You probably haven’t heard of Thomas Sipos, but the novelist has written a couple of excellent articles for the (annoyingly) conservative web site FrontpageMag.Com about independent media.
Communist Vampires is partly a description of Sipos’ self-publishing efforts with his excellent anti-Communist horror novel, Vampire Nation (which succeeds, btw, as a straight horror novel even if you’re not into the anti-Communism aspect of it).
Christians Go Hollywood is in the similar vein but focused on movies. That article would have been better if he’d focused on truly small, independent films.
Go rent The Last Broadcast to see just how good a movie with essentially no budget can look these days. It’s everything The Blair Witch Project should have been, and it cost a grand total of $900 to make (I’m not making that figure up) compared to Blair Witch’s $30,000 to $50,000.
Personally, I’ve always been impressed at the vitality of the Christian pop music scene. Somewhere in my basement I’ve got a case full of Christian pop music cassettes from the 1980s.
The weird thing is the double standard when it comes to Christian-oriented cultural products. If a bunch of Leftists get together to help fund a documentary or Warren Beatty uses his clout to get an assinine political-screed-disguised-as-a-movie like Bulworth made, the media doesn’t blink an eye. But when a movie like The Omega Code comes out, almost all of the media coverage focuses on the explicit religious nature of the film and the marketing techniques behind it.