"I really, honestly, believe that the more creative you are, the more likely you are to be a liberal."

So says Charles E. Sellier Jr. And he's not doing that thing where you think that the people who agree with you are finer, better, truer, more beautiful, more talented, more all-around wonderful than those slimy rats who don't. He's a righty director.

What [three right-leaning filmmakers] acknowledge... is that something besides liberal bias is responsible for the striking shortage of conservative nonfiction cinema at a time when filmmakers on the other end of the spectrum are flooding screens with messages about global warming, the war in Iraq and the downside of Wal-Mart.

If it were a left-wing agenda, it wouldn't be traceable to the studios. They don't deal in documentaries. It could be the film festival programmers. But left-wing politics might be inherent in the nature of filmmaking. Here, the theory is that "the very nature of conservatism runs counter to the rebellious impulses that make a good film... that a critique like Robert Greenwald’s 'Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price' is inherently more exciting than a defense like Ron Galloway’s 'Why Wal-Mart Works.'"

“The origin of the word conservative is about not changing, accepting what is,” said the director Wash Westmoreland, who is not a conservative. “And that’s never a very interesting thing to make a film about. The thing that drives you to make a documentary is seeing it as a way to social change. Societies with little conflict tend not to make interesting art.”

And yet, lefty critiques usually follow a predictable pattern. And it actually isn't the slightest bit innovative to display rebelliousness. It's a huge Hollywood tradition, going back to the silent era. So are we really talking about creativity?