Some of Hollywood’s most familiar names are shunning the leftist filmmaking culture there and are pursuing other projects on their own that focus more on faith and patriotic themes.
Fox News reported that “Full House” alum Candace Cameron Bure, 47, who spent more than a decade at the Hallmark Channel and was dubbed the “Queen of Christmas” for her renowned holiday films, recently left the network for the new traditional-family-oriented network Great American Family.
“My heart wants to tell stories that have more meaning and purpose and depth behind them,” Bure, who is now Great American Family’s chief creative officer, said in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal.
“I knew that the people behind Great American Family were Christians that love the Lord and wanted to promote faith programming and good family entertainment,” added the devout Christian.
The outlet asked if she was planning on featuring any content with LGBTQ themes, to which she responded no.
“I think that Great American Family will keep traditional marriage at the core,” she said.
Fox News Digital added:
Great American Family, which was launched in 2021, provides a faith and family alternative to purely secular programming, including the massive holiday film market.
While major studios and networks have typically steered away from focusing on the religious aspects of the Christmas holiday, Great American Family is taking the opposite track and highlighting Christianity in many of its holiday offerings, according to Abbott.
Meanwhile, Pure Flix founders David A.R. White and Michael Scott, who started the network in 2005 and which has since been acquired by Sony Pictures, said the holiday market is huge and ripe for traditional themes.
“I think families were looking for it,” Scott, who is the son of a pastor like White, told Fox News. “People not only here in the U.S. but around the world were looking for it. It was just a great place for us to be.”
He said they were inspired by “this hunger and this need to give people content that uplifted and inspired that human spirit that was something different than what Hollywood was giving to them.”
“I don’t even think Hollywood really realized how big of a marketplace is here, like it didn’t even exist,” White added.
“I think for the longest time this content wasn’t available to families,” White observed. “Just safe, uplifting, inspiring content that ultimately brings people to higher levels of insight to who God is and the purpose that he has for their lives.”
Other stars know that Hollywood’s liberal filmmakers aren’t into patriotic films either, including “Dukes of Hazzard” star John Schneider. He is starring in a new patriotic film titled “To Die For,” which was independently made.
Fox News adds:
The film follows reclusive veteran Quint North (Schneider), who takes a public stand for his personal freedoms after receiving a court order to keep his American flag-flying El Camino truck away from a local high school. The actor told Fox News Digital the film defends patriotism, freedom of speech and the American flag.
Schneider told Fox News Digital that he was inspired to make “To Die For” after reading an article about a man who had been jailed for refusing to remove the American flag from the back of his truck.
“I read the article, and it said he had a restraining order against him, so he couldn’t drive within a certain distance from the [local] high school with the flag on his truck,” he recounted.
“[My wife and I] are big supporters of our military and our law enforcement. And I thought, now is the time to make a movie about this guy.”
“I wanted to make a movie not about that individual guy, but that kind of guy who is willing to go to jail in order to continue to express his First Amendment right of free speech,” he said. The film was released Oct. 20.
“People talk about Hollywood as if it has autonomy,” he told the outlet. “Hollywood is a line item on a billionaire globalist spreadsheet, really. So, Hollywood has to basically do what they’re told. I know a lot of people in Hollywood, and I don’t really believe that they are naïve enough to believe a lot of the things that they put forth as truth. But as a very old song used to say, they owe their soul to the company store.”
“You’ve got the celebrity types who… get paid a lot of money, but they’re really doing what they’re told as well. So there’s not a lot of room in that model for free thought. There’s not a lot of room in that model for free speech. You really have to work, I believe, outside that model, ’cause that model’s not going to change.”