Fighting the culture war one documentary at a time
Michael Pack
Video Embed
The documentary Emmys were announced on Sept. 28. As an Emmy voter, I can attest to the consistently high quality of these winners. No one should be surprised that many were liberal, such as HBO Max’s The Janes, about a Chicago group that performed over 11,000 abortions before Roe v. Wade, that Hillary Clinton was the executive producer of a Netflix winner, or that not a single film has a conservative point of view.
Over the last few decades, documentaries have had a renaissance, a surge of production value, artistic skill, and audience approval. Nonfiction now accounts for a good deal of the content on streaming services and TV, from true crime to reality shows to documentaries that are, as we used to say, “ripped from the headlines.”
NOVEMBER TO REMEMBER: DISTRICT ATTORNEY RACES FOCUS ON SPIKE IN CRIME AND PRISON VERSUS REFORM
Seeing their power and ubiquity, liberals have made documentaries one of their primary tools to gain public acceptance of their ideas. For example, the New York Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, a series of articles and later a book claiming that all of American history is based on racism, is now an Emmy-nominated six-part series for Hulu. Former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have a multipicture deal with Netflix. Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary 13th popularized the idea that mass incarceration is a racist idea embedded in American history. Since before Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth in 2007, celebrities have lent their support to films about global warming and continue to do so.
What might be surprising is that conservatives have not made much use of this powerful medium. While many on the right have complained about the culture, they have not bothered to produce much of it, especially the storytelling media, including documentaries.
On the left, it is quite the reverse. Just follow the money. Over many decades, the Left’s vast fundraising machine has poured money into documentaries, as it also has into feature films, from big foundations such as Ford and McArthur to for-profit production and distribution companies that are explicitly devoted to social justice, such as Participant and Magnolia. I estimate the Left spends tens of billions of dollars on “woke” content compared to, at most, tens of millions from the Right, and has done so for over 50 years.
As a result, there is now an entire ecosystem supporting young liberal filmmakers. It begins with the thousands of film schools that often advertise themselves as training activists. Then, the budding liberal filmmaker can turn to a network of liberal funders, film festivals, distributors, and awards. While many young filmmakers may aspire to be Steven Spielberg, most will make nonfiction, which is cheaper and now omnipresent on the web.
This is all to the credit of the Left, which is fully engaged in the battle of ideas, utilizing every media to make their case. The fault is with the Right, which has deserted the arena to the detriment of all Americans.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Unlike government or academia, culture is a relatively free market. If conservatives simply imitate what the Left has done and devote a similar amount of energy, money, and talent to movies and TV, the culture will change.
In my own case, I have worked at producing fair, balanced films that tell stories that the Left has ignored. Over many decades, 15 of my films were broadcast nationally on PBS, most recently Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words; the trailer is here. Whereas the Left wanted to tell the Ruth Bader Ginsburg story in multiple feature films and documentaries, Clarence Thomas’s dramatic journey from dire poverty in the segregated South to the highest court in the land had been ignored. Our goal has always been to reach beyond Left and Right to the vast center, which a good story, fairly presented and well told, can do.
As a result of America’s cultural imbalance, there are many such stories left untold or undertold. Even worse, the “woke” bias against American traditions and obsession with race, class, and gender resulted in some very misleading documentaries and feature films. Where are the movies celebrating the West’s victory in the Cold War or critical of shutting down the economy to get to net-zero emissions?
As the Left long ago recognized, producing a few good films is not enough: A parallel ecosystem to develop and nurture new talent is needed. Palladium Pictures, my new company, is starting to build this ecosystem through a newly launched incubator program to train young right-of-center filmmakers. Each year, we will select several talented filmmakers, fully fund their short documentaries, and then distribute them. Fortunately, there are many new ways to distribute video content, especially shorts. Much, much more is needed to create a true ecosystem, including plentiful amounts of funding and larger distribution platforms.
Those who tell the stories control the terms of the debate. The public needs a fuller, truer picture of their history, their recent past, and current controversies. I put my hope in a new generation of storytellers, if we give them the help they need.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Michael Pack is a documentary filmmaker, president of Palladium Pictures, and former CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. He has produced over 15 documentaries for public television, most recently Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.