As I've said here before, the new front line isn't the shop floor or the street protest, it's the media machine. So far the Left has been largely useless at doing anything about this. Blogs are a start, but they're no more than that - they're easy to marginalise and can be painted as being outside of the mainstream.
What changes hearts and minds is two things.
Mr. Moore made a film about a serious problem here in the US and the audience is responding. We don't know, at this point, if it will prove to be a spark igniting a fire, a turning point, or if it will be forgotten in 3 months. All that can be said now is it's a small victory. But it is a victory and I'll take it.
One guy can only do what one guy can do. It is my understanding it takes at least a year to bring a film to market and then another couple of months promoting it. Say a couple of months recover time and we're at 18 months per project. (I hope someone who knows what they're talking about will chime in! ;-) If this is accurate, and I have no reason to claim it is, we need 18 film-makers making films as fast as they can to have one film released per month.
There are other documentary film-makers working away but they don't get the publicity Mr. Moore does. Nor do they get their films screened. The normal documentary in the US shows on 10 to 15 screens before disappearing into DVD-land. Eugene Jarecki made an indictment of the US military-industrial-political system in 2005, Why We Fight. At the height of its run it showed on 64 screens (Whoopie) with a US gross of ~$1.5 million (Whoopie.) The reviews I've seen of the film are complimentary. Sony Classics picked-up the DVD rights so it should be rather good. I don't know. I haven't been able to see it. Has anyone on ET seen it? The winner of the Oscar for 2005 was March of the Penquins. March won the Oscar, grossed ~$78 million, was a huge success, and appeared - after winning the Oscar - at the highest point on 2,506 screens in the US. In my local outlet there are stacks and stacks of copies of the DVD.
I'm not going to cavail MotP was a success as it disseminated information about GW that certainly needed to be broadcast. But I do think the information contained in Why We Fight was, and is, more critical.
So I have to gloss my own argument by adding, those 18 film-makers required to release one film a month have to be really, really, good film-makers who don't stretch the audience too much.
Moral: If you're going to make a 'downer' film include cute fuzzy animals.
and keep the hard information in the background.
I've been focusing on documentaries since the same problems are even more critical in narrative film-making. (Correction requested!) Using the Warren Beatty film Reds as the prototype we discover the driving force, the foreground (?), of the film is the relationship between Jack Reed and Louis Bryant. That's where, if I'm not mistaken, the audience invests, emotionally. The political background, my main interest in the subject, is kept very much as background or stage-setting -- if those are the words I want.
All of the above was written so I could say: we need to encourage "our" film-makers and budding film-makers. Nothing is more discouraging than to shed your blood only to have 12 people show up to fill a 500 seat auditorium. We need to show them that if they tear their guts out making a film there is an audience who will come and be moved by their work. A doo run-run-run, a doo run-run
