See all the latest videos and articles patriots need to watch and read at Discern.tv.
It’s no secret that the left owns most of the media establishment in America. Movies, television, publishing, music, news programming and even sports have either volunteered to march under the progressive banner or been forced into it by the woke scold mobs of online Social Justice Warriors, whose burn-it-all-down cancel culture campaigns make them seem more like terrorists than combatants in the arena of ideas. That’s why, curiously enough, the one bastion of the media landscape that conservatives own—talk radio—has been a constant target of destruction for the left, even if their efforts and reviving the Fairness Doctrine and and scaring off sponsors of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck have been less than successful. They keep on trying, however, because it’s not enough that the left holds sway across ninety percent of what Americans see, hear and read. They want it all, if only to make certain that everyone knows resistance to their agenda is futile.
Which is why I knew that when Cinestate—an upstart mixed-media company started by film impresario Dallas Sonnier in, appropriately enough, his adopted hometown of Dallas, Texas—the company would eventually draw the ire of the left. You see, Sonnier not only doesn’t believe in playing it safe with the kinds of entertainment he produces, he actively seeks out projects that might offend the sensibilities and pieties of those who have become accustomed to the kind of Hollywood fare that reflexively affirms progressive values. A good example is Cinestate’s acquisition of the legendary Fangoria brand, which languished for years before Sonnier picked it up and started putting out new issues of the famed Fangoria magazine, which chronicles horror entertainment for horror fans. Sonnier also turned it into Cinestate’s horror division, with the goal of cranking out the kind of exploitation and slasher fare that used to grace video store shelves back in the 80’s (to give you an idea, the film Satanic Panic was their second release—Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich was the first).
To say that movies featuring final girls being offered up for ritual sacrifice and chased by Nazi puppets didn’t please the Karens of the left probably doesn’t come as much of a shock—but then Sonnier also announced the creation of Cinestate’s Rebeller banner, which is preparing to release Run Hide Fight, a movie about a high school mass shooting. Other studios found the subject matter radioactive, which suited Sonnier just fine. In fact for him, it was a selling point. Oh, and did I mention the film’s heroine uses her own firearms skills and training to take down the school shooters herself? That alone was enough to make liberal heads explode.
So why do it? As Sonnier has explained, “We’re in Dallas, we don’t have to play by the rules of New York or LA.” More than that, however, he’s attracted to dark, violent stories with complex characters who are all shades of gray—to which he’s attached top-notch talent such as Kurt Russell, who appeared in Cinestate’s Bone Tomahawk, a horror film set in the Old West that is a seriously tough watch, along with Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn who play conflicted cops in Dragged Across Concrete.. Bit by bit, little by little, Cinestate has been carving out a place for itself making movies for those who prefer an unsafe space to the paint-by-numbers agitprop getting churned out of the Hollywood studios.
So, naturally, they need to be destroyed.
ENTER THE DAILY BEAST
In an article published on June 6, the Beast’s senior entertainment editor Marlow Stern—in a rather obvious and hamhanded attempt to get some of Ronan Farrow’s mojo to rub off on him—asserts with a rather lurid headline, “How a Right-Wing Movie Studio Enabled the ‘Harvey Weinstein’ of Indie Film.”
Earlier this year, a Facebook post spread like wildfire through the Texas film community. It was the account of a young actress, alleging that Adam Donaghey, a rising producer in the region, had raped her when she was 16. Donaghey, who has denied the allegation, was subsequently arrested in late April on suspicion of sexual assault of a minor, and is currently free on bail. The Dallas Police Department would not provide any further information…
When Cinestate joined forces with Donaghey in 2017, handing him producing duties on a number of its genre films—The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, VFW and Satanic Panic among them—it was met with a raised eyebrow by many in the Texas film scene, who were well aware of Donaghey’s reputation as a serial predator.
“The first time I was ever on set I was warned about Adam Donaghey,” a female filmmaker tells me. “I was told he was the Harvey Weinstein of Dallas.”
The article goes on to detail the experiences of Cristen Leah Haynes, who worked with Donaghey when he was a line producer on an independent film unaffiliated with Cinestate. Donaghey allegedly made a very lurid pass at Haynes—of which she has an audio recording, so her story is pretty solid—making her the victim of sexual harassment, which I want to state here without any equivocation: no woman should ever be subjected to such humiliating treatment.
That said…
Characterizing Donaghey as the “Harvey Weinstein of indie film” is a quite a stretch, if not downright dishonest clickbaitery. Weinstein was a Hollywood mogul, the head of his own studio which had a reputation of making Oscar-winning films. To say that he could make or break a career—actors, writers, directors, you name it—was an understatement. Everybody wanted to work with him, even though everybody knew of his sexual proclivities, because he had so much power in that town that looking the other way on his extensive abuse of women was simply the price of doing business with him.
To top it all off, Weinstein also leveraged his influence in the political realm, becoming a high-value organizer and donor to the Democrat Party. The number of photo ops he had with Democrat heavy-hitters is legion, and he was well-known as a good friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton—at least until his predatory activities finally received the full media spotlight (which only happened, by the way, after NBC News—which had its own in-house sexual abuse scandal brewing at the time with Matt Lauer—spiked the story), and Weinstein suddenly found himself radioactive.
We’re LIVE and everything is on sale for a limited time! Whole Cows has launched offering freeze-dried beef for long-term storage. Don’t wait for food shortages to get worse. Stock up today. Use promo code “launch15” at checkout for 15% off!
Adam Donaghey, on the other hand, was a line producer when the alleged harassment took place. In case you don’t know what that even is, relax. Most people outside the biz don’t have the first clue, other than they might have seen it in the credits on a TV show some place. To make a long story short, a line producer is the person who manages the very necessary but mostly humdrum process of running the logistics of a production, such as managing budgets and making sure everybody gets paid. So, when Stern asserts in his article that Donaghey was some kind of power player in the Dallas indie film scene because he “signed the checks,” he means it literally—although not in the way he implies. This is misleading in the extreme, because the reader is meant to come away with the notion that, like Harvey Weinstein, Donaghey was the one who could greenlight a film and turn somebody into a star. That wasn’t his job, and it’s wrong to imply as much.
Furthermore, Haynes did not accuse Donaghey of sexual assault, but sexual harassment. In other words, after she told him to buzz off, he apparently did so—cold comfort for being on the end of an encounter no woman should have to suffer, but not the same thing as the worst offenses for which Weinstein was convicted. This is, however, a common media tactic: the conflation of two issues which are not the same, in order to confuse the audience into thinking something that isn’t true.
That Stern is doing so for political reasons is all but obvious in the headline of his article: “How a Right-Wing (emphasis added) Movie Studio Enabled the ‘Harvey Weinstein’ of Indie Film.” He wants you to know right off the bat that Cinestate is bad because they’re conservative—even though Dallas Sonnier has never said he makes films for political reasons. Quite the contrary, he just wants to make films that don’t exclude conservative audiences, and explore stories and themes that Hollywood is too squeamish—and too leftist—to touch with a ten-foot pole. Given that a good one-half of the country is underserved in that regard, to me that isn’t necessarily conservative—it’s just good business sense.
But what about Cinestate’s establishment of a business relationship with Donaghey in spite of his reputation for sexual harassment? Isn’t that a ripe subject for discussion? In fairness to Stern, I would say yes—it certainly is. Again, though, there is no record of Haynes filing an official complaint with her employer because of Donaghey’s actions, and the article states that she admits she never did so—and so we’re left with that other staple of shoddy journalism, anonymous sources. Stern cites dozens of film workers in the Dallas scene who “all knew” about Donaghey’s reputation and talked about it to one another. But as the movie business is rife with egos, backbiting, burned bridges and vendettas, Sonnier would have assumed he had to take a lot of these stories with a grain of salt. How that might have affected his thinking when hiring Donaghey, I obviously can’t know—we can only go on what he told Stern for his article: “I thought a person I knew and worked with made a pass at another person I knew and worked with, and I told him to apologize to her. I didn’t understand the severity of it. I didn’t take the time to investigate it. I’m guilty of that… portion.”,
Who should you believe? Who knows? It’s true that Cinestate has become a big player in the Dallas film scene, so it’s reasonable to think that people who are in the know and might have information that supports what Stern is alleging would be reluctant to go on the record for fear of jeopardizing their own job prospects. After all, that same fear also kept a lot of Harvey Weinstein’s victims from coming forward—which is perhaps the only real thing this story has in common with the narrative Stern is trying so hard to shape here. But I do know that Sonnier is the one who actually went on the record, so that has to count for something.
SOCIAL JUSTICE MAKES FOR LOUSY STORYTELLING
I’ll wrap this up with one more observation that I couldn’t help but make about how Marlow Stern, for an entertainment editor, doesn’t seem to have the first clue as to what makes for compelling drama. Rather, he seems to believe that entertainment’s purpose is merely to validate his own biases, or at the very least not make us uncomfortable. For example, here’s a little aside he throws in to illustrate how Dragged Across Concrete proves that Cinestate is bad while cementing his own good-guy progressive bona fides:
[W]ith films like Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and Dragged Across Concrete, the latter a morality play urging sympathy for a racist cop, played by Mel Gibson, who beats down innocent black folks, as well as the launch of the right-wing website Rebeller, its raison d’être was clear.
What exactly would that reason be, Marlow? That only good, virtuous characters are interesting? Guess that means the Academy erred in awarding Anthony Hopkins a Best Actor Oscar for portraying Hannibal Lecter—a cannibalistic serial killer. And that audiences were wrong for finding him interesting, and even witty, in between bouts of being utterly terrified by him. Or that perhaps Denzel Washington should have been snubbed for Training Day, in which he plays a corrupt narcotics cop caught up in a web of double-deals and murder—a tour de force performance layered with both menace and charm, not a bunch of Snidley Whiplash mustache twirling.
Cinema is filled with these kinds of characters, from Norman Bates to Travis Bickle—flawed, damaged and even monstrous characters who run the gamut of personalities but all have one thing in common: they’ll always be remembered by audiences. If Stern had his way, however, as implied by his seeming preference for easily delineated characters—and as defined by his own progressive sensibilities, of course—what we’d end up with are more of the same bland, conformist and utterly tiresome morality plays that Hollywood loves but the public largely greets with an indifferent yawn.
Adam Donaghey, based on the available evidence, is most certainly a sleazy character—and if the criminal charges against him are proven in court, he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. His actions, however, are his own—and Stern is relying largely on innuendo and shady reporting techniques to imply otherwise, with a political goal in mind. My hope is that when the dust settles on all this, Cinestate will not allow this kind of attack to change their goal of reaching audiences that Hollywood was all but abandoned.
Because they have lots of stories to tell, and I’m not the only one who would like to see them.
Full disclosure: I have pitched a script to Cinestate and will do so again without reservation.
Check out the NEW NOQ Report Podcast.
American Conservative Movement
Join fellow patriots as we form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. The coronavirus crisis has prompted many, even some conservatives, to promote authoritarianism. It’s understandable to some extent now, but it must not be allowed to embed itself in American life. We currently have 8000+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.
[yikes-mailchimp form=”1″]
var wWidgetConf_b1a6d20b69 = {rows: 4,cols: 1,backgroundColor: ‘rgb(240, 240, 240)’,textColor: ‘rgb(0, 0, 0)’,displayContent: ‘0’,contentSort: ‘0’,contentType: ‘0’,showTitle: ‘1’,showThumb: ‘1’,widgetID: ‘wWidget_b1a6d20b69’};
(function() {
var sc = document.createElement(‘script’); sc.type = ‘text/javascript’; sc.async = true;
sc.src = ‘//mixi.media/data/js/92936.js’; sc.charset = ‘utf-8’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(sc, s);
}());
Covid variant BA.5 is spreading. It appears milder but much more contagious and evades natural immunity. Best to boost your immune system with new Z-Dtox and Z-Stack nutraceuticals from our dear friend, the late Dr. Vladimir Zelenko.