Picture of the Day: A New Tea Party 'TV Show'
Courage, New Hampshire: The Travail of Sarah Pine (trailer above) premiered last night at a theater in Monrovia, Calif., and, while it won't air on actual TV any time soon, it is a TV-style series that aims for a less-liberal retelling of colonial America.
Two tea-partiers, a Hollywood development executive and a Patrick Henry impersonator, formed a new production company called Colony Bay and are self-financing the endeavor. They say they're making the series as an alternative to liberal-influenced entertainment media; it'll go straight to DVD, and they're looking for conservative media partners to run it online, The Hollywood Reporter wrote last week:
Colony Bay was founded by James Patrick Riley and Jonathan Wilson, who started in Hollywood as an assistant in ICM's motion picture literary department and became director of development for Peter Hyams, working on films like End of Days with Arnold Schwarzenegger. They met when Wilson was forming the Pasadena chapter of Tea Partiers and he recruited Riley, an experienced Patrick Henry impersonator, to perform at an event. ...In fact, Riley said he didn't even bother pitching the show to traditional TV outlets.
"They wouldn't get it, or trust us. We know we're new, and we'd like to prove ourselves on our own, without focus groups or leftist-orthodoxies telling us which stories to tell," Riley said.
The plot centers on a colonial woman who accuses a British sergeant of seducing and impregnating her, then refusing to help her care for the child.
Entertainment media seems to be a popular new model for tea partiers. In the fall of 2009, former House majority leader Dick Armey's group FreedomWorks promoted a tea-party documentary. More recently, that group and other tea partiers promoted the feature film Atlas Shrugged: Part 1.
Video via Colony Bay