Persistence of Vision

On April 30, New York governor David Paterson signed the Libel Terrorism Protection Act into law. Passed unanimously by the New York State Assembly and Senate, this long-arm legislation protects New York authors from the crippling threat of foreign libel judgments in countries with weak speech protections.

"New Yorkers must be able to speak out on issues of public concern without living in fear that they will be sued outside the United States, under legal standards inconsistent with our First Amendment rights," said Governor Paterson. "This legislation will help ensure of the freedoms enjoyed by New York authors."

"Terrorism and terrorist financing are matters of vital interest to all New Yorkers, in no small part because New York City remains a target of significance for international terrorists," said Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau. "New York authors must have the freedom to investigate, write and publish on terrorism and other matters of public importance, subject only to limitations that are consistent with the U.S. Constitution. This legislation will help to ensure such freedom."

The law was inspired by author Rachel Ehrenfeld's difficulties defending herself in the U.S. courts against a trumped-up English libel judgment. Now, it benefits her. She will shortly be returning to court to seek a declaratory judgment against Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, who sued her in England--and won--after she discussed his financial ties to terrorism in her book.

Watch The Libel Tourist here.

Indoctrinate U has screened at nearly thirty colleges and universities since MPI launched its campus tour in January. It's been pleasing crowds and provoking conversation everywhere it goes.

Most recently, the film travelled to UC Irvine for a screening co-hosted by the College Republicans and the Zionists of America. Maloney's movie offers an "uncensored and surprisingly amusing look at the anti-intellectualism that is becoming more prominent in college campuses and university offices nationwide," the student paper reported.

Indoctrinate U also drew strong praise at East Tennessee State, where the Society for Intellectual Diversity held a screening. Co-sponsored by the College Republicans, the Sociology department, and the Anthropology department, the screening won praise from a skeptical student journalist. "I decided to go to this event because I feel that, despite its decidedly conservative political undertones, the movement to ensure the rights of students and faculty at universities is an important one," she wrote. "With obvious sincerity, [the president of SID] made it very clear that the purpose of the organization is to get the word out to students of their right to learn in an educational institution which is free of indoctrination to a certain ideology. I thought to myself, 'That's something I can support. Maybe this movie will be better than I am expecting.' And in a way, it was. 'Indoctrinate U' also served as commentary on the state of intellectual freedom on college campuses through the utilization of anecdotal evidence and 'guerilla journalism.'"

Indoctrinate U will screen at UC Santa Cruz on May 21.

Indoctrinate U has screened at nearly thirty colleges and universities since MPI launched its campus tour in January. It's been pleasing crowds and provoking conversation everywhere it goes.

Most recently, the film travelled to UC Irvine for a screening co-hosted by the College Republicans and the Zionists of America. Maloney's movie offers an "uncensored and surprisingly amusing look at the anti-intellectualism that is becoming more prominent in college campuses and university offices nationwide," the student paper reported.

Indoctrinate U also drew strong praise at East Tennessee State, where the Society for Intellectual Diversity held a screening. Co-sponsored by the College Republicans, the Sociology department, and the Anthropology department, the screening won praise from a skeptical student journalist. "I decided to go to this event because I feel that, despite its decidedly conservative political undertones, the movement to ensure the rights of students and faculty at universities is an important one," she wrote. "With obvious sincerity, [the president of SID] made it very clear that the purpose of the organization is to get the word out to students of their right to learn in an educational institution which is free of indoctrination to a certain ideology. I thought to myself, 'That's something I can support. Maybe this movie will be better than I am expecting.' And in a way, it was. 'Indoctrinate U' also served as commentary on the state of intellectual freedom on college campuses through the utilization of anecdotal evidence and 'guerilla journalism.'"

Indoctrinate U will screen at UC Santa Cruz on May 21.

The Singing Revolution is touring cities across the U.S. and Canada--and drawing raves wherever it goes. The Washington Post calls the film "fascinating," "powerful," and "exhilarating." The Tulsa World agreed that it is "intriguing" and "fascinating." The Examiner pronounces it a "highly recommended film" that reveals an "astonishing history." And the Toronto Sun announces, "If you'd like to see the transformative power of art in action, check out The Singing Revolution, a documentary about the role of culture in the preservation of a national identity for Estonia. This is a film about courage." The Sun's final sentence gives us words to live by: "The Singing Revolution, which is in English and Estonian (with English subtitles), is the sort of film that should be shown to North American school children or anyone else who takes his freedom for granted."

People are beginning to recognize that higher ed suffers from a bit of a problem when it comes to intellectual diversity and individual rights. And they are trying to do something about it. University of Colorado at Boulder chancellor Bud Peterson, for example, is trying to raise $9 million to endow the nation's first chair of conservative thought and policy. But while the impulse is a good one--campuses need to see a lot of intellectual variety than they presently do--the method leaves something to be desired. As the folks at the Americans for Tax Reform blog put it,

That’s great CU is looking to address the lack of intellectual diversity on their campus, but I’m not sure that plugging in one token conservative professor is the best way to go about it. For true progress, universities must foster overall diversity in opinion and philosophy amongst professors and students, rather than plant one loner to, as George Will put it, be studied in the same way that anthropologists study a foreign culture.

That's an awesome compliment--and we're happy to accept it!

Indoctrinate U director and star Evan Coyne Maloney will be on Fox and Friends tomorrow morning.

One of MPI's most exciting projects is a short film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's short story, "Harrison Bergeron." A dystopian tale about a world where "equality" is repressively and damagingly mandated from above, Vonnegut's story makes some strong points about freedom. The story shows both how fragile and irrepressible freedom is. It also explores what happens when equality of opportunity--which can be legislated--is supplanted by equality of results, which can't. The film will is in post-production now, and will premiere in early 2009. Already, the hype is beginning.

Here is Weekly Standard write Sonny Bunch, at the America's Future blog:

“I’ll go ahead and be a cliché here as a libertarian and quote Ayn Rand,” Chandler Tuttle warned midway through our first interview, “‘Art is a selective recreation of reality reflecting the artist’s metaphysical value judgments.’” In every subsequent conversation I’d have with the aspiring filmmaker, that passage from The Romantic Manifesto popped up. The repetition wasn’t the crutch of a lazy mind, nor was it a function of an interview subject showing discipline and staying on message. Rather, that quote represents a concrete belief – an idea that drives him to create a final product he considers true to himself and his conscience.

The topic of discussion when the Rand quote dropped was Tuttle’s current project, an adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut short story, “Harrison Bergeron.” Sitting at a dinner table in the Moving Picture Institute’s West Hollywood office, Tuttle was explaining how the project came to be and why MPI was interested in bringing his vision to the screen.

If I can indulge in a cliché myself for a moment, like most great stories, this one started with a girl. “I was dating a girl, and she was really into Kurt Vonnegut … so I went out and, thinking myself clever, got a selection of short stories.” Luckily for him, the collection he picked up was Welcome to Monkey House, and the second story was a four-page, 2,300-word doozy by the name of “Harrison Bergeron.”

For the uninitiated, “Harrison Bergeron” is set in a frightening world of mediocrity and uniformity which Vonnegut describes without wasting a word in the opening paragraph:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

The exception to that equality is the story’s namesake, Harrison Bergeron. An Adonis of a man, Bergeron is too brilliant to be cowed by the state, and too dangerous to be allowed to live. The short story, a stark condemnation of the totalitarian implications of the Left’s drive for social equality, has long been a favorite of the Right; National Review reprinted it in 1965, and John J. Miller, a writer for the magazine, recently recommended it in a piece on conservative science fiction.

For similar reasons, it struck a chord with the powers that be at MPI, a fledgling production and distribution company that is spending more than $100,000 – a rounding error for a big Hollywood studio, but a significant portion of MPI’s annual budget, which totals less than $2 million – to film Tuttle’s 25-minute adaptation.

MPI founder Thor Halvorssen on Backbone Radio.

... The Singing Revolution is playing across the country. Here's what viewers have to say:

--"The Singing Revolution is the sort of film that should be shown to North American school children or anyone else who takes his freedom for granted." (Jam!)

--"Singing Revolution eloquently illustrates that, once granted, even a smidgen of freedom can transform into an unstoppable weapon against oppression." (Slant)

--"One incredible tale: As independence gains a foothold, a crowd of USSR-loyal reactionaries storms the capitol building in Tallinn. The trapped officials...radio an S.O.S. to the Estonian public -- and the People actually show up." (Village Voice)

--"One incredible tale." (L.A. Weekly)

The Singing Revolution is currently playing in Toronto, San Francisco, San Jose, Tulsa, Denver, Santa Fe, Key West, and Washington, D.C. In the coming weeks, it will screen in Philadelphia, Rochester, Schenectady, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, St. Louis, Dallas, Houston and more. And in June, it goes to Latvia.

MPI fellow Engi Wassef has made a heartbreaking and instructive documentary about what happens to both cultural and economic wellbeing in a world without religious liberty. And the critics are noticing. Here's a review from Harvard's independent mag, 01238:

Like the classic girl’s novels its title evokes—think Anne of Green Gables or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm—the mesmerizing Marina of the Zabbaleen develops a timeless theme: how the world looks through a child’s eyes. It’s hard to imagine, however, how Anne or Rebecca might have fared in a precarious neighborhood of Egyptian garbage pickers. Though Marina unfolds amid some of the toughest circumstances to be found in the world’s cities, the film’s strength is a profound regard for the imagination and insight of children.

Filmed over the course of seven months in Cairo, the documentary follows seven year-old Marina, the only daughter of a family of farmers turned garbage pickers. If Egypt had a caste system, these would be the untouchables; members of the Coptic Christian minority, the Zabbaleen squat at the margins of the city, making their living by raising pigs and collecting Cairo’s trash. They are a community of survivors. In one of the film’s more arresting scenes, Marina peers from a crowd as a tattoo artist inks a cross onto the wrist of a screaming baby. This Coptic tradition, explains the artist, dates from Roman times, when the mark ensured that even if a child’s parents were martyred, their cultural identity would remain intact. Director ENGI WASSEF, herself a Copt, was born in Cairo and moved with her family to New York at the age of seven. After graduating from Harvard in 2002, she did a stint at Goldman Sachs before enrolling in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. At a screening of her documentary last week, she told the audience that she had been filming another family in the Zabbaleen neighborhood when she spotted Marina and her brother outside a store. “They looked like angels to me,” she said.

A magnetic little girl, garrulous and bright-eyed, Marina leads an exceptional life; in a community where entire families rise before dawn to collect garbage, Marina’s mother has vowed to keep her daughter in school. Marina and her brothers constantly play with the camera—in one montage they peer into the lens through the sole of a broken sneaker. Yet harsher realities crowd around. We see women pick through a bag of hospital waste, used syringes falling on their bare feet. Later, Marina has a tooth pulled without anesthetic at a government-run clinic. It is hard to believe that things will get better for Marina, only worse.

Though Wassef tries to provide some context about the privatization of Cairo’s waste system, Marina of the Zabbaleen is not overtly political. Still, the Egyptian government has refused to allow Wassef to screen her film in that country.

When former Massachusetts governor mandated health care for everyone in the state, it was hailed as the beginning of a vital and necessary shift toward universal health care for all Americans. But the reality of Romneycare has been very far from the ideal--and has proven to be a parable about why government should stay out of the health care business. From the Wall Street Journal:

The showpiece of RomneyCare was its individual mandate, a requirement that all Massachusetts residents obtain health insurance by July of last year or else pay penalties. The idea was that getting everyone into the insurance system would eliminate the "free-rider" problem of those who refuse to buy insurance but then go to emergency rooms when they're sick; thus costs would fall. "Will it work? I'm optimistic, but time will tell," Mr. Romney wrote in these pages in 2006.

Well, the returns are rolling in, and the critics look prescient. First, the plan isn't "universal" at all: About 350,000 more people are now insured in Massachusetts since the reform passed. Federal estimates put the prior number of uninsured at more than 657,000, so there was a reduction. But it was not secured through the market reforms that Governor Romney promised. Instead, Massachusetts also created a new state entitlement that is already trembling on the verge of bankruptcy inside of a year.

Some two-thirds of the growth in coverage owes to a low- or no-cost public insurance option. Called Commonwealth Care, it uses a sliding income scale to subsidize coverage for everyone under 300% of the federal poverty level, or about $63,000 for a family of four. Commonwealth Care also accounts for 60% of statewide growth in individual insurance over the last year, and the trend is expected to accelerate, perhaps double.

One lesson here is that while pledging "universal" coverage is easy, the harder problem is paying for it. This year's appropriation for Commonwealth Care was $472 million, but officials have asked for an add-on that will bring it to $625 million. For 2009, Governor Deval Patrick requested $869 million but has already conceded that even that huge figure is too low. Over the coming decade, the expected overruns float in as much as $4 billion over budget. It's too early to tell how much is new coverage or if state programs are displacing private insurance.

The "new Big Dig" moniker refers to the legendary cost overruns when Boston rebuilt its traffic system. Now state legislators are pushing new schemes to offset RomneyCare's runaway expenses, including reductions in state payments to doctors and hospitals, enlarged business penalties, an increase in the state tobacco tax, and more restrictions on drug companies and insurers.

Mr. Romney's fundamental mistake was focusing on making health insurance "universal" without first reforming the private insurance market. The "connector" that was supposed to link individuals to private insurance options has barely been used, as lower-income workers flood to the public option. Meanwhile, low-cost private insurers continue to avoid the state because it imposes multiple and costly mandates on all policies.

Hailed at first as a new national model, the Massachusetts nonmiracle ought to be a warning to Washington. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both proposing versions of RomneyCare on a national scale, with similar promises that covering everyone under a government plan will reduce costs. Mr. Obama at least argues that more people would be covered were insurance more affordable. But his solution is Massachusetts on steroids – make insurance less expensive for policyholders by transferring the extra costs onto the government. Mrs. Clinton likes that but also wants the individual mandate, despite the mediocre results so far.

Marriages of convenience between production companies and places eager for the investment and exposure a film brings are all the rage right now. Georgia--the scene of The Legend of Bagger Vance and The General's Daughter--offers a production tax credit of up to 30 percent, a move that state residents hope will lure filmmakers who have defected from the Peach State in order to take advantage of incentives in New Mexico and Louisiana. Hawaii, which enjoyed its best year ever as a film location in 2007, leaves nothing to chance: Its attractive tax incentives have generated more than $200 million in direct spend since they went into effect in 2006. In 2007, Hawaii hosted the filming of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and a number of other projects.

And most spectacularly, given the dollar's difficulties against the euro, there is Ireland, which is offering grants of up to 20 percent of the Irish production budget for films produced or co-produced by Irish filmmakers:

the Irish government's Section 481 tax incentive, supplemented by the Irish Film Board's international production fund, is helping to support a rise in both Irish productions and international co-productions.

Section 481, which can be applied for by an Irish production company only, offers producers up to 20% of a project's Irish budget -- with a maximum of e50 million ($78 million) -- and is available to both film and TV productions; it's in place until 2012.

Perhaps most importantly, the coin is paid out on the first day of principal photography. That means producers can receive up to $15 million on the first day of filming.

In addition to the government tax incentives, the Irish Film Board can invest $1.2 million in any given project in equity finance, with discretionary powers to raise that sum to $1.5 million on a case-by-case basis.

The result has been a number of announcements in recent months of high-profile projects being set up as Irish co-productions or coming to Ireland to shoot.

"That bottom-line figure producers receive from the tax incentive and the IFB is allowing us to compete internationally and with our closest rival, namely the U.K.," says Irish film commissioner Naoise Barry. "The IFB is a film sponsor, not a producer. It relies heavily on the quality of Irish production companies that are co-producing these film and TV shows."