Filmmaker R.J. Moeller has a keen sense about people and pairings.
He recalls helping to connect Dennis Prager and comic Adam Carolla, two media personalities with wildly different skill sets and backgrounds. Yet Prager and Carolla clicked, and they toured the country as a very odd but endearing couple. They later co-starred in the 2019 documentary “No Safe Spaces,” which Moeller produced.
Most documentaries don’t move the cultural needle, but ‘Call Sign Courage’ gave its star a real-life happy ending.
Moeller also sensed something special about Lt. Col. Matt Lohmeier, a former Air Force pilot fired by the Biden administration in 2021 for slamming the military’s DEI culture on “The Steve Gruber Show.”
Lohmeier decried the military’s diversity initiatives, citing their ties to critical race theory.
That led Moeller to produce “Call Sign Courage: The Matt Lohmeier Story.” The documentary, recently promoted by X’s own Elon Musk on the social media platform, recalls Lohmeier’s battle against a formidable system.
He lost his job at Space Force and his pension, but the military veteran wouldn’t give up. His battle is the heart of “Call Sign Courage.” That story felt like a natural for the right documentary filmmaker, Moeller recalls, including Lohmeier’s faith and family connections.
‘Jon Hamm meets John Wayne’
“I thought, ‘This dude is special.’ The character, the depth, what he did when no one else wasn’t looking,” Moeller says. It didn’t hurt that his subject “looked like Jon Hamm meets John Wayne.”
Except Lohmeier wasn’t eager for his close-up.
“These news cycles move fast. He was happy to be forgotten about … he was exploring taking a high school teaching position,” Moeller says.
A mutual friend connected them all the same, and the filmmaker convinced Lohmeier to share his story with the world via film.
“If you give me 12 months … we’re going to make you a film,” the producer told him, sealing the deal.
Crucial allies
Funding is always tight for documentary filmmakers, but Lohmeier’s story attracted the Heritage Foundation’s attention, which helped pick up some critical fees. The nonprofit helped release the film free on X for a limited time last week. Now, the film — directed by Marshall Lee, who cut his teeth editing movies like “What Is a Woman?” and “Am I Racist?” — is available on Apple TV, Prime Video, and other VOD platforms.
Musk screened the film and helped arrange for the free X window. The result? Moeller says roughly five million people watched some or all of it over the weekend.
Moeller, who also produced “Live Not By Lies” for Angel Studios, understood how his subject matter’s fight to call out the military’s Marxist turn mattered to the film. Not everyone was happy to see that element included in the documentary.
“I cannot tell you how many conservative people in D.C., when they heard about this film or saw cuts of it, said, ‘Eh, don’t talk about Marxism so much.’”
“I’m leaving it in the film … it’s the most powerful stuff,” he says. “The more they tell us to not talk about Marxism, the more we’re going to do it.”
RELATED: Killer bear flick ‘Backcountry’ puts big-budget thrillers to shame
IFC Midnight
10,000 hours
Moeller is part of an emerging right-leaning brand of storytellers, the kind who once had little access to the public. Now, with X, YouTube, and other social media platforms, he’s able to share his skills with the public.
It all started for him in the existing movie ecosystem.
“I’m proud of the 10,000 hours I put into traditional Hollywood … you need to cut your teeth out there,” he says. Now, he’s eager to leverage what he calls the “wild, wild west” of storytelling outside the industry’s glittery walls.
“Hollywood failed by overspending and making stuff people didn’t want. Don’t make the same mistakes in the conservative film world,” he says.
The existing film industry “has things to teach us, like professionalism,” he says. “We need to bring in our values, our own money, and our audiences … we need to be really good stewards of that, to under-promise and over-deliver in this space.”
Making inroads
He remains hopeful that David can, if not slay Goliath, make inroads in the pop culture landscape.
“The center-right entertainment ecosystem is doing its best, and platforms like Angel Studios are taking big swings, but how to find and monetize an audience remains the biggest struggle for independent filmmakers,” he says. “We know the audience is there, but lining up quality work with proper distribution, especially marketing, so that everyone can turn a profit and rinse-and-repeat that 1,000 times is easier said than done.”
Moeller is hard at work on a new project, a pilot for a dramedy called “Are We There Yet?” with comedian Jeff Dye. The show, following a stand-up comedian “struggling with his faith, marriage, career, and sobriety,” will be shopped to streamers and potential buyers this summer, he says.
Most documentaries don’t move the cultural needle, but “Call Sign Courage” gave its star a real-life happy ending.
“The Trump campaign found out about the fact that we were telling Matt Lohmeier’s story, and they invited him to a campaign rally in North Carolina right before the 2024 election,” he says. “At that event, Trump offered Matt a position in his administration.”
Read the full article here
