MB Civic

By JOHN ANDERSON

LOS ANGELES

“THERE are exceptions to every rule,” said the writer, director and producer Charles E. Sellier Jr. “But I’ve been at this 34 years, and I really, honestly, believe that the more creative you are, the more likely you are to be a liberal.”

“I think there is a huge disconnect between conservatives and film,” said the festival director Jim Hubbard. “I don’t know if it’s in their DNA or what, but there’s definitely a reason conservatives tend to shun the arts.”

“The conservative movement has been about talk radio, maybe books,” said the filmmaker Michael Wilson. “Film — and music, to a large degree — has long been considered in the realm of liberal thought.”

It would be natural to assume that the three men quoted above labor somewhere on the left side of Hollywood, or make movies about free-trade coffee pickers and Chinese sneaker factories. None is the case. Mr. Sellier, chief executive of Grizzly Adams Productions, has been responsible for documentaries like “George W. Bush: Faith in the White House” and the religiously themed “Breaking the Da Vinci Code.” Mr. Hubbard, with his wife, Ellen Gard Hubbard, founded the right-leaning, Dallas-based American Film Renaissance festival in 2004. And Mr. Wilson was responsible for one of the more successful conservative documentaries of recent years, “Michael Moore Hates America.”

What the three acknowledge, however, is that something besides liberal bias is responsible for the striking shortage of conservative nonfiction cinema at a time when filmmakers on the other end of the spectrum are flooding screens with messages about global warming, the war in Iraq and the downside of Wal-Mart.

Mr. Hubbard, for one, is out to fill the void. He said a philanthropist, whom he declined to identify, had come forward with money to help finance a series of six documentaries that Mr. Hubbard wanted to produce, on various subjects, including the growth of government and whether it is “potentially a threat to our freedom.”

Mr. Hubbard traces his own passion for the hitherto missing conservative cinema to an experience almost five years ago, when he was attending the University of Arkansas law school. He and his wife, he says, went to their local art house, where the menu was “Bowling for Columbine,” “Frida” and “The Life of David Gale” — films, respectively, by a liberal, about a Marxist and against capital punishment. The Hubbards weren’t pleased.

“We support art,” Mr. Hubbard explained during a recent interview. “We want more people to make films with all perspectives. But what we noticed was a definite lack at the center-right of things. If you look at the top 20 documentaries in the political genre, 18 or 19 take a left-of-center position. And if you look at the last election, 51 percent of the country takes a right-of-center position. You’d think there’d be a market there.”

Still, the Hubbards and others, if they are to succeed, will have to figure out exactly why conservative expression, so vibrant in books and broadcast in recent years, has remained muted on film.

A number of factors present themselves. Hollywood’s studios, which often shun onscreen politics for fear of alienating one side of the audience, are barely a factor in the documentary business. But documentaries are relatively inexpensive to make, so most are scratched together with independent financing, then go scrambling for an audience — on cable television, at political gatherings or, for the lucky few, in theaters.

It’s no secret that film festivals don’t just serve as the cradle for many political documentaries, but also provide the only home they’ll ever know. Neither is it classified information that many festival programmers and audiences, by their own description, lean leftward. But several programmers interviewed for this story — from Geoff Gilmore at Sundance to Carl Spence at Seattle to Ally Derks at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam, the largest documentary festival in the world — said they simply did not get many conservative films.

“We did get one very interesting film a few years ago — partly financed by the Army — that was a tale of the heroic hardships of some of the most celebrated and later successful P.O.W.’s in Vietnam,” said Alan Franey, program director of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

“It was quite gripping in a ‘Little Dieter Needs to Fly’ sort of way,” he added, referring to Werner Herzog’s 1997 documentary about the adventures of a pilot who had been shot down during the Vietnam War. “But our staff were, probably rightly, convinced that our audience doesn’t appreciate ‘that sort of thing.’ ”

Richard Peña, program director of the New York Film Festival and a member of the New Directors/New Films selection committee, similarly noted a dearth of strong conservative prospects. “For a number of years we received submissions from a Christian university of films that always looked like cheap sci-fi and were always about forced abortions,” Mr. Peña said.

“I frankly can’t think of docs with a conservative slant,” Mr. Peña added. “New Directors did show Néstor Almendros’s ‘Improper Conduct,’ but Nestor would have argued that it was truly a left film, since it defended gay rights, while attacking Castro. The festival also showed a documentary years ago, about the Ukraine famine in the 1930’s, written by Soviet attacker Robert Conquest. The gist of his argument was that the famine was ordered by Stalin to take care of those unruly Ukrainians, but his evidence had been disputed. But those are probably more marginal cases.”

Meanwhile, others in the documentary world argued that the very nature of conservatism runs counter to the rebellious impulses that make a good film — in effect, contending that a critique like Robert Greenwald’s “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” is inherently more exciting than a defense like Ron Galloway’s “Why Wal-Mart Works.”

“The origin of the word conservative is about not changing, accepting what is,” said the director Wash Westmoreland, who is not a conservative. “And that’s never a very interesting thing to make a film about. The thing that drives you to make a documentary is seeing it as a way to social change. Societies with little conflict tend not to make interesting art.”

Before he and his partner, Richard Glatzer, made “Quinceañera” — which won the grand jury prize for dramatic features at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — Mr. Westmoreland directed “Gay Republicans,” which profiled various members of the Log Cabin Republicans and the split within the group over President Bush’s stance on gay marriage. Though each character in the movie was Republican, it remained a story about a progressive struggle.

The notion that conservatism is essentially static would probably come as a surprise to some of the exuberant right-leaning thinkers who have upended the talk-radio world. Yet Mr. Sellier, with several religious documentaries to his credit, finds some truth in the idea.

“In order for a mind to soar at the possibilities and come up with someone no one ever thought of and making a film about it and showing it at a film festival — it means you’re out of the box,” he said. “And if you’re out of the box, you’re out of conservative thinking, aren’t you?”

Mr. Sellier described himself as an evangelical Christian, but also as a pragmatic businessman. He follows market research. He said he makes the films he makes because there’s an appetite for them. “You may come back to me in five years and ask , ‘Why is the only thing you make sci-fi movies?’ ”

Mr. Hubbard, however, points to the lack of supportive infrastructure as a major stumbling block for conservatives like Mr. Wilson, who had no shortage of creative energy when he conceived his “Michael Moore Hates America.”

“Michael had a great idea,” Mr. Hubbard said of Mr. Wilson, whose film parodied Mr. Moore’s own “Roger & Me” by following around an unresponsive Mr. Moore and attempting to debunk his film “Fahrenheit 9/11.” (Mr. Moore comes under frequent attack, from the film “FahrenHYPE 9/11” to the Web site “Bowling for Truth.”)

“Here you have an individual that conservatives despise, a critique of the No. 1 doc of all time, and he couldn’t raise a nickel till it was too late,” Mr. Hubbard said. “It boggles my mind. That film got standing ovations at both screenings we gave it in Dallas.”

With his newfound financing, Mr. Hubbard said he expected to produce films that were more than simple polemic, though whether they will satisfy the likes of Lincoln Center’s Mr. Peña or Vancouver’s Mr. Franey remains to be seen.

“A documentary should be an investigation,” Mr. Hubbard said. “You might have a preconceived notion, but we definitely want to keep an open mind. If we have to criticize Republicans, we’re going to criticize them. And if we find a place to praise Democrats, we’re going to do that.”

Mr. Wilson, who is planning to make a film with Mr. Hubbard, seconded the notion that conservative films will succeed only if they reflect deeper cinematic values than many have shown to date.

“I’m a movie guy,” said Mr. Wilson. “I went to see ‘Nacho Libre’ yesterday. But because documentaries have moved to the forefront, a lot of people have started making documentaries — and not everybody’s a filmmaker.”

Initial offerings to Mr. Hubbard’s Dallas festival or the conservative Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles, he said, included “a lot of movies that were like two-hour speeches. It might be important to someone who’s making it, but it doesn’t engage anyone else.”

But word of better conservative films, including his own, has been spreading, he said. And, inevitably, that has gotten him meetings in Hollywood. “One executive told me: ‘Listen, everybody has his or her politics, and in Hollywood they tend to skew leftward. But the bottom line is, if you can make us money, we want to work with you.’ It’s still a business.”