Joe Farris (Filmmaker)
Joe Farris started making films during the Obama administration. Today, he runs a production company turning out popular movies and video programing. He doesn’t look like what conservatives are supposed to look like—he still has long hair, and his office echoes with what he describes as “nü nü-metal” music. However, he has little use for liberalism in general, or for liberals themselves.
We started out in a crappy apartment in St. Louis, where I was from. We thought we ought to go to Hollywood, but we didn’t have any money. We had just enough cash for some cameras and our computers and Internet access. We would make these little short videos and edit them with software we downloaded for free. We’d finish cutting them and then post it on our YouTube Channel.
Our stuff wasn’t political at first, or what we thought of as political. We were trying to be funny, because funny means hits. So did cats. We kept trying to think of a really funny political cat video because we knew that would go viral. Never did, though.
I was never political before, but I was very much about freedom—especially on the web. I was really pissed off to read about how the NSA under Obama was gathering all sorts of Internet tracking info. I thought that they, being liberals, should be against that sort of thing. But they weren’t.
We were doing pretty well, getting a reputation. We’d put something up and get 50,000 hits in a day. The next time, we would shoot for 100,000. It was still a new thing back then for a bunch of nobodies with a little bit of equipment to be able to get an audience.
Now, we would play off of other material in our political stuff—you can’t satirize something without referencing it, right? But we’d get all this copyright grief. Studios and companies would demand YouTube and other sites pull our stuff for infringement, and they would. But it wasn’t infringement—it was fair use, like our lawyers told us, but there was nothing stopping these big companies from throwing their weight around to screw us over.
Funny, but I first thought it was conservatives doing it. You know, big business equaled conservative? So I was totally sideswiped when I did some research and found out that the liberals were backing these big companies over little guys like us. The only people sticking up for us on Internet freedom were the constitutional conservatives. It kind of freaked me out. I thought I hated the Tea Party and it turns out we agreed on a lot of stuff that was important to me.
So, we started tweaking the left for hypocrisy. Some of our viewers didn’t like it because we were not, you know, on the team. Well, I don’t play on teams—I do what I want. But, because our videos weren’t afraid of taking on liberals, we got a reputation as conservative.
I thought that was going to limit us as far as getting an audience, but things were changing. The old ways of doing business were dying. I was reaching millions of people with my work and it had never been on TV or in a movie. The dinosaurs in Hollywood couldn’t ignore us anymore—they were getting desperate because people were going around them to get the media product they refused to provide.
We got an e-mail from an agent in Hollywood. He actually said that he wanted “to do lunch”—he used those exact words! I’m not sure what was funnier—him using that phrase or him just assuming we had to be in his town to do what we did. Like I said, the established Hollywood types just did not understand the changes overcoming their industry.
I called him on the phone and broke the bad news to him, first that I was half a continent away and second that we were conservative. He was more worried about where we were. He said that with the kind of traffic our videos were getting, he’d meet with us if we were the Khmer Rouge.
Technology totally opened the doors to the entertainment industry, which I think was and is probably the most important element of American culture. It’s a battlefield we had no choice but to go fight on as conservatives. For too long we left most of it—with exceptions like country music—to the cultural left. And we paid for it.
The old entertainment industry was built on several structural factors. First, they produced product—movies, TV, records, books—that required a huge capital outlay for equipment and for professionals to use it. Studios, cameras, recording equipment, printing presses, and highly paid people to use them cost a fortune.
That was a huge barrier to entry in the past. Back then, those independents who did do their own work often ended up making things like Plan 9 from Outer Space and all those terrible DIY punk records people used to sell out of their Gremlin hatchbacks for a buck. My dad told me about those. My generation had a different experience.
Besides money, the majors also controlled the distribution of entertainment. They were gatekeepers. If you wanted to be on TV, in a theater, in a record store, or in a bookstore, you had to go through them. And if they disapproved, you didn’t get through at all.
Well, that was all dying right as the conservative movement really got underway. While primo equipment is still pricey, it is possible for nearly any group of entrepreneurs to gather up the money to make their product. We did. And this was a product of pretty high-level technical quality. A lot of what we did was comparable to the stuff produced by the majors. Professionals still had their place, but modern technology made it exponentially simpler to do what it used to take a highly paid pro to do.
The gatekeepers found themselves guarding the gates while the walls were tumbling down around them.
So, we stopped waiting at the gates. We were just going to go around the gates because the walls were collapsing. Sure, only a major studio could open a film at 3,000 theaters, but anybody could get on video on demand. And everyone did—have you seen how many movies you’ve never heard of are out there? Content is king.
Back when Obama was president, it became possible to watch whatever you wanted whenever you wanted with just a couple clicks of your remote control or on your computer or device. It’s normal today, but back then it was incredible.
And we got into the industry with outspoken conservative material. So did a lot of other conservatives. Of course, most of it was crap, but most of everything is crap.
There was a huge opportunity for conservative folks to enter the entertainment industry without waiting on an invitation. By simply making product, they gained visibility. The ones that made good stuff, the ones that found an audience, eventually found the industry eager to take advantage of them. Sure, most of the folks in the entertainment industry were liberal, and probably most still are, but all of them really like money. And if they think a conservative will make them money, he’s got a shot.
There was one important principle we needed to learn. There was no room and no market for “conservative entertainment.” None. Zip.
There was always room for quality entertainment, entertainment that finds an audience because it’s good. That it is conservative too is a fringe benefit. Anyone who is trying to make entertainment that tries to be conservative before it’s entertaining is going to find that his product sucks before it does anything else.
I remember people would come into Hollywood with a lot of money and announce they wanted to make conservative films. What’s a conservative film anyway? I’d say Saving Private Ryan or Dirty Harry were conservative films from a time when conservatism was frowned upon. But these guys always thought it meant a movie with no action, no sex, no bad words, and no freaking point. Usually, it would have characters talking about Jesus—hey, nothing rocks a theater like 10 minutes of theological exposition.