IT WOULD BE HARDER TO DO THE OPPOSITE:

Talk Back: Dallas group organizing conservative film festival (PATRICK WILLIAMS, July 8, 2004, dallasobserver.com)

Listen up, conservative people, could you please give the ol' Buzzer a break and stop being so damned nice and reasonable when we call you? It would make our job--i.e., flinging stones at you--much easier if you would give us a little more rabidity and a little less rationality.

What prompts this request is a chat we had Tuesday with Jim Hubbard, law school grad and soon-to-be lawyer who, along with his lawyer wife, Ellen, is behind the American Film Renaissance Institute, a new Dallas group that is organizing a film festival here September 9 through September 11. The festival intends to show "movies dedicated to celebrating pro-American values, messages and themes." So what would a right-wing film festival give us then? Dirty Harry? Selected works from Charlton Heston's filmography?

We had high hopes that Hubbard would rant, call for a Hollywood boycott and say Michael Moore is in league with Satan. "My criticism is not with liberals. My criticism is with conservatives," Hubbard says. "The film industry is not your enemy."

Huh?

In a country evenly split on politics, he says, there should be a market for documentaries and feature films with a conservative slant.

Even setting comedies aside for the moment, it's hard to think of a great movie that isn't conservative, which is perhaps inevitable given the inherent limitations of storytelling. For example, the top 6 grossing films of 2002 were all conservative as well as every Best Picture nominee this year.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2004 3:21 PM