29 July 2006 @ 12:26PM >> The New York Times is reporting that Oliver Stone (”the director of [two] antiwar movies”) is getting praise for his World Trade Center film from some unlikely sources:

L. Brent Bozell III, president of the conservative Media Research Center and founder of the Parents Television Council — best known for its campaigns against indecency on television and for stiffer penalties on broadcasters — called it “a masterpiece” and sent an e-mail message to 400,000 people saying, “Go see this film.”

Cal Thomas, the syndicated columnist, wrote last Thursday that it was “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.”

[...]

To top it all off, a writer on The National Review’s Web site, Clifford D. May, actually wrote the words “God Bless Oliver Stone.”

This about a filmmaker whose conspiratorial tirades — not to mention his hyperviolent “Natural Born Killers,” polarizing political films “J. F. K.” and “Nixon,” and the lesser-known television documentary on Fidel Castro — have driven conservatives batty for decades. Only last year, The Washington Times, in an editorial, called the hiring of the “conspiracy-addled” Mr. Stone a “maliciously inspired choice” to direct “World Trade Center.”

The film isn’t out yet, so I can’t judge it for myself. But when the project was announced, I do remember thinking that Oliver Stone was a poor choice for a film about September 11th. (Fortunately, I didn’t write about it, so there’s no embarrassing rant to sheepishly recant.)

And that reminded me, we all have our own knee-jerk reactions and personal biases, even those of us who make a hobby out of pointing out the biases that exist elsewhere.

I’ll watch the film, simply because I’d like to be surprised by someone like Oliver Stone. It’s a healthy thing when your prejudices are proven wrong.

12 July 2006 >> The idea was simple enough: give the world a small taste of the political environment that college students face every day.

How many people outside academia realize the degree to which classrooms have become political platforms for professors? Who off campus hears that entire press runs of student newspapers routinely “disappear” because they contain opinions that challenge the campus orthodoxy? Who knew professors could be hounded out of their jobs simply for failing to register with the preferred political party?

While campus political correctness has been the subject of magazine articles and books, people rarely get a chance to see the students and professors who suffer very real punishment simply for holding the “incorrect” set of views. Never before have the excesses of the campus power structure been scrutinized in a feature-length documentary film.

Nearly three years ago, I teamed up with Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg to form On The Fence Films, specifically for the purpose of creating films that ask questions other filmmakers weren’t. Our first planned feature-length film would cover the political environment on college campuses.

I am very happy to report that this film, Indoctrinate U, is now being shown to distributors and should be released this fall. We are also setting up a campus tour to coincide with the release; I’ll be traveling to schools around the country screening the film.

• Film distributors interested in Indoctrinate U should contact Blaine Greenberg at:
  blaine (AT) onthefencefilms (DOT) com
• Students (or anyone affiliated with a college or university) who want to bring Indoctrinate U to their campus can request a screening.

Indoctrinate U covers a number of stories never before shown on screen. Some of the stories are bizarre and so hard to believe that you may end up researching them yourself. And if you do, you’ll realize that the truth on campus truly is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s frightening, and sometimes, it’s just plain depressing.

We haven’t posted our trailer online yet, but in the meantime, here’s a bit of a tease.

11 March 2006 @ 6:17PM >> Apparently, George Clooney doesn’t think enough issue-oriented films are being made. So, he’s promoting a competition called “Film Your Issue” for budding filmmakers aged 18-26.

If the “VIP judges” of this competition are any indication—they include outspoken liberal Clooney himself, a Democratic senator, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, a relic newsman who finally admitted his own liberal bias years after retiring, two current TV newsreaders, and a handful of other journalists and “social activists”—one can assume that the Film Your Issue competition is looking for issue-oriented films from a certain perspective. No surprise there.

But it might be kind of fun if the judges themselves were surprised by receiving films that did something other than reinforce their pre-existing worldviews. So, while I am too over-the-hill to submit any of my own work, I’m hoping there are some aspiring young filmmakers who might be inspired to enter.

Prove that leftists aren’t the only ones who can master the medium!

5 March 2006 @ 5:52PM >> Ed Driscoll has posted an interview with me on do-it-yourself video production.

26 May 2005 @ 11:01AM >> A number of people have been asking about the follow-up to Brainwashing 101, the 46-minute documentary on political correctness released as a preview last fall. By the end of this year, On The Fence Films will complete Indoctrinate U, the feature-length follow-up to Brainwashing 101. When it’s out, you’ll be able to see why I’ve been threatened with arrest on multiple campuses, including my own alma mater, Bucknell University. More >>

24 January 2005 >> The New York Sun profiles Evan Coyne Maloney. More >>

12 January 2005 >> Over at AcademicBias.com, the website set up to showcase Brainwashing 101, we’ve added a blog. We’ll be posting reports on campus political bias as well as updates about the feature-length version of Brainwashing 101, which is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of 2005.

Check it out and read about the Arab Muslim student from Kuwait who was told by his political science professor that he needed “regular psychotherapy.” The student’s offense? Being thankful to the United States for liberating his country after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion.

4 January 2005 @ 2:54PM >> The Liberty Film Festival announced their top 20 conservative films of 2004.

I’m happy to say that three of my films made the list: Brainwashing 101 in the “10 Best Documentary Films” category, and both Peace, Love and Anti-Semitism? and Gettin’ a MoveOn in the “5 Best Shorts” category.

While it is very flattering to be selected three times, I know there are other films that should have been on the list as well.

9 September 2004 >> Today, many American college campuses are dominated by the ideology of political correctness. According to the tenets of political correctness, the United States is the source of all the world’s troubles, capitalism is evil, and people’s biological heritage makes them either “oppressors” or “victims”. Political correctness does not tolerate dissent, so students who disagree with the ideology are often punished. Tools like speech codes are used by school administrators to enforce thought conformity. At Cal Poly, one student endured a Kafkaesque disciplinary ordeal that lasted more than a year and ended up in federal court—just for posting a flyer announcing an upcoming event! Welcome to the world of higher education today, where universities seem more intent on teaching students what to think than how to think. More >>

8 September 2004 >> For a while, I’ve alluded to a documentary project I’ve been pursuing. The time is finally right for me to tell you a little bit more about it.

At the end of last year, I formed a production company with two other partners to create a film tackling the topic of political correctness on college campuses. There are many great books that discuss political correctness, but to our knowledge, nobody has ever produced a film on the subject.

While our ultimate goal is to produce a feature-length documentary for release in 2005, a more immediate goal was to produce a short documentary and release it at the beginning of the 2004/2005 school year. That’s where we are now, and I’m proud to announce that our project—a 46-minute film entitled Brainwashing 101—will be screened publicly for the first time at a film festival in Dallas this Saturday, September 11th. (I will be there, as will my two partners in the production company.) We are also making the film immediately available online. More about that below.

Why are we releasing a short film now? Well, we’re obviously interested in finding mainstream distribution for our final film, the one that will be released next year. Knowing the political proclivities of the film business, we expect that finding distribution might take us a little more time than it does for left-of-center documentarians. So, there’s no time like now to get started making connections.

But we’re also trying to do something that might prove a lot more interesting: we’re making the first documentary where the Internet will play a pivotal role in helping create the film.

We’ll be using the Internet to organize a distributed network of digital video gatherers—what we’re referring to as our DV Squad—to cover territory that our small crew can’t. We hope to have DV Squad members at schools around the country, ready to document the political environments on their respective campuses. The most compelling of the submissions from our DV Squad members could end up in our final film. Because we’re capitalists and we believe that good work should be rewarded, we’re holding a contest for the best DV Squad footage. The top three winners will take home an Apple Macintosh iBook G4, an Apple iPod, and an iPod Mini, respectively.

We’re also using the Internet to distribute Brainwashing 101. Anyone familiar with this site knows that online video distribution is nothing new, but our 46-minute film is quite a bit longer than your typical online video. We’re really pushing the technological limits of the Internet. Can the current infrastructure provide independent filmmakers with a viable medium for widely distributing their long-form work? We don’t know; as far as we’re aware, it hasn’t been really tried this way before. Will people tolerate watching a long video in a small window? We will soon find out. (We are also making DVDs available for people who want to watch a high-quality version of the film at home.)

Want to see for yourself? Visit our new website AcademicBias.com. From there, you’ll be able to watch Brainwashing 101, download it, buy it on DVD, join the DV Squad and learn more about political correctness. We’re trying to build a website comprehensive enough to serve as a web portal for information on campus political correctness. We’re not out to replace the good websites that are already out there, but to augment them by providing users with a one-stop location for finding relevant resources elsewhere on the web.

People often stub their toes while breaking new ground. It remains to be seen whether our online experiment will work. With your help, it will. And if it does, it’ll represent another leap forward for online media.

7 March 2003 >> The original Protesting the Protesters video generated a huge response and a lot of questions. Here are some answers to the most common ones. More >>