Palin “doc” man talks about the film

I had a conversation this afternoon with Stephen Bannon, the writer and director of “The Undefeated” — a documentary about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.  The film will premiere this coming Tuesday, June 28 at the Pella Opera House.

“I had a concept about how to tell her story,” Bannon said. “It’s an amazing story of, really, modern America and the kind of difficulty of the middle class and the working class to make an impact on the world. And that story was hiding in plain sight and the mainstream media and even most of the conservative media had not picked up on the story. They really picked up on Governor Palin when she came to the Republican convention and hadn’t really looked at the backstory.”

I followed up with this question: When you see filmgoers leaving the Pella Opera House, what are you hoping? That they’re inspired to vote for her? What’s the goal of the film?

“The goal is very simple,” Bannon said. “Number one is, you know, AMC Theaters which is the second-largest theater chain in the country and Cinedigm which is the largest digital distribution company in the country, and ARC Entertainment — those are Hollywood capitalists. I mean, they’re not conservative companies by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the executives there watch more MSNBC than they do the conservative channels.  They see it as a story that transcends politics.  I mean, it’s really a story about people that are out there — when this story starts off, Sarah Palin is working on a little commercial fishing boat she co-owns with her husband who’s a blue collar foreman up on the North Slope.  Her dad’s a school teacher. He doesn’t make a lot of money. The family’s never made a lot of money. She’s married to a blue collar guy. She’s not part of any social or cultural or political elite.  Even in the frontier like Alaska, we lay out Alaska for the frontier it is, she’s not part of that elite. In fact, she’s as out of the loop as anybody in modern America and it shows you over 20 years really beginning at a town council level what one has to do to take on the vested interests.”