Quick — name a great conservative movie that came out in the last five years.
Not easy, is it? Despite crushing the Democrats in the recent election, despite Hollywood’s awful recent box office, despite having hugely successful billion-dollar media companies, conservatism can’t produce a great movie. On the International Movie Database list of the “50 Best Conservative Movies,” the most recent film, Juno, came out in 2007 — almost 20 years ago. Other films on the list are indeed brilliant, but most are more than two decades old: The Incredibles, Metropolitan, The Lives of Others.
I was recently contacted by the president of a right-leaning film company interested in an adaptation of my book The Devil’s Triangle. The book describes how I was targeted by the Left in 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. After that ordeal was over, I was contacted by a well-known Hollywood actor. (He’s shared the screen with Johnny Depp.) He instantly saw the rich material in my story. “It’s a psychological thriller,” he said, noting that the story had everything — politics, scandal, sex, flashbacks to the 1980s. Then he named the budget: $10 million. Not a lot of money for a place like Netflix.
Hopefully the film institute that is interested in The Devil’s Triangle can sell the idea to investors. Woke leftist Hollywood is played out, and people are ready for something different. This doesn’t mean boilerplate conservative movies. Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire empire is now producing films. The three they’ve released are Run Hide Fight, Shut In, and Terror on the Prairie. All are damsel-in-distress dramas wherein a woman with a gun fights off outside marauders. All are basically the same movie.
Conservatives need the boldness to make not just holy-roller movies or films offering binary moral choices but films with some ambiguity and darkness. The Devil’s Triangle has sex, psychology, politics, drugs, and skateboarding — as well as Jesuits and a 1980s soundtrack. Conservative filmmakers often avoid films with flawed protagonists and challenging dramatizations of the real world, preferring to stick with dogmatic or religious stories. It’s why this spring there are no fewer than three movies about Jesus being released by faith-based movie studios.
I’m Catholic and all for Jesus movies, but I also want some variety when I go to the Cineplex. I worked in a movie theater when I was in college in the 1980s, and the best movies from that era still guide my cinematic tastes: Hannah and Her Sisters, Blood Simple, Glengarry Glen Ross. The good news for conservatives is that with modern technology and the deep pockets of some conservative donors and organizations, it’s possible to make great films that offer complex characters, thrills, and psychological insight while also reflecting our values. We can also provide great villains. In The Devil’s Triangle, I compare the modern American Left to the Stasi, the diabolical East German secret police under communism. Nazis make great villains because of their raw evil. Communists are the same.
In a recent video stream, the popular and anti-woke film critic the Critical Drinker rejoined in the failure of Disney’s disastrous and woke remaking of Snow White. “Woke is over” the Drinker announced. The people are ready for something new.
indeed they are. I have a great story — the Kavanaugh trial certainly did not lack for drama — a vision of how to bring it to the screen, encouragement from successful Hollywood actors, and a budget a fraction of what conservative organizations spend on think tanks and white papers that do nothing to change or enrich the culture.
CONSERVATIVES ARE SEIZING THE MEANS OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION
It’s worth noting that one of the people who helped me with the treatment for The Devil’s Triangle is a young filmmaker named Paul Roland, who made an outstanding film called Exemplum for $10,000. You read that figure correctly. Roland is hugely talented. He also works for a conservative website, so he can’t get the kinds of grants and support always gives to gifted young liberal artists.
The planets have aligned for the Right to finally take on Hollywood and win. As Alec Baldwin puts it in Glengarry Glen Ross, “They’re out there waiting to give you their money. Are you man enough to take it?”
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
