In 2018, conservatives had the opportunity to translate an incredible story to film. It was a story that had sex, politics, the 1980s, and demonic antagonists on the Left. It was a cross between Caddyshack and The Lives of Others.
But the film was never made. The Right’s inability to do so reveals why conservatives are inept at filmmaking.
While liberals have controlled Hollywood for decades, conservatives fall short in the arts due to two things: nepotism that works as a kind of right-wing welfare state, elevating those with little talent to positions of power and visibility, which is different from how the fiercely meritocratic Hollywood and entertainment system works; and secondly, a black and white worldview that fails to recognize that the best movies often have flawed characters as protagonists.
Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire has made three dramas: Run Hide Fight, Shut-In, and Terror on the Prairie. All three are the same film with the same theme, i.e., flawless damsel in distress kicks ass with firearms. This stuff isn’t The Godfather — not even close.
The story I know would have made a great film happened during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. I was dragged into that battle when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were teenagers in the 1980s and claimed that I was in the room when the attack took place. The media went insane, using opposition research, extortion threats, and an attempted honey trap to kill Kavanaugh’s nomination. Our Stasi media charged that I’d presided over 10 gang rapes and bought and sold cocaine. They used as sources people I’ve never met. It was the most high drama America had seen in decades.
After Kavanaugh was sworn in in 2018, I went to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, to get away from D.C. It was there one night that I had another conversation with a veteran Hollywood actor who has appeared in Oscar-winning movies, and directed, produced, and written television shows, as well as starring in Broadway musicals and doing voiced animated characters for movies, television series, cartoons, and video games.
Over the phone, this talented man explored why the Supreme Court battle I had just experienced would make a great film. This was not a shoot ‘em up or an action movie, he said, although there would be action. It was a psychological thriller about the American Stasi, our version of the old German secret police. The women in this film not be helpless victims, but — considering that the FBI found out there was witness tampering going on during the hearing — like the cutthroat killers from film noir.
The fact that I am a former boozer and at one point made money photographing models made me more human, my Hollywood guy told me. (When I mentioned to Mr. Hollywood I had been told by a conservative at a public relations firm that I was not a sympathetic character, he blanched. “Why, that’s insane,” he said. “You’re almost the definition of a sympathetic character. Your flaws are at the core of what makes you sympathetic.”)
I even had a name for the movie: The Devil’s Triangle.
While no conservative foundation or billionaire could see this vision, there was someone who had once encouraged me as an amateur filmmaker. His name is Alec Baldwin.
Yes, Baldwin is a hard-Left crazy, and he needs some lessons on gun safety. Yet just before the Kavanaugh hurricane, he had seen a short film I had done for a model and singer who wound up in the top 10 on American Idol. Baldwin was impressed. “Let’s make a weird little film together,” he tweeted at me. We exchanged ideas via DM for a couple of days. Of course, when the Kavanaugh hit happened, Baldwin dropped me fast.
Still, my experience with Baldwin is very telling, especially as it contrasts with the soporific reaction on the Right. Unlike conservative foundations and think tanks, Baldwin didn’t care about family connections or who I knew. He cared only about talent. The actors he performed with in Glengarry Glen Ross were there because they were the best. This fierce meritocracy is why Hollywood movies are so superior to conservative ones.
Baldwin was a kid from a poor Catholic family in Massapequa, Long Island, the son of a high school teacher and coach who always struggled financially. “Acting was a way to ease, though never eliminate, the financial anxieties of a boy from South Shore Long island who remains inside me today,” Baldwin wrote in his memoir Nevertheless. (Baldwin also had a #MeToo moment: When a gay producer tried to kiss him, Baldwin told him that if he tried it again Baldwin would “break every bone in your body.”)
Baldwin broke a sweat to learn his craft and those around him and rose through the ranks because of hard work and talent. When this ethic takes hold on the Right, our films will get better.
We also have to embrace some ambiguity. For all his craziness (or more likely because of it), Alec Baldwin could do The Devil’s Triangle justice where a conservative could not. Baldwin knows that the best films don’t call for a girl in a white hat. They call for an antihero like Junior in Miami Blues.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, 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.
