Somewhere outside San Antonio, on a hillside that could have been borrowed from a John Ford movie, a sixty-year-old rancher is pouring coffee for a screenwriter who drove down from Austin. The rancher is not a studio executive. He has never read a treatment in his life. But he is about to write a check for a film set in West Texas, because he is tired of seeing his part of America treated as a punchline. That scene, in a hundred variations, is the dream of a red-state Hollywood. It is not simply a dream of moving the entertainment industry’s headquarters from Los Angeles to Nashville or Austin, although that is part of it. It is something deeper: a desire to build a place where stories about family, faith, small towns, hard work, and common sense can be made without apology, by people who live in those stories and respect them. For generations, conservative and religious Americans have felt like exiles in their own popular culture. They have watched movies that mock their beliefs, television shows that ignore their lives, and award ceremonies that insult their values. They have made peace with the fact that Hollywood is not for them. But now something has shifted. Streaming platforms have broken the old gatekeepers’ monopoly. Digital cameras have made filmmaking cheaper than ever. The pandemic sent people fleeing coastal cities, and many of them settled in Texas, Tennessee, Florida, Oklahoma, and other conservative strongholds. And a growing audience, tired of being lectured, is hungry for an alternative. The dream of a red-state Hollywood is no longer a fantasy. It is a scatter of studios, streaming services, film workshops, and coffee-stained screenplays being passed around kitchen tables across the middle of the country.
The frustration that fuels this dream is not just about politics. It is about the experience of being treated as invisible. For years, conservative characters in mainstream entertainment were almost always rendered as objects of pity or ridicule. The rural father was stupid. The churchgoing mother was repressed. The soldier was violent. The businessman was greedy. And if a story tried to take faith seriously, it was usually packaged as a small, cheap, and barely distributed film, quietly offered to audiences who had already learned not to expect much. Meanwhile, people in the center of the country watched their own lives become exotic or insulting on screen. A producer might praise a script set in Cincinnati—and then rewrite it to include a mute gay love interest, a corrupt pastor, and a nine-minute scene about a man who discovers his vulnerability by knitting hats for abandoned kittens. This is an exaggeration, but not by much. The deeper complaint is economic and professional. To work in Hollywood, you must live in Los Angeles, pay its rents, accept its culture, and climb a ladder built by people who all share the same assumptions. If you are a screenwriter who believes in traditional marriage, or a director who thinks prayer is a real force in people’s lives, you eventually learn to keep those opinions to yourself. The result is not just political discrimination. It is a flattening of art. A filmmaker cannot write honestly about a soldier’s faith if the room treats faith as a mental illness. A storyteller cannot make a great movie about a small town if everyone in the room agrees that small towns are backward and mean. The dream of a red-state Hollywood is born from this exhaustion: enough, these creators say, of trying to be accepted by a world that despises everything we love. Better to build our own world.
What does that world look like? It does not look like a single studio lot with a guard gate and a water tower. It is a patchwork. In Austin, where the tech boom already created a parallel culture of irreverent individualism, conservative media companies have opened offices and ramped up production. The Daily Wire has built a campus there, producing films and television shows aimed explicitly at conservative audiences, with titles like “Lady Ballers” and “What Is a Woman?” that are less art films than ammunition in the culture wars. Down the road, independent producers are making smaller, quieter work: westerns, faith-based dramas, stories about ranchers and oil workers and small-town teachers. In Nashville, the Christian music industry has long provided an infrastructure of studios, publishers, and talent that can easily be repurposed for film. Faith-friendly streaming services, such as Great American Media and Angel Studios, have grown by offering alternatives to the overt sexual content and gloom of mainstream programming. In Georgia, the film industry has exploded, though it sits in the complicated shade of Atlanta, a blue city in a purple-to-red state; many locals are happy for the jobs, less happy about the Hollywood values that came with them. Oklahoma, Montana, and New Mexico have poured money into tax incentives, hoping to attract productions that bring a certain moral vision along with their crew trucks. There is even a plan to build a huge new studio complex near Johnson City, Texas, in the middle of the Hill Country, where the bluebonnets are thick in spring and the politicians don’t hide their faith. These efforts are small compared to the Paramount lot, but they are real. And they are built on something that Hollywood has forgotten: audiences are yearning for stories that make them feel less alone.
Behind all the announcements and tax credits, there are people, and it is their stories that give the dream its emotional force. Consider a cinematographer in his forties who spent fifteen years in Los Angeles working on commercials and gritty indie films. He is good at what he does, but he grew weary of the endless networking, the moral compromises, the sense that every job required a little bit of selling his soul. When a shot on a faith-based film brought him to a small town in Tennessee, he felt something strange: peace. He could walk to work. The craft services table was humble, but the crew prayed before meals. The director asked about his kids, not just his gear. So he stayed, and now he makes less money, but he goes home to his family every night, and he works on stories that he would not be ashamed to show his grandmother. Then there is the actress who left Los Angeles after a series of auditions where she was told to “tramp it up” and “make it grittier,” and who decided she was tired of being asked to disrobe for a career. In Oklahoma she found a small but growing community of performers who share her values. She now plays mothers, teachers, and frontierswomen in movies that are not slick or huge, but that make audiences cheer and cry. And there is the screenwriter in Texas, a young man with a degree in film from a state school, who used to send scripts to managers in Los Angeles. Every rejection had the same tone: the story is good, but the characters are too religious, or the ending is too hopeful, or the politics are too subtle. He stopped sending scripts. Instead, he met a local doctor and an oil executive who both liked cowboys and hated what entertainment had become. They funded his first picture—a simple western about a father and a son—for less than the catering budget of a Marvel movie. It showed in twelve regional theaters and made a small profit. None of these people think they are making “right-wing films.” They think they are making American films, the kind that used to be made for everyone before the industry grew too narrow and too cynical. They are not angry, exactly. They are determined.
But the obstacles are enormous, and no honest account of the dream can ignore them. A red-state Hollywood cannot be built purely on grievance; it must be built on craft. Good films require skilled producers, experienced gaffers, sound mixers, set designers, editors, and post-production specialists. Those people exist in every city, but not in the concentrated numbers that Southern California has accumulated over decades. A state can offer tax incentives, but if the crew base isn’t there, the production will still end up flying people in from Los Angeles, which defeats the purpose. Money is another problem. The streaming services backed by conservative donors have budgets measured in millions, not billions, and they are expected to produce hits, not experiments. They also face a paradox: the same audience that shouts about boycotting Hollywood has a habit of consuming mainstream entertainment. Many conservatives will gladly watch a film that mocks their values if it is slick and glamorous, because culture is not a political test but a private pleasure. The new alternative must be good enough to compete, and that is a brutal standard. There is also the risk of becoming what it hates. If red-state filmmakers fill their movies with sermons, smug speeches, and angry straw men, they will simply mirror the problems they fled. Ideology is not a substitute for character. A film about a heroic Christian lawyer who defeats a corrupt liberal judge is no better, artistically, than a film about a heroic atheist lawyer who defeats a corrupt Christian judge. The audiences who want a red-state Hollywood are not demanding propaganda; they are asking for stories that contain moral order, romantic love, patriotic courage, and the possibility of redemption. Those are universal themes, but they are hard to execute, and they are especially hard to execute while also paying attention to the budget. Finally, other places are changing. As Atlanta grows, it is becoming more liberal. Austin is one of the most left-leaning cities in Texas. The very success of a conservative creative hub will attract newcomers who do not share the founders’ values, and the old problem of being crowded out could happen again. The dream must therefore be more than a real estate play. It must be a cultural grounding, a set of institutions and relationships that can survive demographic change and artistic evolution.
And perhaps that is the real meaning of the dream. It is not a plan to destroy Hollywood, and it is not even really about revenge. It is about dignity. Every culture wants to see itself in the mirror of its art. The heartland of America does not want to be told that it is backward, bigoted, or irrelevant. It wants to see its rivers and prairies, its porches and church halls, its quiet courage and its loud laughter, its complicated people and its stubborn faith. The dream of a red-state Hollywood is a promise that those stories deserve more than a lifetime of negative depictions and patronizing condescension. It is also a hope that the entertainment industry can be rebuilt in a different image: less centralized, less arrogant, less preoccupied with shocking people and more interested in reminding them of what they love. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. Many attempts will fail. Some will be too pious, too angry, too cheap, or too repetitive. But the dream persists because the need is real. In a small screening room outside Tulsa, or Nashville, or Boise, a filmmaker is about to press play for an audience of ranchers, teachers, nurses, and mechanics. He is nervous. He has spent two years making this movie, using savings and donations and favors. He has poured his heart into it, and he is afraid that the audience will laugh in the wrong place, or cry too late, or miss the point entirely. The lights dim. The title appears. The projector hums. And for ninety minutes, a group of people watch a story about a prodigal daughter coming home, or a soldier remembering his best friend, or a preacher doubting his calling, or a wounded man finding forgiveness. It is not a perfect film. The lighting is a little rough. The dialogue sometimes repeats itself. But when the credits end, nobody moves. Then someone starts to clap, and the room fills with applause, not because the film was flawless, but because it was theirs. That is the red-state Hollywood. It is small, fragile, and alive, and it is growing.
