Freedom's Filmmakers
by Edward L. HudginsFriends of freedom in America and elsewhere are often distressed that much of popular culture, especially on movie and TV screens, is dominated by those who would limit liberty. Thus, it is refreshing to see a new group that promotes freedom not through political activism but through film, working on projects that have involved even A-list director Quentin Tarantino and gorgeous superstar Lucy Liu.
The Moving Picture Institute is the brainchild of 31-year-old Thor Halvorssen. Halvorssen explains that the freedom movement has done a great job of advancing its cause by using empirical evidence and sound intellectual arguments. But it needs to engage the public on the emotional level as well and not bemoan, but make its mark on, popular culture.
Fighting on the Cultural Front
A free society can be sustained only if its ideas, principles, and values are held in the minds and hearts of the people. But surveys suggest serious problems. For example, in one survey, only 23 percent of students knew that James Madison was the father of the American Constitution while 98 percent knew that Snoop Dogg was a rapper. Yet, such facts also suggest that popular culture is a potent medium for communicating ideas, principles, and values. Sadly, most proponents of freedom have been absent from that arena.
In recent years, documentary films have come into their own to spread ideas and worldviews. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11 raked in $119 million in the United States and another $103 million overseas. In 2006 Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth brought to the silver screen an argument that one would normally expect to find in science journals or policy papers.
Enter Thor Halvorssen. Halvorssen was born in Venezuela, seemingly biologically destined to fight for freedom. His family in that country goes back to the 1530s. One of his relatives is Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan who liberated much of South America with a vision of Enlightenment principles similar to those of the revolution in the United States.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Halvorssen received both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in history. He had to sue his school when it tried to bar the campus newspaper he edited. Concern for academic freedom led him, over a bottle of wine with Alan Kors and Harvey Silvergate in 1999, to establish the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which helps students and academics who are the victims of political correctness and repression on campus. Halvorssen was the group’s first executive director and CEO, serving in that post until 2004.
But he was also interested in the arts and culture. Recently, he explained to TNI that as a teenager he read the novel The Spike by Arnaud de Borchgrave and wanted to make it into a movie. When he was twenty-four, he entered into an agreement to do just that; it’s still in the works.
Thus, it was no surprise when, in July 2005, the entrepreneurial Thor Halvorssen came up with the idea for the Moving Picture Institute. Over breakfast with Frayda Levy on a cold winter morning late that year, he decided that he would invite her to become its president. Halvorssen also recruited Rob Pfaltzgraff, COO at FIRE and a graduate of Tufts with a degree in American studies, to became its executive director.
Freedom on Film
A film project has many steps: development, pre-production, production, post-production, distribution. At any stage, money or talent can fail to appear; creative differences can occur, or management changes can result in cancellation.
This is where MPI comes in. Halvorssen explained to TNI that the group he founded “focuses on movies that will make a difference in the struggle for American values. We are unlike any other foundation promoting the principles of American freedom. We exist to nurture the development of filmmakers through a major internship program to provide crucial support for filmmakers through production grants, whether it’s for a feature film, a narrative documentary, or a short film.”
MPI, he continues, “eschews the labels ‘conservative,’ ‘liberal,’ or ‘libertarian.’ That allows so many people who might have disagreements over this or that particular issue to all come under the same umbrella.”
But there’s no question about the organization’s purpose: “We view the film industry as unconcerned with exploring the idea of liberty or developing a distinctive and nuanced portrayal of deep-seated American values like freedom of speech, freedom of association, and, especially, the free enterprise system.”
Early Impact
The folks at MPI understand the process of filmmaking, and, in just over a year, have jumped into numerous projects at all levels of production. MPI already is funding eight fellowships.
The company has been involved with three films that already are released and being seen. (See sidebars.) Hammer and Tickle documented how humor supported the aspirations of freedom-loving people living under communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Freedom’s Fury looked at the literal and symbolic victory of the1956 Hungarian Olympic water polo team over the Russian team, just weeks after Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the democratic government that had all-too-briefly overthrown communism. It premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
The most recent, Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism, focuses on the desire of the poor people in Romania, Madagascar, and Chile to have Western mining companies set up operations that will provide them with jobs and prosperity—and the condescension and callousness of eco-advocates who seem not so concerned about the environment as about keeping the poor of the world impoverished.
The New York opening of Mine Your Own Business was packed; 150 had to be turned away. The Atlas Society, publisher of The New Individualist, co-sponsored the film’s premiere in Washington, D.C.
But the film also generated just the intolerant and repressive reaction that Halvorssen and Pfaltzgraff fought when at FIRE. MPI invited the head of Greenpeace to the Washington premiere in the National Geographic Society auditorium. Greenpeace, which had not even seen the film, responded with letter to the society calling on it to ban the film from its facilities. The day before the premiere, eighty environmental groups worldwide published a letter condemning the film.
A handful of demonstrators stood outside of the society’s building on opening night to condemn the film as corporate PR and to argue that most residents of the Romanian village eyed by the Western firm for its operations did not want a new mine. The film’s writer/narrator, Phelim McAleer, confronted the protestors, offering $1,000, then $2,000, then $3,000 to anyone who, through a legitimate poll or survey of that village’s citizens, could prove that claim. No one took him up on his offer.
Coming Attractions
MPI has a number of other exciting projects in the works. Highlights include:
Indoctrinate U. This was the story that inspired Halvorssen to start MPI and that reflects his and Pfaltzgraff’s concerns at FIRE. Written and narrated by Evan Coyne Maloney, it focuses on how institutes of higher education are attempting to snuff out opinions contrary to the dominant anti-freedom ideology promoted by many faculty and administration officials. The film’s executive producers are entertainment attorney Blaine Greenberg and software entrepreneur Stuart Browning, the latter an Objectivist who is now an MPI Fellow working on short films about healthcare. This film is ready for distribution.
Empire of Wealth. The film is based on John Steele Gordon’s book, subtitled The Epic History of American Economic Power—a celebration of America’s rise from small colonies to world power, not principally by means of military might but through the creation of wealth. Currently in development.
Harrison Bergeron. This is a film version of the Kurt Vonnegut classic about a future society that literally enforces egalitarianism on all individuals. The story shows the terrifying logical consequences of those who want no one to be better than anyone else. Periodic noises blast in the ears of smarter people so that they can’t think any better than anyone else. The best dancers must wear weights on their legs lest they perform better than others. The MPI Fellow who will be directing the project, Chandler Tuttle, carries a copy of Ayn Rand’s Romantic Manifesto and the U.S. Constitution in his briefcase. Currently in pre-production.
Zabbaleen. In Egypt, this word means “trash collectors.” The film looks at minority Coptic Christians who, through their own efforts in the free market, are able to make a living for themselves and work peacefully with their Muslim neighbors in a part of the world not known for freedom or tolerance. For those interested in Hernando De Soto’s insights on the rise of markets in less developed countries, this film promises to be a must-see. Currently in production.
Into the Future
Thor Halvorssen currently holds only the title of “Founder” at MPI. He has complete freedom to do as much as he wants and other things as well. In association with actor Andy Garcia, he is currently producing a narrative film, Against All Hope, about the horror of life in Fidel Castro’s Gulag and the struggle of one individual who refuses political rehabilitation. Halvorssen has started yet another organization, the Human Rights Foundation, of which he is the president and CEO, and to which he is devoted to during the workday.
Rob Pfaltzgraff is optimistic about MPI’s future. The organization will continue to help promising filmmakers. It wants to assist individuals at every level of the film industry—not only writers and directors, but managers, agents, financiers, you name it. It aims to create a group of people committed to freedom across the industry.
Says Frayda Levy: “Just as there are organizations and associations committed to offering opportunities and intellectual guidance to young professors, lawyers, and journalists, MPI wants to assist the directors, agents, producers, and screenwriters of tomorrow’s filmography.” To that end, MPI has created a Creative Council that includes acclaimed director David Zucker (of Airplane and Scary Movie fame), Rob Long (producer of the “Cheers” television show), Cecilia DeMille Presley (producer and granddaughter of the film industry’s founder—who was also Ayn Rand’s first employer in the film industry—Cecil B. DeMille).
Freedom in America has allowed America’s film industry to become the world leader. It is therefore only proper that those involved in the industry recognize the values on which their success is based. MPI will continue to remind them of that and to foster those values in an industry that has such a profound affect on American values and culture.
[SIDEBAR FOLLOWS]
NOTEWORTHY FILMS FROM THE MOVING PICTURE INSTITUTE
Freedom’s Fury
Most of us remember well the 1980 victory of the American Olympic ice hockey team over the heavily favored Soviet team at Lake Placid, New York. That victory took on its special significance against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and communist expansion around the globe.
But few remember the equally dramatic confrontation between the Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, only two weeks after Red Army tanks crushed the freedom revolt that erupted in Budapest. Freedom’s Fury documents the history of that failed revolution and how the Hungarian people’s aspirations for liberty came to be embodied in that sporting event.
At the end of World War II, Soviet troops occupied Hungary. The desires of that country’s people to replace fascism with democracy were slowly strangled by the rise of the Communist Party in Hungary, backed by and employing the same repressive tactics of Stalinist Russia. But by 1956, Hungarians began to let their desires for liberty be known.
Freedom’s Fury shows us how the October demonstrations, led at first by students and later joined by individuals from all walks of life, brought tens of thousands to the streets of Budapest. They forced Stalinist dictator Mátyás Rákosi to step down and ousted the hardline Communists in favor of a government of reformers who asked remaining Russian army units to leave and announced their intention to withdraw from the Soviet-run Warsaw Pact. But while Moscow indicated its intention to abide by the wishes of the Hungarian people, it worked secretly with Hungarian Communists to quell the uprising. On November 4, the Soviet military rolled into the country. Hungarians put up a strong resistance. Thousands were killed in the fighting but were no match for the Red Army. Reform Prime Minister Imre Nagy was arrested and later executed.
Against the birth and murder of Hungarian freedom, Freedom’s Fury shows us archival footage of the Hungarian water polo team training for the 1956 Olympics in Australia. The film also interviews the surviving team members, who describe how they wondered whether, after the bloody events of that fall, they would be able to get out of the country.
Fortunately, they did, and the match-up with the Russian team in Melbourne, only two weeks after Soviet tanks rolled over the bodies of so many of their countrymen, became the symbolic focus of the aspirations of all their countrymen. The match itself was brutal. Hungarian team star Ervin Zador was sucker-punched by an opponent, and the “blood in the water” and on his face symbolized his nation’s own bloody struggle for independence. The Hungarian team’s victory in that match was bittersweet in another way: The team understood that half its members would defect to the West, possibly never to see their homes and families again.
The film ends with the now-elderly surviving members of the Hungarian team, as well as those of the Russian team, meeting in Budapest. All the animosity is gone. They want to remember that Olympic spirit.
Freedom’s Fury is important because current generations must not forget past struggles for freedom if they are to fight for it today and in the future. It was written and directed by the brother-sister team of Colin Gray and Megan Raney Aarons and narrated by world-famous swimmer Mark Spitz. Thor Halvorssen was co-producer; executive producers included Quentin Tarantino, Lucy Liu, and Andrew G. Vajna, who was also responsible for such hits as First Blood, Total Recall, Evita, and Terminator III. The documentary premiered at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
Mine Your Own Business
In Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism, Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer writes and narrates the story of how Westerners, who you’d expect would want to foster the quest for prosperity by people in less-developed countries and in lands emerging from the yoke of communism, argue literally that those people would rather remain poor.
McAleer takes us first to Rosia Montana, a village in rough and rugged rural Romania. The Canadian firm Gabriel Resources wants to open a gold mine in this area that has been mined since Roman times. Pure gold—for the impoverished and unemployed locals who face an even worse fate as the state-owned operations wind down.
But Western environmentalists say “No!” Belgium activist Françoise Heidebroek, who lives far from Rosia Montana in Bucharest, calls that village a “magic place” and believes the gold mine will ruin it. She suggests that the locals can earn livings instead from agriculture, raising sheep, growing vegetables in little gardens, and tourism. She also opines that most locals might prefer horses to cars. And she bemoans the mining company’s efforts to move locals out of the part of the town where they want to set up operations.
But McAleer can find no locals who yearn for subsistence farming. Out-of-work miner George echoes his neighbors’ desire for good jobs with a Western firm to replace the ones lost as the state operation closes. George points out that the area is already pretty filthy and polluted because of the money-losing government enterprise that will be required to shut down as Romania enters the European Union. By contrast, Western firms are far more environmentally friendly and will run their operations in compliance with EU standards. Do the natives want horses rather than cars? As one villager observes, “We are human beings and we need to develop.”
Remote Rosia Montana will never become a tourist magnet; there’s little to attract wealthy Westerners. And the lack of indoor plumbing is a reason why villagers whose houses are being purchased by the Canadian company (it is not allowed to seize homes) welcome the opportunity to sell out and move to a nicer area. Ironically, environmentalist Heidebroek works for the country’s railroad, which can and does seize property.
McAleer shows us a village near Rosia Montana with no major employer or Western investment. Its few remaining people scratch out a marginal living smashing up the remains of old industrial facilities to sell for scrap. It’s like a scene out of Atlas Shrugged.
Is this condescending desire to force villagers to be “happy peasants” limited to a few environmentalists in Romania? McAleer takes George to even-poorer Port Dauphin in Madagascar, where environmentalists have fought for fifteen years against opening a mine there. In this case, Mark Fenn, the country representative for the Worldwide Fund for Nature who lives in that country but not in that village, wants to save the “quaintness” of Port Dauphin. Fenn shows off his $35,000 boat and the foundations of his dream house in a country where the average income is $100 per month.
When the matter of material prosperity is brought up, Mark explains to an incredulous George that we must ask what and whom we perceive to be rich and poor. Yes, a mine would bring jobs and prosperity; but if one spends time with a family in Port Dauphin, one can “count how many times in the day that family smiles, and if you could measure stress” you’d find them better off than most folks in the developed world.
Mark maintains that, in any case, when these people get money, they don’t want to hang onto it. They spend it all in three or four days; they buy beer and throw a party, perhaps purchase a stereo and some jeans. He further explains: “Indicators of quality of life are not housing, they’re not nutrition specifically, they’re not health in a lot of cases, it’s not education. A lot of…children in Port Dauphin don’t go to school because the parents don’t consider that to be important.”
One has trouble focusing as McAleer shows us villagers who want nothing more than jobs, prosperity, and a better future for their children, while Mark Fenn’s children go to school in South Africa. For in the words of a friendly, good-looking, and well-spoken Westerner, one has just heard as pure an anti-human evil as one can imagine.
McAleer finds more of this unbelievable condescension in a British environmentalist who wants to stop a mining operation fifteen thousand feet up in the Chilean Andes. Sure, 27,000 people applied for the five thousand jobs, but, he explains, for so many natives there is a “spiritual connection with earth.” No matter how materially well-off these people might become, he claims, digging into sacred mountains will mean they will lose the core of their spiritual reality, something they’ll never recover.
Writer Deepak Lal tells McAleer that environmentalism is a “new secular religion” and denounces the “misanthropy of the green movement.” McAleer observes that “progressives” used to march to demand jobs for all, but now march to deny them to the poor of the world. He summarizes the theme of his film well by calling for “the dignity of development.”
At a Q&A session after its premiere, the film’s co-director and producer, Ann McElhinney, observed that leftwing actress Vanessa Redgrave—with no sense of the irony of her action—walked onto a stage decked out in gold jewelry to accept a prize for her work to stop the goldmine in Rosia Montana.
Hammer and Tickle
Most of us cannot imagine what it would be like to live in a repressive communist regime. Yet millions of individuals did. How did they cope?
Many laughed!
In Hammer and Tickle, filmmaker Ben Lewis gives us a whirlwind history of communism. But unlike most documentaries, he uses re-enactors, archival footage, and individuals who opposed the system to show how humor helped people cope, and how it helped bring down a system that its subjects saw as a horrible joke.
Communism was bigger and better than other dictatorial systems: the queues were longer, the party congresses were bigger, there were ten times as many secret policemen. But the harder the times, the better the jokes; and best of all were jokes about communism.
Lewis shows us up front that humor was recognized at the highest levels as a weapon against the system. President Ronald Reagan tells of a conversation with a communist who is asked about the potato supply: If we put them in one pile, they’d reach the foot of God! But in the Soviet Union, there is no God. Well, there are no potatoes either!
Reagan’s joke echoes one about two Russians standing in a long line. One says, “My son is playing William Tell in school play.” The other asks, “But where did they get an apple?”
Such jokes began with Lenin and the Russian Revolution. What’s the difference between capitalism and communism? Capitalism is the exploitation of men by men. Communism is the exact opposite!
After Lenin’s death, he’s lying in state. As a man files past, the bodyguard remarks, “Lenin is dead, but his ideas will live forever.” Replies the man: “If only it were the other way around.”
The era of Stalin was even harsher for subjects of the Soviet government, and Lewis shows us this as reflected in the jokes of the period:
Stalin asks his driver, “Are you more or less happy since the revolution?” “Less.” “Why?” “Before revolution I had two suits; now I only have one.” “What are you complaining about? In Africa people walk around naked.” “Yeah, when did they have their revolution?”
Under Stalin’s collectivization of farms, some seven million people starved to death. Thus, Soviet subjects joked that Stalin was having a problem with mice in his office. An advisor suggests that to get rid of them, he should make his office a collective farm: half the mice will die of hunger, and the other half will run away.
But jokes were not always a laughing matter. Lewis tells us that some 100,000 people were sent to the Gulags for so offending their communist masters with humor. Thus, the joke about the competition for telling jokes: first prize—twenty-five years! And an aide finds a judge in a Moscow courtroom laughing hysterically. “What joke’s so funny?” he’s asked. “I can’t tell you; I just gave a man ten years for telling it.”
World War II brought the joke about Hitler and Stalin in hell, the former up to his neck in feces, the latter only up to his waist. Why isn’t Stalin also up to his neck? He’s standing on Lenin’s shoulders!
After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev didn’t seek to jail people for telling jokes. Perhaps Soviet leaders felt it was better for people to joke than to demonstrate in the streets or try to escape, as they were doing in Soviet satellite countries.
So, one guard at the Berlin Wall asks a second guard, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” “Yes,” is the answer, followed by the response: “Then I’ll have to arrest you!”
Soviets officials tried but failed to use jokes at the expense of the West. In the end, they allowed jokes in their own controlled publications at the expense of shop assistants or petty bureaucrats, which spoke to peoples’ frustrations without challenging the system.
But decades of communism led to inevitable economic decline: “How come you don’t have any cheese in the shop today?” “Sorry, we’re the shop with no meat. The shop with no cheese is across the street!”
Queuing for necessities became a way of life: “Where did you find toilet paper?” “I didn’t buy it. It’s just back from the laundry.”
And nothing worked. A Soviet factory manager brags about his productivity: In the first year they produced five hundred items, in the second year five thousand, in the third year one hundred thousand, and next year it will be five hundred thousand. What does he produce? “Out of order” signs!
Even Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika couldn’t stop the outbreak of freedom in Eastern Europe and the final fall of communism—nor the endless supply of jokes at the system’s expense. Lewis ends with President Reagan, who would tell these jokes and not just to conservative audiences. While other diplomats and presidents might be too mistakenly polite to do so, the Gipper told them to Soviet leaders to their faces when he met with them. This was his way of saying, “I know the nature of your system, you know the nature of your system, and your people certainly know the nature of your system.”
Hammer and Tickle won the top prize at the Zurich Film Festival and has aired on BBC4 as well as French and German television. Thor Halvorssen was executive producer of the film, and he tells TNI that the film was purchased by and will air on the Sundance Channel this spring.
Ben Lewis opens the documentary with Orwell’s quote that “Every joke is a tiny revolution.” At its end, we understand that the fight for freedom takes on many forms. We have Lewis, Halvorssen, and the rest of the staff at MPI to thank for capturing on film a major victory on this oft-ignored front.