Episode 231: “Reclaiming the Culture through Film” with Michael Pack

Global streaming services are projected to reach over 1.5 billion subscribers in 2025 with worldwide spending on TV, film and documentary production reaching over $220 billion a year. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max alone account for more than $75 billion of that spend with almost all of it on woke progressive themed entertainment. Looking only at documentaries and small independent features, the Left spends tens of billions of dollars each year.

The Left’s successful decades “long march through the institutions” has captured Hollywood and it now owns the cultural narrative. Conservatives have paid a big price for downplaying the importance of culture, seeing its airy fictions as less serious than economics or politics.

The numbers show it. The right spends, maybe, only tens of millions of dollars on films and television, a spending gap of over hundreds of billions of dollars.

Artists are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and if conservatives hope to regain the cultural ground, we need to get into the game. 

Joining me to explain how is Michael Pack, documentary filmmaker and the former CEO of the US Agency for Global Media. Michael’s produced over 15 award-winning films for public television, and most recently Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.

Conservatives who have basically surrendered the culture wars often claim, "We can't fight back because the left is naturally more artistic and given to storytelling."

Michael and I do not believe that's true and that the culture wars are winnable, but only if we take them seriously.

This episode provides a start, exploring the craft of making - and the business of financing - filmed storytelling and documentaries. We cover film schools, production facilities, cinematography, sound, editing, the foundations financing progressive filmmakers and much more.

We also talk about the pure fun of filmmaking and storytelling. It’s a lot more fun than politics.

Based on my experience, the actors are all pretty good-looking, the creatives are fun to work with and it's a joy to be on a movie set. Getting into movies is not like taking your castor oil.

We start with story and the truth that the most effective way to win hearts and minds is through the telling of stories.

From the first cave paintings, to the Bible, to Shakespeare, to today, stories are how people learn to understand the world, and each story is a model for how the world works.

“People crave epic stories, meaningful life pursuits, and courageous figures who appear to stand for something,” relates Michael. “Good stories are stories of heroic individuals, usually not without flaws, dealing with complex things and making choices.”

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, I am much more optimistic about the culture, especially the story-telling media, than about politics and government.”

Politics is actually a harder game to win. The administrative state has really dug in and civil servants have iron-clad protections.

On the other hand, the culture is still relatively a free market. We can make films. We can set up streaming companies. We can set up distribution companies. 

“We have simply seeded that turf to the Left,” says Michael. “We have simply let them have it. It's not a culture war when only one side has an army in the field and the other side just writes essays about how they don't like that army. “

We have to be making culture, not just complaining about it, and it is not that hard to do and we can do it.