Conservative Filmmakers Are Changing Hollywood – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The Dream Factory: that’s what they used to call Hollywood. As the long-forgotten silent-movie star Norma Desmond sings in the 1991 musical Sunset Boulevard: “We taught the world new ways to dream.” To people of my parents’ generation, born in the 1920s, it was unimaginable to let a week go by without making a trip to the local picture show. Significantly, Americans tended to love the same movies, no matter where they lived or how they voted — there was no such thing as blue or red states — and the movies they loved most tended to be the ones that ended up being rewarded with Oscars. 

In other words, there was cultural harmony. The Academy Award winner for Best Picture in 1939, Gone with the Wind, was also that year’s top-grossing film; in 1940, the Best Picture, Rebecca, was the fifth-biggest earner; in 1942, the Best Picture, Mrs. Miniver, raked in more than any movie other than Disney’s Bambi; in 1943, the Best Picture, Casablanca, came in at number four at the box office; in 1944, Going My Way won the Oscar and was the top grosser. Ordinary moviegoers, in short, tended to agree with Academy voters — and, I might add, highbrow critics.

By the time my cohort came along in the 1950s, so had TV, which stole some of the movies’ thunder, as a result of which the film industry began to lean more on spectacle (The Ten Commandments) and less on story. Still, the audience favorites continued to be the critics’ darlings. (In 1957 and 1959 respectively, Bridge on the River Kwai and Ben-Hur came in number one at the box office and won Best Picture). The youth-centered social revolution of the 1960s led to a decline in the amount and quality of adult fare and to the rise of antiheroes (Midnight Cowboy, Bonnie and Clyde), although the relaxing of censorship also made possible the creation of gritty masterpieces like The French Connection, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver. A couple of decades later, the arrival of the internet, which brought with it a cornucopia of entertainment options, brought new challenges to the film industry. 

Still, the well-oiled machine kept chugging along, bringing with every year a new batch of estimable product — although, as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, more and more of the most popular movies tended to be sequels or remakes, many of them about superheroes, while some of the most critically acclaimed films tended to engage in crude left-wing message-mongering that left the ordinary moviegoer cold. If World War II had occasioned pictures (Casablanca, Mrs. Miniver) that rallied audiences to the cause, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq brought on a slew of projects (among them Redacted, Syriana, Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, and Stop-Loss) in which Americans were the bad guys. Increasingly, the critics and other elites diverged sharply from the general public. 

Then, some time in the last few years, the woke virus infected America’s cultural elites, and Tinseltown, which was already dangerously prone to politically correct virtue-signaling, went totally bonkers. In 2016, Hollywood came down hard on itself for having nominated only white people for the 2015 acting Oscars — a trauma that led in 2020 to a new set of diversity rules that finally took effect with this year’s awards ceremony on March 2.

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Under the new rules, a film, to be eligible for Best Picture, has to meet two of four standards. To meet Standard A, either the story has to be about an approved minority group, or a major character has to belong to an approved minority group, or 30 percent of the actors have to belong to at least two approved minority groups. To meet Standard B, a certain number of creatives, technicians, and/or crew members who worked on the picture must belong to an approved minority group; to meet Standard C, members of approved minority groups must have been given special opportunities by companies associated with the film; to meet Standard D, a certain number of senior executives at the studio that produced the film must belong to approved minority groups.

These new rules are defended by the Left as generous and flexible. In fact, they put certain movies entirely out of the running. The American Spectator’s editor, Paul Kengor, told me that Reagan, which was based on one of his books and which, released last August, was a standout movie in an otherwise unimpressive year, is ineligible for a Best Picture Oscar. To be sure, these days it’s almost impossible to imagine the Academy celebrating a sympathetic movie about the Gipper, even if it were eligible. 

After all, during the last eleven years — even before these diversity rules took effect — the Oscar for Best Picture has gone to a movie about slavery (12 Years a Slave), a movie about Jim Crow (Green Book), a movie about being black and gay (Moonlight), two pretentious items directed by Mexicans (Birdman, The Shape of Water), one dishonest dose of Catholicism-bashing (Spotlight), a story about a singer born to a deaf family (CODA), a South Korean black comedy (Parasite), a Chinese-born director’s slam at American capitalism (Nomadland), the ultra-weird Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Oppenheimer. 

All of these movies were critically acclaimed, but few (Oppenheimer was the major exception) found large, enthusiastic audiences. What did people rush out to see? Consider last year’s list of top-ten hits, which consisted mostly of cartoons and superhero movies and fantasy adventure stories, several of them sequels (Despicable Me 4, Kung Fu Panda 4, Inside Out 2); the only top-ten hit that was also one of the ten Oscar-nominated pictures was Dune: Part Two. 

Yet even these lightweight genres have stumbled of late, with wokeness infecting everything from superhero reboots (in which long-beloved characters are presented as transgendered) to Disney remakes (such as this year’s feminist Snow White). The result: box-office figures have plummeted, with domestic grosses for Hollywood releases dropping by almost 25 percent between 2019 and 2024. Meanwhile, the legacy media continue to deny, as New York Times film critic A. O. Scott did in a preposterous 2022 article, that Hollywood is liberal at all. And one of the five performers nominated for Best Actress this year was a biological male.

But fear not: Hollywood’s self-immolation has an upside. Recognizing that the Dream Factory has alienated at least half of the American public with its kooky politics and its vast condescension, a growing number of filmmakers who dissent from the Left Coast’s worldview have stepped into the breach. Their efforts have been aided by the fact that advancing technologies make motion pictures easier and cheaper to make than ever; and their films, pretty much ignored by the legacy media, have been able to garner the requisite publicity thanks to conservative podcasters and other alternative media.

Indeed, some of those films have been produced by the Daily Wire, home of several major conservative podcasts. Its two most consequential releases have been directed by Justin Wolf and have featured the podcaster Matt Walsh. What Is a Woman? (2022) pulled back the curtain on the cast of freaks with medical degrees who have encouraged the butchering of children’s genitals. In Am I a Racist? (2024), Walsh explored the wacky world of the “anti-racism” racket. Ignored by mainstream critics, Am I a Racist? became the year’s top-grossing documentary. And of course, it was snubbed by the Academy when it chose the nominees for Best Documentary, even though there were plenty of blacks and women onscreen. 

Daily Wire co-founder Jeremy Boreing, who has a background in film production, has explained that when it comes to filmmaking, his company’s goal is not to counter left-wing propaganda with right-wing propaganda: All that conservative audiences ask of films, he says, is that they don’t “spit in the face of their philosophy” and that they entertain. Nor does he want Daily Wire to replace Disney. He wants “Disney to become Disney again … serving the entire audience, not just a fraction.” And by competing for ticket buyers’ dollars, he asserts, the Daily Wire has pushed Disney in that direction. 

Daily Wire isn’t alone in challenging the film establishment. Angel Studios, founded in 2021, has released films about Jesus, the heroic Nazi-era theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the sainted nun Mother Cabrini, and David and Goliath. So far, its most successful release has been Alejandro Monteverde’s Sound of Freedom (2023), in which Jim Caviezel plays Tim Ballard, who has rescued children from sex traffickers in Colombia; also in the cast are such established actors as Mira Sorvino and Bill Camp. Made on a $14.5 million budget, it grossed $250 million. 

Mainstream critics were nasty about Sound of Freedom, and the Academy gave it the cold shoulder; ordinary moviegoers, however, were extremely positive. Caviezel, you may recall, is the actor who played Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), which can fairly be described as the precursor of all of these films. Like Sound of Freedom, The Passion of the Christ offended the elite critics but attracted huge audiences: bringing in $612.1 million worldwide, it remains the highest-grossing independent film ever, a record of success that the people at Daily Wire and Angel Studios plainly seek to emulate.

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Not to be outdone by the Daily Wire and Angel Studios, Breitbart, the news and opinion website founded in 2007 by the late Andrew Breitbart (famous for saying that politics is downstream from culture), released its first cinematic venture in 2022: My Son Hunter, directed by Robert Davi from a Brian Godawa screenplay based on a story by Phelim McAleer. I greatly looked forward to this picture, which starred Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden, because there was so much remarkable material to work with; but the film turned out to be an illustration of exactly the kind of failing that makers of countercultural cinema most need to strive to avoid. 

Taking entirely for granted an audience that shared its creators’ legitimate disdain for the Biden family, My Son Hunter did a maddeningly sloppy job of going after Joe and Hunter, clumsily mixing farce with pathos and ending up with something inert that, damn it, could have been powerful. (“You get the impression,” I wrote in my review, “that the filmmakers had two entirely different concepts for this picture and decided to go with both of them.”) The lesson: sharing the politics of your intended audience doesn’t excuse the kind of lazy approach that has drained the networks’ late-night talk shows of anything remotely resembling humor. 

In November, Business Insider reported that both Amazon and Netflix — apparently having noticed the success of films like Am I a Racist? and Sound of Freedom — are now “leaning toward faith and family-based shows and films,” with new titles like Amazon MGM’s biblical series House of David and Netflix’s R&B, “a take on the biblical love story of Ruth and Boaz set in the modern-day American South,” and Mary, “a biblical epic starring Anthony Hopkins.” Yet Business Insider emphasized that the bicoastal entertainment execs remain ticklish about material that’s “too religious or conservative” and don’t really “know the audience” that they want to reach — a state of affairs that “could change as more people leave Los Angeles for states like Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee, which have growing film and TV production hubs.”

“The more people come and see that the big, bad scary heartland and the South are not what they think it is,” one agent told Business Insider, “the friendlier they are to tell the story of these places.” Precisely: While heartland Americans thoroughly grasp the mentality of coastal Americans, the opposite is definitely not yet the case. But we may well be getting there. Let’s hope so. Because the more that the elite come to understand and respect the so-called flyovers — the people whom Hillary Clinton notoriously dismissed as “deplorables” — the better chance the U.S. stands of returning to something resembling national unity. 

And the better chance, moreover, Hollywood stands of regaining its footing. Annually, an organization called MovieGuide, which publishes what it calls “movie reviews for Christians,” examines the box-office receipts of the films released during the year in light of those films’ perceived political orientation. (In 2016, for example, Sully and Hacksaw Ridge were considered conservative, while Jackie and Moonlight were labeled liberal.) Routinely, its analyses have shown that Americans, to a substantial extent, prefer pictures that are perceived to have conservative content over more leftist offerings, with the former doing five or six times better at the box office than the latter.

All of which suggests that just as rinky-dink little companies like Paramount (founded in 1914) and Warner Bros. (1923) ended up being giants in international entertainment, the advent of start-ups like Angel Studios and the Daily Wire’s film unit may well mark the beginning of a massive new industry that, during the second Trump term, will release a growing number of movies that align with the tastes, values, and opinions of the American people — just as Trump’s administration is, at this very moment, transforming our military, our foreign policy, and the other sectors of our government in such a way as to make them more satisfactorily reflect the views of the electorate. 

We can dream, can’t we?

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