From The New York Sun, headline is linked.
A Conservative Answer to Michael Moore
Profile: Evan Coyne Maloney
BY JACOB GERSHMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 21, 2005
Evan Coyne Maloney, 32, who dresses and looks like a college student, may very well be America's most promising conservative documentary filmmaker. Yet the Upper East Side resident hasn't completed a single film.
The hype unaccompanied by output says a lot about the room for growth in the conservative documentary community. But a number of those on the right expect Mr. Maloney's unfinished debut film, "Brainwashing 101,"to emerge as a breakout theatrical hit - or at least to make it to theaters, a feat few films of its political ilk have managed to achieve.
A sardonic attack on political correctness in higher education, Mr. Maloney's film was hailed as the "most anticipated" documentary in 2005 by the American Film Renaissance, an upstart film institute based in Dallas. People attending October's Liberty Festival in Los Angeles apparently gave a preview version of it a standing ovation - though not of the duration of Michael Moore's 20 minutes at Cannes. A critic writing for the insider Hollywood Web site Ain't It Cool News called the first cut of the film one of the most "horrifying and hysterical documentaries I have ever seen."
As the title suggests, the 46-minute film, which Mr. Maloney is racing to expand into a full-length documentary by fall, is his attempt to confirm the worst assumptions that conservatives have about what goes on at universities. His film is about the spread of noxious speech codes, abuses of power by vindictive administrators, and the arbitrary restrictions on academic freedom imposed on conservative students - cases of which, the film argues, are increasingly cropping up in universities. The film begins with images of Columbia University, a university embroiled in a controversy concerning students who say professors violated their academic freedom.
On the road with Mr. Maloney across the country, the viewer watches an economics professor from Mr. Maloney's alma mater, Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, explain to the filmmaker that most white students at the school are "unconsciously racist" and that much of the "cutting-edge" work in his field is "being done in feminist economics."
Mr. Maloney then turns his camera to the case of Steve Hinkle. A student at California Polytechnic State University, he was disciplined by school officials after posting a flyer promoting an upcoming speech by a black conservative who equated welfare and slavery. The school dropped charges against Mr. Hinkle only after a civil-liberties organization sued, saying the university was violating freedom of speech.
To top it off, Mr. Maloney interviews Sukhmani Singh Khalsa of the University of Tennessee, a Sikh convert who received a death threat by e-mail from another student angry over his conservative opinion pieces in the student newspaper. The university refused to punish the author of the e-mail, who called Mr. Khalsa a "towel head" and reportedly urged students to shoot the student in the "face."
"The problem on campus becomes who defines harassment," Mr. Maloney said in a recent interview with The New York Sun. "Who on campus is going to stand up to a multicultural office or a diversity office?"
One of the more amusing scenes in the film comes when Mr. Maloney stops by the office of Cal Poly's president, Warren Baker - in a "Roger and Me" moment - for an impromptu interview, only to be herded away by a grouchy assistant. Not a single university administrator has agreed to appear in the New Yorker's film.
The story of how Mr. Maloney, who had little previous filmmaking experience, has become the right's best answer to Mr. Moore starts a little more than a year ago in front of the home of the older documentarian.
After staking out the director for four days with a fancy new Panasonic digital video recorder, Mr. Maloney confronted Mr. Moore on a sidewalk on the Upper West Side, with the intention of provoking a flustered reaction from him. Mr. Maloney wanted to needle him with pointed questions about liberal bias in Hollywood and then post the footage on his Web log, Brain-terminal.com.
{ to his credit -- editorial note added here by tf1980 } Mr. Moore, as it turned out, was game for the interview. He calmly told Mr. Maloney that documentary filmmaking "should be open to all people of all political persuasions."
"It should not just be people who are liberal, or left-of-center, or whatever," the Oscar-winner said. "Make your movies, and then the people will respond or not respond to them."
Soon after the video of Mr. Moore went up on his Web site, Mr. Maloney received an e-mail message from Stuart Browning, 44, a goateed man from Miami Beach who has deeply conservative political views - and who boasts of having more money than the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, John Edwards.
At the time, Mr. Maloney had already gained some notice from the press with his 6- or 7-minute documentary shorts on left-wing protesters.
He videotaped antiwar demonstrators in New York in 2003 providing silly answers to questions about how America ought to deal with Iraq. He recorded a rowdy pro-Palestinian protest at Rutgers University, where one speaker screamed, "Long live the intifada," and another protester whispered to Mr. Maloney on camera: "Are you nervous?"
The shorts, posted on Mr. Maloney's Web site, were enough to impress Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, who called Mr. Maloney's Web video journalism "the wave of the future."
In the fall of 2003, Mr. Browning and Mr. Maloney founded a production company, On the Fence Films, whose first film would be "Brainwashing 101." The expanded version has the working title "Ministry of Truth." Mr. Browning set the budget of "Brainwashing" at $250,000, a little more than 4% of Miramax's reported investment in "Fahrenheit 9/11."
... more at linked article
I'd get to know this name, as this guy seems to be an up-and-comer.
His work sounds fascinating, and worth spending a few dollars to check out if should make it's way to any local theatres. (I hope it does). If not there, then certainly on DVD or pay TV outlets.
