It’s no secret Hollywood is dominated by the left.
Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro wrote a book called Primetime Propaganda where he interviewed prominent Hollywood producers, who assumed he was on the left because of his last name and his Harvard baseball cap, and they all admitted to left-wing bias and blacklisting of conservatives.
But at least one conservative producer in Hollywood is fighting back against the pervasive left-wing agenda.
John Sullivan is calling on conservatives to go to the box office and support films with a right-of-center bent to ensure diversity of ideas.
From The Washington Times:
If conservatives want any shot at influencing the culture, they need to go to the movies. Not buy DVDs. Pay for movie tickets to right-tilting feature films.
“We need your help. When a movie comes to the theaters, you have to go see it,” said Hollywood director and producer John Sullivan told the crowd at the Western Conservative Summit.
“We get two weeks in the theaters and then it’s gone,” he said. “The executives in Hollywood, we could sell 20 million DVDs and they wouldn’t care. We could have 100 million YouTube [views] and they wouldn’t care. We do $10 million at the box office, and they’re all going to pay attention.”
There’s a ripe opportunity with the anticipated February release of “Gosnell,” co-produced by Mr. Sullivan, which tells the story of Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s 2013 trial on murder charges stemming from the deaths of a female patient and newborn infants at his Philadelphia abortion clinic.
“The fact that it’s a feature film carries more political and cultural weight than anything else,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Whether the right will turn out for a movie that takes on a hot-button issue like abortion remains to be seen, but conservatives already have shown they will support Hollywood releases that carry a pro-military message.
Patriotic audiences helped drive the box-office success of recent blockbusters like “American Sniper,” “Lone Survivor” and “Hacksaw Ridge.”
In Hollywood, money talks, so box office performance is terribly important. Despite relatively zero marketing, some recent conservative firms have done well.
The article continued:
Even smaller Christian films are on a roll: Those topping $10 million in their opening weekends include “Heaven is for Real” ($22 million in 2014), “Son of God” ($25 million in 2014), “War Room” ($11 million in 2015), “Miracles from Heaven” ($14 million in 2016), and “The Shack” ($16 million in 2017), according to Box Office Mojo.
Conservative documentaries like “America” and “2016: Obama’s America,” both of which Mr. Sullivan directed with Dinesh D’Souza, have outperformed expectations, but in terms of impact, nothing beats a theatrical release.
“When you look at Hollywood in general — and I’m including the news, television, the movies and that — the driver for all this is theatrical films,” Mr. Sullivan said.
What’s missing are right-wing voices. “Really conservatives have abandoned this platform,” he said.
“I don’t know why it happened, I really don’t,” Mr. Sullivan said. “I’ve asked a lot of people. Some would say they were driven out of it, some would say it was natural attrition. But it’s something we have to go back to if we ever want to have any shot at having any point in the culture at all.”
The stakes are high. “Without that,” he said, “we might as well write everything off at this point in time. I hate to sound pessimistic in that way, but that’s the way it is.”
Starring Dean Cain and Earl Billings, “Gosnell” was produced with $3.2 million in crowdfunding in the largest fundraising effort for a film in Indiegogo history, but the film has struggle to find a distributor.
Entertainment media is a powerful medium the left essentially has a monopoly on. If conservatives want that to change, they have to vote with their dollars.
Otherwise, conservative voices in the industry will be cowed and leftists will continue to have free rein to spread their propaganda.