Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
At the inaugural American Film Renaissance festival, conservative moviemakers take feeble aim at Hollyweird -- and arch-nemesis Michael Moore.
Sep 15, 2004 | Speaking at the American Film Renaissance's small opening-night reception at the Dallas Intercontinental last Friday, the right-wing film critic Michael Medved claimed that "the huge success of 'The Passion of the Christ' has changed Western culture permanently and forever." He's simply stunned, he said, that Hollywood wasn't trying to cash in on the shift.
"What is it about one of the most profitable movies in history that they don't understand?" he asked, as a crowd of about 50 festival-goers nibbled miniature roast beef sandwiches, spring rolls and empanadas. "There is something wrong here! There is a very real problem! The problem is not that people objected to the movie because it was anti-Jewish" -- indeed, he said, the charges of anti-Semitism were "sick, twisted and demagogic."
"They opposed it not because it was anti-Jewish," he said, "but because it was pro-Christian."
Like so many of the people at the inaugural American Film Renaissance festival, Medved spoke with an easygoing Rotary Club ordinariness that belied the seething anger underneath. There was none of Zell Miller's fire and brimstone in his voice as he blandly called for more demeaning portrayals of gay people in the mass media, saying, "Every single image of homosexuality you see on TV is positive. It's not only positive, it's glowing. It's saintly. When was the last time you saw a nasty gay character? A degraded gay character?"
Medved is a bigot, but he's also on to something. Many people on the coasts haven't reckoned with the true cultural complexion of vast swaths of this country. They tend to make movies and write articles and produce albums as if their fellow citizens inhabited the same reality that they do. But there is another world in America, a through-the-looking-glass universe in which conservative Christians, despite dominating all the branches of government, feel persecuted by the state, in which gun control is seen as the natural precursor to genocide and Bill Clinton is suspected of covering up Iraqi responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombings. Residents of this febrile realm believe they're the majority and that sinister, cringing liberals are denying them their cultural due. Convinced that the film industry is conspiring against them, they want to create a cornfed Hollywood of their very own, from the grassroots up.
According to the story that festival founder Jim Hubbard, 35, told repeatedly to journalists and attendees, he was inspired to create the American Film Renaissance after he and his wife, a pretty, bouffant blonde named Ellen, went to an art house theater one night and were distressed to find that their only choices were Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" and the Frida Kahlo biopic "Frida," about "a communist artist."
"Where are the films for normal people?" he asked.
The American Film Renaissance was created to give films for "normal people" -- in this iteration, the far right -- an outlet. It was held at Dallas' Studio Movie Grill, a theater with waiter service where audiences can order burgers, pizza, nachos and other greasy snacks while they watch movies. According to Hubbard, the timing wasn't intentional, but Sept. 11 was invoked over and over again in the festival's selections, the burning towers shown to punctuate all sorts of arguments about liberal treachery.
Hundreds of people turned up -- some traveling cross-country for the experience. David Goodman, owner of a New Jersey DVD distribution company, bought several titles, and says he'll soon have them in megastores like Wal-Mart. "This is the counterbalance to 'Outfoxed,'" he says, speaking of Robert Greenwald's recent documentary about Fox News. "This is the counterbalance to 'Bush's Brain' and 'Fahrenheit 9/11.'"
One of the films Goodman picked up was "The Siege of Western Civilization," the 45-minute fledgling effort by Herb Meyer, a 58-year-old who once served as vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council under President Reagan. An avuncular, moon-faced man with bright, engaged eyes, Meyer speaks with disarming calm about the second civil war he believes the United States is currently fighting, a war his film seeks to explain as it bounces from the dangers posed by al-Qaida to those posed by liberalism and low birth rates.
"There are those who wish to turn us from a Judeo-Christian into a secular culture," he explains, sitting in the Intercontinental lounge. "This really is a kind of civil war. This is not normal politics. We are two cultures in one country. That's never happened before. I'm not sure we can survive where half of us think marriage is between a man and a woman and half think a man can marry his goldfish."
For all the risk that liberalism poses to the nation, Meyer is sanguine about his side's imminent victory. "It's panic time for the liberals," he says. Medved echoed him, saying, "Secular people in America know very well they're outnumbered. They know very well they're outclassed, and they are in fear."
Judging by the American Film Renaissance, though, the right has quite a ways to go before it can take on Hollywood.
