In the last two weeks, my attention has been focused on three cultural events. The first is an upcoming concert at the Strathmore Center by Cecile McLorin Salvant. The second is Angel Down, the novel, set during World War I, that just won the Pulitzer Prize. The third is promoting my upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival, which got promoted in National Review.
During that time, Matt Walsh did what he always does. He complained. Walsh complained that movies aren’t any good, that everybody’s woke, and that American culture stopped doing interesting things in 2007. He complained about a culture that he knows little about. Walsh doesn’t know Cecile McLorin Salvant. He never talks about Angel Down, a brilliant novel about war. He’d done nothing to promote the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
Walsh is culturally illiterate. Walsh could be doing a lot to change the culture. If he got behind the festival and helped promote it, we could showcase the kind of freedom-loving filmmakers that Walsh says he wants to see flourish. He recently posted about making patriotic American films:
One of the big reasons for the current lack of patriotism and pride in our nation’s history is that about 40 years ago our most prominent storytellers in Hollywood just basically stopped telling stories about American history altogether, unless it has something to do with WW2, civil rights, or slavery. I mean they just released a movie about the meteorologist who did the weather report for D-Day. They’ll give WW2 weathermen their own movies before they tell a story from any other era of American history.
The Right has attempted to counteract this a little bit, but “conservative” attempts at American history films and TV shows are invariably hokey and kid friendly, the kind of thing you can watch with your grandmother and your 5 year old, and you’ll all be equally informed and bored by the experience.
We need R-rated adult-oriented American history stories. Daniel Boone should have his own series. It would be gritty and violent and not for children, but it would also be phenomenally entertaining and put an American legend back on the cultural map, so to speak. The fact that Daniel Boone hasn’t been depicted on screen at all since like the 60s is a travesty. Throw a dart at that guy’s Wikipedia page and you’ll land on something that could be its own feature length trilogy.
I have a perfect R-Rated movie for Walsh—The Devil’s Triangle. It has drama, humor, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and 1980s flashbacks. Walsh won’t engage with this idea. Because he’d rather complain than doing something.
Walsh’s idea about making patriotic movies caught the attention of Amanda Milius. Milius’ father John Milius was a great Hollywood director, producer and screenwriter whose credits include Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry and The Wind and the Lion. Milius offered this take:
The reason I’ll never really like “conservative first” content or art slop is bc I came from someone and was myself someone who grew up “craft first” w politics as the undercurrent. While most of these ppl were doing their assigned social studies classes or reading the Federalist Papers for the 800th time, and have never taken a visual arts class in their life, my Dad forced himself to perfect the craft of writing in a high school for maladjusted students who got thrown out of prep school and then went to the best film school in the world. And I spent my formative years in art school, working at an art house video store, and then also went to the best film school in the world. That actually is worth something.
The problem w the right is there’s a lot of people in charge of $ and media who haven’t spent a min working on an artistic craft and CANNOT tell good from bad at even the most basic level.
I get that Matt hates me for dunking on the [Daily Wire] for years and their own hokey content but show some respect to people like my Dad that personify the point you think yr new in making re conservative films that are actually good.
What DW will never realize is the material has to be good first and conservative second. Or you’re just making homework on film.
Conservatives don’t have the guts to do something creative. 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 brilliant but most are more than two decades old: The Incredibles, Metropolitan, The Lives of Others.
Over the last century, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries—not as much for ideology, but because they mastered the craft of storytelling. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on challenging plays in the 1930s and in 1941 directed Citizen Kane. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone. Conservatives, even wealthy ones, are never willing to plant this kind of seed money. It’s why we fail.
One of the films we’d like to show is the short documentary Dreaming Against the World. It depicts the life of Mu Xin (1927-2011), a brilliant yet largely forgotten artist of the 20th century. Xin was imprisoned during China’s Cultural Revolution. The documentary filmed on location in China and New York by filmmakers Tim Sternberg and Francisco Bello, both nominated for Academy Awards. In 1971, the Chinese government accused Mu Xin of having illegal relationships with foreign countries. Mu Xin was arrested and imprisoned for 18 months. Three of his fingers were broken and almost all his artworks destroyed. From 1977-1979, he was under house arrest. As Dreaming Against the World shows, he protested with art, asking for a pen and paper which was sometimes granted. “I want to prove that I'll create art to my last breath,” he said. “I'm a slave in day, but a prince at night.”
We could discover and promote the next Mu Xin, and make more films like Dreaming Against the World. We could do that if we had the right resources and support. Matt Walsh could be invaluable in that effort. Yet he refuses.