Mark Judge is a journalist and filmmaker whose writings have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Caller. He is the author, most recently, of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi, cited by Mark below.
Mark writes to apprise us of his inspired idea for a film festival. With a little help from you, dear readers, he is going to make it happen. He calls this preview of coming attractions “On the Waterfront: The Anti-Communist Film Festival.” He writes:
We’re having an Anti-Communist Film Festival.
I’ve spent years attending film festivals, and over the course of time have compiled a list of great anti-communist films: The Lives of Others, Trial, Freedom’s Fury, On the Waterfront, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Hail, Caesar!. Last year I got the idea: Why not show them all together?
The reaction was instant and enthusiastic. Why spend $100 million for a conservative movie when so many great ones already exist? 2026 also marks the 20th anniversary of The Lives of Others, one of the greatest anti-communist films ever made. That film will be our centerpiece. As I argue in my book The Devil’s Triangle, the most appropriate analogy to the modern left is not the Nazis, but the Stasi.
We’re holding the festival this October at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which is also our sponsor. You can donate here. [Ed.: Mark is $1900 short of his goal.]
Movies change lives. More than any other art form film gets into the soul and the subconscious, altering perceptions of the world and creating empathy. It’s why Roger Ebert called movies “an empathy machine.” The left has owned Hollywood for a century. It’s time to change that.
One of the theaters we are considering renting for the festival is the Bethesda Theater. I worked at the Bethesda when I was in college in the 1980s and it was known as the Bethesda Cinema ’n’ Drafthouse. The Drafthouse had originally been the Bethesda Theatre. It was designed and built in 1938 by the firm of the John Eberson, dean of American Theatre Architects. The theater was was designed in the historic Streamline Moderne style, and still has some of the art deco illustrations — spinning stars, planets, suns — on the walls.
In 1983 the Bethesda reopened as the Bethesda Cinema and Drafthouse. We featured “second-run” movies, films that were no longer in wide release but had yet to come out on VHS video. In fact VHS tapes played a role in the collapse of communism, as Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies were kidnapped into the Eastern Bloc.
I was a bartender at the Drafthouse when we played Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers’ first film, and saw all the greats of the era: Back to School, Top Gun, Blue Velvet, Broadcast News, Revenge of the Nerds, Aliens, Little Shop of Horrors, Joe Versus the Volcano, Harold and Maude, To Live and Die in L.A., Big Trouble in Little China, and Beverly Hills Cop. I witnessed a film actually snap during a showing — American Anthem, the cheesy 1986 vehicle for gymnast Mitch Gaylord. When the film broke and the screen blank, the audience applauded.
I saw audiences moved to tears, fall in love, emerge having a political certainty shaken. My freshman year in high school my Jesuit teachers screened for us On the Waterfront, and it had educated me about the nature of Communism. The film was director Elia Kazan’s metaphor for naming names in the 1950s, for which he was shunned by Hollywood for most of the rest of his life.
As Allan Ryskind notes in his book Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters: Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, the left hated Kazan not just because he came out against communism in the 1950s, but because he did it with such relish. “Kazan was not only the most illustrious former Communist from the entertainment industry to have cooperated with HUAC,” Ryskind writes.
“What really galled the Hollywood Left was that Kazan appeared to have become a believing anti-Communist who thought cooperating with the Committee, even if one had to name names, was absolutely justified. That is what the Left has never been able to forgive.” Two days after his HUAC appearance, Kazan took out an ad in the New York Times urging others who knew about Communism to defect.
The Kazan ad said that he had placed the facts he knew about this “dangerous and alien conspiracy” before the “House Committee on Un-American Activities without reserve”—without reserve—and “that any American who is in possession of such facts has the obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate government agency.”
The American Communist Party, his ad continued, “was abjectly taking its orders from the Kremlin,” attempting “to dictate personal conduct,” and “habitually distort[ing] and violat[ing] the truth.” To be a Party member, he stressed, “is to have a taste of the police state.”
Firsthand experience with the Communist Party not only “left me with an abiding hatred of Communist philosophy and methods,” but with the conviction that we must fight to preserve “the very things which [Communists] kill” in the countries they already rule. Kazan noted that the communists suppress “free speech, a free press, the rights of property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual rights.”
Not surprisingly, Kazan was blackballed by the American Film Institute – which also, after some flirting, shot down hosting the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
Now with a Marxist mayor of New York and socialism popular at universities, the same totalitarian monster has reared its head again, like the ever-growing plant Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors that thrives on blood. More than lectures offered at think tanks, more than white papers or dry symposium, more than podcasters and influencers, films can reveal to the young that communism is an evil system that always results in misery.
