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So, what are you doing Sunday night?
Watching TV, going out for a few beers, shoveling yourself out from the wicked early snow dump socking in the Mountain States and the upper Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic?
How about going to a local movie premiere being billed as the largest simultaneous opening night ever?
Journalist and Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer made the national news trying to ask Al Gore a question at the Society of Environmental Journalists' conference in Wisconsin last Friday. Gore dodged Phelim's question about the errors in An Inconvenient Truth, and Gore's SEJ allies cut Phelim's microphone. Al Gore never takes questions at any of the speeches he makes.
Now McAleer is releasing his counter-film, Not Evil Just Wrong, in a blitz targeting tea partiers and college campuses around the country and overseas.
Sounds like bluster? Check out the number of sites that are going to be hosting this event on Sunday, 8pm EST/5pm PST, and you just might be seeing once again how effective the tea party movement really is at guerrilla organizing when it wants to.
You can be part of the festivities, though it is a little late to host your own premiere. You can attend a public premiere at a local campus or just tune in for one of the simulcasts being made on sites such as Big Government.
Not Evil, Just Wrong
Host Your Own Premiere
Public Premieres
You know, if I am not skiing this Sunday evening I might just grab some popcorn and catch a movie...
An inconvenient tea party
An inconvenient tea party
By: Daniel Libit
POLITICO
October 16, 2009 02:57 PM EST
Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer couldn?t get Hollywood interested in his conservative answer to Al Gore?s ?Inconvenient Truth,? so he?s trying to promote it a different way ? by getting tea party protesters to turn out for thousands of screenings across the country Sunday night.
McAleer is billing the multicity premiere of ?Not Evil Just Wrong? as the world?s largest simultaneous film viewing, and he says the ?cinematic wing of the tea party movement? is just the ticket for making it work.
?This is tailored-made for the tea party movement,? says McAleer. ?A small tea party is like a small theater.?
To promote the film, McAleer dialed in to Wednesday?s weekly conference call for 150 tea party leaders in California. Dawn Wildman, co-coordinator of the California Tea Party Patriots, said the reaction was tremendous.
?I think it is a marvelous idea, in the sense you are actually bringing it to the people,? Wildman said.
In San Diego, Wildman is expecting about 150 people to show up at a veterans? museum to watch the film. In Newport Beach, she said, a group of 100 is expected to watch the film at a restaurant. And organizers in Bakersfield are planning on showing the movie three separate times.
While Tea Party protests have so far focused more on government spending than environmental issues like global warming or the cap-and-trade bill working through Congress, tea party leaders says it?s time for the movement to branch out.
?It says a lot for the American people and the movement if we can consistently be looking at public policy or fiscal responsibility and evaluate pieces as they come out ? whether they be film pieces or books or any kind of intellectual pieces come out,? says Everett Wilkinson, a tea party leader in Florida.
And while a few YouTube video clips have helped ignite the conservative base ? such as Rick Santelli?s on-air diatribe against government bailouts and South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson?s ?You lie!? outburst ? Wilkinson said it will be a first to see his fellow Tea Party activists moved by film.
McAleer, who will watch the film at a screening in Vancouver on Sunday night, started work on the project in early 2007, about a half-year after the release of ?An Inconvenient Truth,? Gore?s alarm bell on global warming. At first, McAleer?s team was small ? mostly just him and his wife, Ann McElhinney.
But at the end of 2008, their work got some buzz in the European press and generated interest at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
Afterward, McAleer says he flew out Los Angeles, hoping to convince studio executives to give it a feature release. But his efforts came up well short.
He blames it on politics.
?I think if we said the Earth is going to disappear in 30 years and America is responsible, then we would have gotten a release,? McAleer said.
So instead, McAleer turned to conservatives for help.
He said he met with Andrew Breitbart, the former Drudge Report editor who now runs a handful of conservative websites, including the one that fanned the flames of the right with videos of ACORN employees encouraging the efforts of actors pretending to seek government funding for brothels. Breitbart?s Big Hollywood site will stream the movie Sunday.
In February, McAleer presented his film at the CPAC conference, taking the stage right before Rush Limbaugh. And he?s hit every big conservative gathering along the way, including the National Right to Life Convention in Pittsburgh and the Americans for Prosperity?s Defending the American Dream Summit in Washington earlier this month.
McAleer received support from Grover Norquist?s Americans for Tax Reform, which e-mailed supporters, and the Heritage Foundation, which will be screening the main premiere on Sunday.
As much as McAleer has sought support from the right, he credits liberal filmmaker Michael Moore with paving the way for his kind of documentary.
?I am the son of Michael Moore,? says McAleer, ?or at least the illegitimate nephew.?
Phil Kerpen, director of policy for Americans for Prosperity, also sees the shoe-on-the-other-foot connection.
?Michael Moore, who was once the guerrilla, down-in-the-weeds documentarian, is releasing big Hollywood pictures, and it is right-wing conservative activists crashing events.?
McAleer seemed to rip a page straight out of Moore?s publicity playbook when he confronted Gore last week at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wis. Taking to a microphone in the audience, McAleer pressed Gore about a British High Court judge?s findings of inconsistencies in the former vice president?s documentary, leading to a confrontation that ultimately ended up with his microphone being cut off.
Though McAleer insisted that there wasn?t ?any grand plan? behind his exchange with Gore, it provided him precisely the kind of publicity he wanted ? presenting him as the intrepid truth-seeker muzzled by the evil liberal media.
But while McAleer is happy to promote his movie through conservative circles, he bristled at being characterized as a conservative activist himself. A former reporter for the Irish News and correspondent for the London Sunday Times, he says he is now just a journalist with a video camera.
A spokeswoman for Gore declined to comment about the film.
Watching TV, going out for a few beers, shoveling yourself out from the wicked early snow dump socking in the Mountain States and the upper Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic?
How about going to a local movie premiere being billed as the largest simultaneous opening night ever?
Journalist and Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer made the national news trying to ask Al Gore a question at the Society of Environmental Journalists' conference in Wisconsin last Friday. Gore dodged Phelim's question about the errors in An Inconvenient Truth, and Gore's SEJ allies cut Phelim's microphone. Al Gore never takes questions at any of the speeches he makes.
Now McAleer is releasing his counter-film, Not Evil Just Wrong, in a blitz targeting tea partiers and college campuses around the country and overseas.
Al Gore received a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for claiming in his film An Inconvenient Truth that humans cause global warming. Today, because of this film, school children fear that polar bears are drowning and they and their parents will be next. And extreme ?cap-and-trade? legislation Gore could only dream about a decade ago is now pending approval in the U.S. Senate, estimated to cost billions of dollars, mortgaging the futures of those same children before they've earned their first paycheck.
In Not Evil Just Wrong two Irish filmmakers take on Al Gore and the blind acceptance of his doomsday agenda.
Over 3 years in the making with a budget of over $1million, this explosive documentary exposes the distortions and hypocrisy of Gore and the global warming ?industry.? It explains the true costs of environmental policies like ?cap-and-trade? now before Congress.
Sounds like bluster? Check out the number of sites that are going to be hosting this event on Sunday, 8pm EST/5pm PST, and you just might be seeing once again how effective the tea party movement really is at guerrilla organizing when it wants to.
You can be part of the festivities, though it is a little late to host your own premiere. You can attend a public premiere at a local campus or just tune in for one of the simulcasts being made on sites such as Big Government.
Not Evil, Just Wrong
Host Your Own Premiere
Public Premieres
You know, if I am not skiing this Sunday evening I might just grab some popcorn and catch a movie...
An inconvenient tea party
An inconvenient tea party
By: Daniel Libit
POLITICO
October 16, 2009 02:57 PM EST
Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer couldn?t get Hollywood interested in his conservative answer to Al Gore?s ?Inconvenient Truth,? so he?s trying to promote it a different way ? by getting tea party protesters to turn out for thousands of screenings across the country Sunday night.
McAleer is billing the multicity premiere of ?Not Evil Just Wrong? as the world?s largest simultaneous film viewing, and he says the ?cinematic wing of the tea party movement? is just the ticket for making it work.
?This is tailored-made for the tea party movement,? says McAleer. ?A small tea party is like a small theater.?
To promote the film, McAleer dialed in to Wednesday?s weekly conference call for 150 tea party leaders in California. Dawn Wildman, co-coordinator of the California Tea Party Patriots, said the reaction was tremendous.
?I think it is a marvelous idea, in the sense you are actually bringing it to the people,? Wildman said.
In San Diego, Wildman is expecting about 150 people to show up at a veterans? museum to watch the film. In Newport Beach, she said, a group of 100 is expected to watch the film at a restaurant. And organizers in Bakersfield are planning on showing the movie three separate times.
While Tea Party protests have so far focused more on government spending than environmental issues like global warming or the cap-and-trade bill working through Congress, tea party leaders says it?s time for the movement to branch out.
?It says a lot for the American people and the movement if we can consistently be looking at public policy or fiscal responsibility and evaluate pieces as they come out ? whether they be film pieces or books or any kind of intellectual pieces come out,? says Everett Wilkinson, a tea party leader in Florida.
And while a few YouTube video clips have helped ignite the conservative base ? such as Rick Santelli?s on-air diatribe against government bailouts and South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson?s ?You lie!? outburst ? Wilkinson said it will be a first to see his fellow Tea Party activists moved by film.
McAleer, who will watch the film at a screening in Vancouver on Sunday night, started work on the project in early 2007, about a half-year after the release of ?An Inconvenient Truth,? Gore?s alarm bell on global warming. At first, McAleer?s team was small ? mostly just him and his wife, Ann McElhinney.
But at the end of 2008, their work got some buzz in the European press and generated interest at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
Afterward, McAleer says he flew out Los Angeles, hoping to convince studio executives to give it a feature release. But his efforts came up well short.
He blames it on politics.
?I think if we said the Earth is going to disappear in 30 years and America is responsible, then we would have gotten a release,? McAleer said.
So instead, McAleer turned to conservatives for help.
He said he met with Andrew Breitbart, the former Drudge Report editor who now runs a handful of conservative websites, including the one that fanned the flames of the right with videos of ACORN employees encouraging the efforts of actors pretending to seek government funding for brothels. Breitbart?s Big Hollywood site will stream the movie Sunday.
In February, McAleer presented his film at the CPAC conference, taking the stage right before Rush Limbaugh. And he?s hit every big conservative gathering along the way, including the National Right to Life Convention in Pittsburgh and the Americans for Prosperity?s Defending the American Dream Summit in Washington earlier this month.
McAleer received support from Grover Norquist?s Americans for Tax Reform, which e-mailed supporters, and the Heritage Foundation, which will be screening the main premiere on Sunday.
As much as McAleer has sought support from the right, he credits liberal filmmaker Michael Moore with paving the way for his kind of documentary.
?I am the son of Michael Moore,? says McAleer, ?or at least the illegitimate nephew.?
Phil Kerpen, director of policy for Americans for Prosperity, also sees the shoe-on-the-other-foot connection.
?Michael Moore, who was once the guerrilla, down-in-the-weeds documentarian, is releasing big Hollywood pictures, and it is right-wing conservative activists crashing events.?
McAleer seemed to rip a page straight out of Moore?s publicity playbook when he confronted Gore last week at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Madison, Wis. Taking to a microphone in the audience, McAleer pressed Gore about a British High Court judge?s findings of inconsistencies in the former vice president?s documentary, leading to a confrontation that ultimately ended up with his microphone being cut off.
Though McAleer insisted that there wasn?t ?any grand plan? behind his exchange with Gore, it provided him precisely the kind of publicity he wanted ? presenting him as the intrepid truth-seeker muzzled by the evil liberal media.
But while McAleer is happy to promote his movie through conservative circles, he bristled at being characterized as a conservative activist himself. A former reporter for the Irish News and correspondent for the London Sunday Times, he says he is now just a journalist with a video camera.
A spokeswoman for Gore declined to comment about the film.