramshackle affair, where left-wing journalists milking the weekend for laughs easily outnumbered movie stars. And that's only if Timothy Bottoms--whose Showtime-produced Bush hagiography, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, was screened on opening night--really counts as a star at all.

The festival was the brainchild of Jim and Ellen Hubbard, she a chipper trial attorney with bouffant hair, he a heavyset man with the hangdog air of a less-than-ruthless Harvey Weinstein. "It was a labor of love," Jim told me, and so it would seem, since the couple raised most of the necessary money from family and friends (their only sponsors were a local talk-radio station and WorldNetDaily), screened and selected every entrant themselves, and spent most of the festival scrambling around with walkie*talkies, keeping the theaters full, the soda flowing, and the films running on time.

The one thing they couldn't do, alas, was find enough good films to fill even a longish afternoon, let alone a weekend. The festival's movies were often awful in fascinating ways, but they were awful nonetheless. Sometimes--as in the piously minded Beyond 'The Passion of the Christ': The Impact--the filmmaker assembled reams of interesting footage and then simply threw it all on screen, with little sense of editing or narrative drive (and a cloyingly preachy voice-over). Other films were more slickly packaged but still lousy, like libertarian radio host Larry Elder's pro-gun, anti-Michael Moore polemic Michael and Me, or the soullessly polished George W. Bush: Faith in the White House. Still others were painfully tone-deaf, like Innocents Betrayed, which could have passed for a History Channel documentary about genocide, save for a narrator intoning--over shots of piled Cambodian skulls or trains bound for Bergen-Belsen--that gun control inevitably leads to state-sponsored mass murder. (Innocents Betrayed, I later learned, was produced by the Wisconsin-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership. Make of that what you will.)

So there was nothing in Dallas to make liberal Hollywood quake in its boots, and much to make it chuckle derisively: Stars-and-Stripes hats and "I Luv Halliburton" T-shirts, a ubiquitous British journalist peddling grievances against the BBC and the Guardian, and an almost pathological obsession with Michael Moore among filmmakers and audience members alike. (Though to be fair, the weekend's second anti-Moore flick--Michael Moore Hates America, by a twentysomething documentarian named Mike Wilson--was easily the festival's finest, and funniest, effort.)

Grassroots indie cinema isn't the Right's strong suit just yet, in other words. "Microsoft wasn't Microsoft in its first year," Jim Hubbard insisted gamely, but the reality of the weekend was better captured by filmmaker Jack Cashill--a friendly Kansan whose quasi-documentary, Mega Fix, spun a dazzling conspiracy theory linking the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800 to covered-up acts of Islamist terrorism. A conservative film festival, he told me, is "like a bear riding a bicycle--you don't criticize its technique, you're just happy the bear can ride."

THE PASSION OF CONSERVATIVES

This wry wisdom was a far cry from the enthusiasms of the festival's opening night, when film critic Michael Medved assured an eager crowd that The Passion of the Christ had revealed the existence of a vast and heretofore-untapped market for conservative-leaning art and artists. He might have had a point--but a weekend watching the AFR's offerings suggested a striking lack of the creative wherewithal needed to take advantage of such an audience.

For this, conservatives can blame the left-wing lockstep of the country's artistic community--but they can also blame themselves. Over the last 40 years, the Right has labored in the wilderness, building a counter-establishment of magazines, colleges, think tanks, and news networks, with an array of foundations--Olin and Bradley, Scaife and Koch--to finance them. And in this wilderness campaign, conservatives have been wildly successful, training a generation that can craft election strategies, run for Congress, plot entitlement reform, and even make a bid to transform the Middle East.

But when it comes to literature, architecture, television, and film, the Right has mainly expended energy trying to reduce its power to shape the artistic landscape--highlighted by its long-running and only recently abandoned effort to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts. For all the supposed vastness of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, its only significant tentacles in the artistic realm consist of a few excellent but low-circulation journals like The New Criterion. Even the recently founded Claremont Review of Books, envisioned as a conservative answer to The New York Review of Books, concerns itself almost exclusively with works of history and political philosophy. The conservative footprint in film and music is all but invisible--despite all the attention-grabbing plaintive liberal ink spilled over the politics of Fox News.