Lights, Camera, Reaction

To many conservatives, this vignette neatly sums up Hollywood’s ideological monomania: Left-wing politics trumps even a good old fashioned roll in the hay. For every Ronald Reagan extolling the greatness that is America, supporting individual rights at home and abroad, and arguing for freedom, the entertainment industry spawns twenty Alec Baldwins fulminating against American foreign policy, decrying big business’s abuse of the environment, and threatening to move to Canada if Bush wins reelection. The truth is more complex, but evidence in support of the stereotype is not hard to find. When it comes time to donate money to political candidates, Democrats routinely squeeze their celebrity friends in Los Angeles for cash; in March, for example, Steven Spielberg hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton that netted more than $1 million for her presidential campaign. Republicans can’t count on that kind of juice.

It’s not all bad news. A small segment of Hollywood was pushed rightward by 9/11, at least on national security issues; two years ago, the New York Times identified “former liberals and centrists like the actors David Zucker, Dennis Miller, James Woods and Ron Silver” as 9/12 Republicans. In the wake of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a box office bonanza raking in $370 million, the town has seen an influx of Christian filmmakers (and Christian money: billionaire evangelical Philip Anschutz’s Walden Media bankrolled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis’s Christian allegory, to the tune of $150 million). And since the early ’90s, David Horowitz has hosted the Wednesday Morning Club, a group of conservatives who meet roughly once a month to hear a prominent conservative speak on the issues of the day.

But these efforts have done little to change the climate of political conformity, not to say paranoia, in Hollywood. In a recent trip to Los Angeles, I met with members of every industry sector, from actors to writers to agents to executives, all of whom described themselves as either conservative or libertarian or simply not left-liberal. All of them swore up and down that there is no such thing as a conservative blacklist, but few of them were willing to go on the record during our discussions. As one person put it over lunch, he had nothing to gain by outing himself as a libertarian. “It’s a complication I don’t need. . . . Why make my life more difficult?”

Enter Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Moving Picture Institute (MPI), which is one part film production company, one part salon. Halvorssen has spent the last several years shuttling back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, building a community in Hollywood that does more than sit around and listen to conservative luminaries pontificate. He is procuring funding for films–mostly documentaries–with an optimistic and freedom-loving outlook, while simultaneously creating a community of artists that will make more such pictures in the years to come. He’s also hoping to introduce a little political diversity into a monocultural industry, so that those who toil in the lower echelons of Hollywood aren’t afraid to show their true political stripes, be they liberal or libertarian, conservative or Communist.

If the name sounds familiar to WEEKLY STANDARD readers, it may be because the 31-year-old Halvorssen wears more than one hat. Through his Human Rights Foundation (HRF), he has been a prominent spokesman for the liberal opposition to Hugo Ch vez in Venezuela, where he was born (see his “Hurricane Hugo” in our August 8, 2005, issue). In an interview at the Moving Picture Institute’s West Hollywood headquarters (located in an apartment once owned by Sheryl Crow, in a building once used by the Kennedy brothers to host their West Coast trysts), he talked about the circuitous path that has taken him from Venezuela to the film industry.

His grandfather was the Norwegian ambassador to Venezuela. His mother’s family traces its roots to the founders of the South American nation. She is a distant relative of Sim n Bol -var; Crist bal Mendoza, the first president of Venezuela and the author of the Venezuelan declaration of independence, was her great-great-grandfather (imagine an American tracing his roots back to both Martha Washington and Thomas Jefferson and you’d be close). “My family’s always been doing stuff regarding human freedom” and individual rights, he told me. Halvorssen planned on continuing that tradition.

He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. After growing up on a steady diet of Latin, ancient history, and other memorization-intensive subjects at the European boarding schools he attended, he found the American university system to be less of a challenge than he had hoped for. In four years he finished an undergraduate degree (with two majors and a minor) and a master’s while graduating Phi Beta Kappa. But it was his experiences outside the classroom that were most formative. He was the editor of the Red and the Blue, an alternative conservative/libertarian weekly published by students and distributed on campus that had fallen out of favor with the college. The administration took issue with an article about Haiti, and denounced the publication as “bigoted, racist, and hateful.” In early 1995, hundreds of copies of the magazine were thrown in the trash, funding was cut off, and the group was evicted from its office space. “We then threatened to sue,” Halvorssen said, “and they settled out of court. We said ‘just let us publish.’ I was elected editor then; we published, and it was great, it was awesome, it was impacting the culture.” It was around this time that Halvorssen met Dave Kalstein, a fellow student at Penn similarly interested in “impacting the culture.”

“With Thor, it was more about bias within the history department,” Kalstein told me in the house he rents, nestled under the famed Hollywood sign. “How come 99 percent of professors in the history department are registered Democratic?” One year was all it took for Halvorssen to realize that he would never fit into academia. “I found the environment to be so closed-minded and in some ways so not stimulating,” he said. “This was not a community I wanted to be a part of.” Upon graduation, he received an award for “protecting student speech” from the president of the university–an impressive piece of irony since he had once threatened to sue her for stifling his own.

Halvorssen’s tribulations with the Penn administration led him to create the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). With cofounders Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate, Halvorssen ran the most visible (and successful) organization dedicated to defending free speech on campus the country has ever seen. He also came to understand the importance of media relations: “I did massive amounts of television, from the O’Reilly Factor to Hannity and Colmes to CNN to PBS to National Public Radio.” So after leaving FIRE, he spent some time as an independent consultant, traveling the country to help nonprofit groups increase their effectiveness. And his travels increasingly took him to Hollywood, where he began introducing himself around town in preparation for his next big project: the Moving Picture Institute.

“MPI was born out of the concept that maybe what we need is to create a community of people and encourage them,” Halvorssen told me–a community that believes in “the concept that one should affirm life. By that I don’t mean pro-life or pro-choice, I mean . . . that life is a good thing. That optimism is what makes it possible for us to, for instance, eliminate poverty.” While building the organization, Halvorssen came across a kindred spirit intent on bringing the stories of campus bias he had dealt with on a regular basis at FIRE to the screen: Evan Coyne Maloney, a novice documentarian with little more than a camera, a website, and a gift for chronicling campus political correctness. “He makes his first film, which is not very fine tuned, Brainwashing 101, and then he makes Brainwashing 201 and I’m like ‘Wow! Evan, I want to produce your film.'”

This wasn’t the first time Halvorssen had gotten into the production game. A few years before, he and Kalstein had attempted to turn Arnaud de Borchgrave’s Cold War thriller The Spike into a feature film, but nothing came of it. Maloney, though, had spent the previous three years as a full time employee of On the Fence Films (a group he cofounded with Stuart Browning, the head of a successful software company, and Blaine Greenberg, a California lawyer) gathering footage for a documentary about left-wing bias on college campuses called Indoctrinate U. After months in the editing room, Maloney and Browning were getting frustrated with the final product but knew the footage was there for a great documentary. In stepped Halvorssen. He injected some cash into the project and, more important, brought on board Chandler Tuttle, a talented editor who took the film apart and put it back together from the ground up.

“I looked at [Indoctrinate U], and I think that at the time there was a lot of frustration with where the project was,” Tuttle told me. “We’ve got this great topic, and we’ve got Evan, who is very charismatic, but it just wasn’t working. . . . Thor wanted me to look at it as a filmmaker and to get that perspective, because I think it had been mostly laypeople who had given their feedback.” Tuttle had more experience in the world of film than everyone else involved with the production combined; he graduated from NYU’s prestigious film school and worked for Focus Features, the boutique studio that distributed Brokeback Mountain, Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and other critically acclaimed films. Tuttle took a week off from work and put together a much-improved product. For his efforts in improving and distributing the film, Halvorssen received a producer credit on Indoctrinate U.

Halvorssen was very specific about his relationship with the Moving Picture Institute. Though he founded it, works relentlessly on its behalf, and steers a good deal of talent its way, he’s not professionally involved with the organization. “I’m not a staff member of MPI. I’m not even [on the board of] directors. I have no fiduciary responsibility; I can’t determine where the money goes, which allows me to be involved in a whole bunch of productions without having any conflict of interest.” His full time job is president and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation. He may be the first person to enjoy California because it allows him to be a workaholic. “One of the wonders of working out in L.A.,” he says, “is that you can have a wonderful work day in New York that ends at 2 or 3 P.M. West Coast time, which means you can then work from 3 P.M. to 10 P.M.” on other projects. The focus of the foundation is fighting the influence of dictators like Hugo Ch vez and Fidel Castro. One of his most memorable pieces on the Venezuelan strongman was an August 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed about a riot organized by Ch vez’s thugs: “Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother’s 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol. She now lies sedated in a hospital bed after a long and complicated operation. She is my mother.”

Regardless of his unofficial status at the Moving Picture Institute, Halvorssen is clearly the driving force behind the organization. “We are a production company, we are a film distribution company, we are a grant-giving education foundation, we are slowly going to become a historical archive, of sorts,” he says smiling, by way of explaining the institute’s mission. The MPI has picked up credits on a number of films, most of them documentaries. The Singing Revolution is a moving depiction of the nonviolent liberation of Estonia from the Soviet empire. Freedom’s Fury examines the cultural significance of the December 1956 Olympic water polo match between the Soviet Union and Hungary, which took place shortly after the Soviets’ bloody suppression of the Hungarian revolution. (Produced by Lucy Liu and Quentin Tarantino, Freedom’s Fury grossed more than Spider-Man at the Hungarian box office.) Mine Your Own Business is a broadside against the hypocritical tendencies of the environmental movement. Hammer and Tickle is a funny little film that explores the impact of political humor in the Soviet Union.

Mine Your Own Business is a good illustration of MPI’s place in the Hollywood food chain. The institute had nothing to do with the initial funding, filming, or editing of the movie. But once the picture was finished, it had nowhere to go. “We saw a fine cut, and we thought it was awesome,” Halvorssen says, but “the film was dead in the water with television broadcast, with any kind of DVD distribution deal.” Halvorssen pointed the filmmakers to the MPI. “We have paid for essentially all promotion, all distribution efforts, we gave [filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney] fellowships as well, which is cash. . . . The film is now being distributed in Ecuador, Argentina; it’s a film that’s really making an impact, really making a difference.”

Halvorssen also sees the MPI as a talent incubator. Chandler Tuttle could be considered Exhibit A in this regard. After his work on Indoctrinate U, the Moving Picture Institute made Tuttle a fellow, allowing him the financial freedom to leave Focus. He’s since become involved with almost every aspect of MPI’s operation: He has designed posters for the documentaries MPI is distributing; he helped edit and create visual graphics for Stuart Browning’s response to Michael Moore’s Sicko (a series of shorts on the health care industry viewable on the Internet and entitled Free Market Cure); he is writing and directing an adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron,” an MPI production with a budget nearing $100,000.

No single ideological label unites those under the MPI umbrella, and Halvorssen will place MPI interns and fellows wherever they can gain the experience and the knowledge necessary to be successful. He has already hooked interns up with people and production companies across the ideological spectrum, from the aforementioned 9/12 Republican David Zucker to Johnny Depp’s outfit, Infinitum Nihil. Halvorssen is slowly amassing and nurturing a cadre of writers, actors, and directors who, whatever their other political differences, are at least dedicated to individual liberty.

Take Halvorssen’s friend from Penn, Dave Kalstein, who was editor in chief of the Red and the Blue after Halvorssen’s graduation. Kalstein tackled different stories, such as the administration’s hostility towards fraternities. “I was trying to find more issues where I could approach people and put it on the cover of a magazine and have them be like, ‘oh wow, I’m interested in fraternities.’ And after they’re done reading the article have them say ‘I totally agree with what they’re saying,’ not even knowing that they’ve adopted the point of view that I wanted them to adopt. It’s just a more elegant way of doing it and Thor was instrumental in getting me to understand it.”

After graduating from Penn in 1999, Kalstein went to work for Elle, then GQ, and managed to sell a script to United Artists in 2005. At that point, Kalstein decided to stop “writing about fashion and blue jeans” and take the plunge–he headed out West to Hollywood. Kalstein and Halvorssen had the idea of turning The Spike into a feature, but since they didn’t hold the rights, or the money to purchase the rights, Kalstein tackled the project “on spec.” In other words, if de Borchgrave didn’t like the final product, he could simply turn them down. Undaunted, Halvorssen provided the seed money. “He’s like, ‘Y’know, how about I loan you $10,000 to be able to live the life,’ which at the time was, y’know, a lot of money,” Kalstein recalls with a grin. “I refinanced my apartment in Philadelphia,” Halvorssen explains, shaking his head. “Gave him a portion of the refi. Looking back on it, if I knew then what I know now about the film industry . . . it was absurd.” But Halvorssen “gave Dave what essentially would have been the first MPI grant, except it came out of my refinance.”

Though The Spike never materialized for Kalstein, he made a short film called Recess, about a group of kids trying to escape a dystopian boarding school in the future. Unable to figure out how to write it as a feature script, he turned it into a novel instead. Prodigy sold to Thomas Dunne Books, and Kalstein was then hired to adapt it for the screen (it’s slated to shoot late this year or early next year in South Africa with a budget of $20 million). Kalstein has since been hired as a writer for the NBC update of The Bionic Woman and is developing a series for Showtime with his literary hero, Bret Easton Ellis. (Kalstein is also happy to report that, having hit the big time, he has repaid Halvorssen in full.)

Bringing the same ethic to his novel and scripts that he brought to the Red and the Blue, Kalstein isn’t interested in making political polemics. Rather, he wants to make popular art that contains subtle political messages. Wrapped within the tautly paced boarding school thriller Prodigy, for example, one can find a number of different messages that resonate with folks outside the liberal-left cocoon of Hollywood. Writing about the establishment of the ultra-successful Stansbury Academy, a prestigious school that (a few decades hence) has developed a cure for AIDS and cancer (as well as a flying car), Kalstein fires off an anti-teachers’ union broadside:

Kalstein points admiringly to a film he did not write but enjoyed immensely: Knocked Up, the box office smash about the relationship that grows between a slacker and a career-driven entertainment reporter whom he has, well, knocked up. Though Kalstein is pro-choice and believes the writer/director of Knocked Up, Judd Apatow, is as well, he says, “You can look at Knocked Up and say it’s the biggest pro-life movie ever. It is, it’s a total pro-life movie. . . . He gave a nuanced look at why they kept the baby. Why didn’t they just abort it? Both the characters, they both took it seriously. . . . I don’t care how brilliant the conservative is, I don’t care how much money he’s got, no pro-lifer will be able to make a better pro-life movie than Knocked Up. . . . You have to tell a great story first, and your ideas will come through the story.”

“Art, if it’s well done, can have far more of an impact,” says Steve Schub, an actor and singer, in between bites of his chili dog outside of Carney’s, a hot dog stand along the Sunset Strip. “If you can have one movie that speaks, like The Lives of Others–I mean, you can read as much as you want about what life in a Communist country would be like, but that movie is so incredible. . . . I wish that was an American film.” Schub is another person who has been drawn into Halvorssen’s web. “He’s sort of [like] John Galt,” Schub says of Halvorssen, referring to the Ayn Rand character from Atlas Shrugged. “I think he’s doing a pretty good job of getting us to out ourselves [politically], to come out and work together.” Schub is an example of the diversity of ideologies Halvorssen is hoping to reach. His Ayn Rand allusion is no coincidence: He described himself as a “radical Objectivist” (“conservatives can be as much of a threat to free speech as liberals can”) to go along with Dave Kalstein (“a neoconservative”) and Chandler Tuttle (“a libertarian”). Halvorssen eschews labeling himself ideologically, insisting instead he is only “a civil liberties and civil rights advocate. . . . I’m focused on free speech, I’m focused on issues of individual rights, I’m focused on issues of poverty.” When Schub learned of Halvorssen’s efforts to promote individual rights, he took a chance and sent him an email. The two struck up a conversation, and the Human Rights Foundation will sponsor Schub’s “Afro-Celtic Yiddish ska” band, the Fenwicks, on a mini-tour this fall.

In addition to being a radical Objectivist, the 24 vet (he played “Samir” in the latest season) also happens to be the only actor who would speak to me on the record. He insists that there is no blacklist against those who don’t conform to the left consensus, though he says that “it is just assumed that you are a liberal or that you are a leftist, or on the left on some level.” It seems to annoy Schub that actors think anyone should care about their bringing “awareness” to an issue. “Why would I necessarily humor their idea on global warming, as opposed to [the ideas of] a plumber or a welder?” He thinks it can detract from the audience’s appreciation of an actor’s work if they know what he thinks about every little issue. “I think as an actor you want people . . . to know as little about you as possible. . . . With actors I love, I don’t want to know what their agenda is in life because the whole idea is that you’re supposed to seduce people into suspending their disbelief, just see the character.” Schub is no slouch, technically; he’s a member of the Actors Studio, the elite organization founded by Elia Kazan where professional actors go to work on their craft. And he’s certainly committed to social change, though not in the same way that, say, George Clooney is. “I think that real change has to happen on a philosophical-cultural level, and that’s where I think [the MPI’s] focus is.”

Since the Moving Picture Institute does not receive any sort of government funding, and isn’t really in the business of turning out profitable films, it relies on private donations to keep the operation running. One of those donors is David Thayer, a hedge fund manager who was interested in “a counterpoint to the likes of Michael Moore and Oliver Stone.” Considering “the way people’s eyes kind of glaze over during public policy debates, this could be a much more effective way, and entertaining way . . . to get the point across,” he says. In order to get that point across, however, people need to see the final product, always the most daunting obstacle for any documentary maker. In the case of Indoctrinate U, MPI has secured theatrical distribution for the film in select cities starting in October. Additionally, Halvorssen is working with a major entertainment company to create an MPI label to distribute Indoctrinate U and other films on DVD.

“I hope and I think they expect that ultimately it’s going to be less of a struggle to get a movie like Indoctrinate U into mainstream distribution outlets,” Thayer says. With any luck, Indoctrinate U will be the first, says Halvorssen. “There’s a tactical aspect to Indoctrinate U,” he told me. “There’s never been a conservative documentary that’s been put into theaters. . . . If Indoctrinate U succeeds . . . in theaters it’s the first time it’s been done. It’ll open the floodgates.”

That’s what Halvorssen wants to do in the end: open the floodgates. Encourage talented people of like mind to come to Hollywood and make films that inspire the better angels of our nature. “Films show you how people can be heroic, how the everyday man can be heroic,” he says, adding, “I have a mission, man. My mission is to make the world a little bit better.” Whether it is through combating the injustices he sees taking place on a daily basis in Venezuela, or correcting the distortions of the American dream he sees in the popular culture, he seems to be doing just that.

Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.