J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
@ Agorist.com
Blogged by Tom Woods on November 20th, 2010
Tom Woods
The libertarian world has been doing a good job writing and publishing in economics, history, and philosophy. But to reach a wider audience, we need to go where the people are. For one thing, people read much more fiction than nonfiction. J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night is an excellent example of the possibilities for libertarian fiction. And now there’s a move to get his book adapted into a motion picture. Fiction writing and the movies are two areas where we are getting killed. We’re not even putting up a fight. A project like this can change that.
Alongside Night, with major endorsements from Ron Paul and Milton Friedman, its libertarian awards and rave reviews, and the intention of Free to Choose media to use the film in its teaching modules distributed to high schools, is an extremely rare opportunity to make inroads into the mass entertainment media. It would be great to see people of means get behind this important project.
About Tom Woods
Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books. A senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Woods holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and his master’s, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Read More.
My comic thriller Lady Magdalene’s — a movie I wrote, produced, directed, and acted in it — is now available for sale or rental on Amazon.com Video On Demand. If you like the way I think, I think you’ll like this movie. Check it out!
November 20, 2010 - 5:06 pm
The only thing harder than writing, directing, and editing a movie is finding “people of means” who care enough to finance them.
I have been knocking my head against the wall of reality-oriented businesspeople who wonder why they’re portrayed by Hollywood as villains like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street or Parker Selfridge in the most successful movie of all time — Avatar — and don’t understand how popular culture impacts popular politics.
Now Tom Woods puts the problem front and center: if we don’t put our own understanding of economics into the pop media — which is the only place most people get their ideas on how the world works — we lose and the socialists who dominate the entertainment media win.
Anybody here watch the new Hawaii Five-0? Every episode, about ten minutes into the story, a businessman is introduced as a character — and this businessman always is revealed to be a murderer, traitor, gangster.
God bless Tom Woods for giving a libertarian like me — who crosses over from an understanding of Austrian-school economics into the arena of imaginative entertainment — a chance to connect to Someone who has the means of putting our worldview on 4,000 movie screens and potentially thousands of classrooms.