The treatment’s almost done. The Devil’s Triangle, my 2022 book, will soon be a movie script.
Some told us not to do it. The Devil’s Triangle recounts how I was targeted in the 2018 battle for the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination. The criminal left tried to blow up the nomination.
Now we’re making a film. The political left doesn’t want to see this. They don’t want their evil exposed. There are also a few on the right who think we should just let it go—they prefer complaint to creativity. Yet seeing what a professional filmmaker and screenwriter has done with my book in the last two months, shaping it into a screenplay has been a revelation. I can’t say the screenwriter’s name yet. I can say together we’ve produced something compelling.
“We don’t tell our own stories.” That’s what a conservative editor and friend told me the other day. Just a few days ago the New York Times ran an essay comparing the MAGA movement to McCarthyism. More than 70 years later liberals are still getting mileage out of Joe McCarthy. Meanwhile, as my friend and editor noted, we on the right don’t tell our own stories. Conservatives don’t need any more God’s Not Dead holy roller celluloid sermons—we need real movies about real people. We need Rated-R dramas.
In the fall of 2018, right after the Kavanaugh attack, I got a call from an experienced Hollywood actor and producer. This person had been in several movies, including one with Johnny Depp.
“So,” he said, “how many offers have you gotten for your story?”
“None,” I replied.
He was astounded. I’d just survived an attempted hit by the Stasi left. They used extortion, opposition research, and a honey trap to get me to destroy Kavanaugh, a high school friend. This was a movie—or so thought the actor on the other end of the line. “It’s just so typical,” the actor said. “Our side just doesn’t have the guts or vision to pull something like this off—a story that will reveal the evil of the left is just dropped in our laps.”
He went on: “One thing was absolutely clear: Had you failed, had you lied and sunk Kavanaugh, Hollywood would immediately be in production depicting a film about it—there would have been several films in production.”
It seems like conservatives prefer the satisfaction of bitching about Hollywood more than doing something. They don’t have the same grit as artistic liberals, who were trained in the DIY, or Do It Yourself, work ethic. Leftists bust their asses making small independent movies or punk rock records, often in the face of people telling them they can’t, it’s impossible, give it up. They do it anyway. Spike Lee becomes a master filmmaker. U2 ends up playing stadiums.
The actor who called me in 2018 knows this. He saw a powerful story, and how it resonates because of the characters, most of us flawed. I was a man in the middle; the left hated me because I’d defied them during the scandal, not to mention being pro-life. I was also a former drinker with a bit of a wild past. The actor put his finger on it: “This entire thing is a psychological thriller that involves a flawed protagonist. You’d have to go back to the 1970s, to All the President’s Men and The Parallax View, to get the feel of it, although the flashbacks to the 1980s would also be great. Imagine the soundtrack!”
Conservatives might argue that we’re already making decent movies. They point to Ben Shapiro, whose Daily Wire is now producing films. The three they’ve released are Run Hide Fight, Shut In, and Terror on the Prairie. All are damsel-in-distress dramas wherein a single woman fights off outside marauders. All are basically the same movie. We need the boldness to make not just holy-roller movies or films offering binary moral choices, but films with some ambiguity and darkness. The Devil’s Triangle has sex and psychology and politics and drugs and skateboarding, and Jesuits. It’s rated R. That’s not negotiable.
A final word: We’d like Alec Baldwin to be in The Devil’s Triangle. In 2016 the actor (and lousy movie set safety expert) saw a short video I made. It was a black and white reel for a young singer who was about to go on American Idol. She’d make it into the Top 10, where my photographs and film of her would be seen by a lot of people. One was Baldwin, who contacted me praising my work. He wanted to work with me—“Let’s make a weird little movie together.” Baldwin then asked me to “take me through what you want to do shot by shot.”
It didn’t work out, but I never forgot my interaction with Baldwin. It revealed something I’ve known for years. The left is better at supporting artists than the right. Liberals find talent and funnel it into a system of grants, fellowships, and general encouragement. This produces art that changes the culture.
The difference between the silence on the right that have met the pitch to make The Devil’s Triangle into a film and my interaction with Baldwin is telling. It was easier to impress Baldwin, who, like me, had grown up in an Irish-Catholic house that idolized John F. Kennedy, than to get any support from the right for The Devil’s Triangle.
By September we’ll have a script treatment. As Baldwin put it in Glengarry Glen Ross, “Are you man enough to take it?”