Why Subscribe?
This is the 25th year of International WOW Company’s work. I’ve made countless plays and nearly ten feature films. For the past twenty-five years our projects have had an enormous impact- fracking bans all over the country, trillions of dollars divested from fossil fuels, efforts to stop the Iraq War, and constant campaigns for economic, environmental and racial justice. I am working on several new projects this year that all have the potential to really make change. I believe that the work this year is going to be our best and most influential.
Ten years ago we cracked the code and found mainstream distribution- HBO picked up GASLAND and everything changed. Over the past decade nearly all of our projects were picked up by HBO or Netflix or other major distributors- with audiences of hundreds millions of people. We got more and more focused on making films that were miraculously both radically political and influential AND SOMEHOW ALSO supported by the mainstream. It really worked. We changed the world. We had a huge influence.
But that was still a form of dependency on the powers that be. We built an audience of millions of people for radical political content that the mainstream structures still benefit from today.
But the last two years have changed everything. You may not have noticed this (it has been kept off the front page), but there has been unprecedented media consolidation at the corporate level. For example: AT&T an extremely conservative company, purchased HBO and HBO’s content became radically less political. The same has happened across the board- streaming services have become extremely conservative and anything labeled “political” is getting ignored.
So just at our peak- our 25 year mark, when our vision of highly influential political avant garde- yet somehow mainstream- art has hit it’s stride- we are having a really hard time getting projects into the mainstream.
It has created a real deep crisis among the best filmmakers out there, who are all experiencing real trouble getting their world-changing projects completed.
That’s where we are asking you to help us. If we can build a subscriber base of a few thousand people we can pay our bills and start to build our future on our own. We can hire (and re-hire) staff to get our vision of this work out there, we can keep WOW Haus making new art well into this new decade. We can make a ripple that challenges the way things get done and get made. We really need that support.
Today, I launched THE TRUTH HAS CHANGED as a series- a project that was originally commissioned by HBO- THEN SHELVED by the AT&T takeover. Four years in the making, the project is the result of touring over 50 cities across the world with the performance. I know you will love it. So many of you have watched the project live in many multiple iterations or have the book version. But this is the ultimate uncensored and unabridged version. Its cool. Lot’s of never before seen stuff.
We also have many other projects that we will be bringing directly to this new subscriber audience. New interviews, mini-docs, feature films, live performances, viral videos. And we are building a community around these new works that we know we can depend upon in moments like this.
We intend to stay in the mainstream. But to do so we need a strong organization and a steady base audience (and, frankly, cash) that can help us negotiate this new landscape and make the strongest work possible.
And yes, we are proudly, devoutly and unabashedly POLITICAL.
That means we want a clean green future on a healthy living planet, we want to see the end of fracking and pollution, we want healthy children and future generations, we want an end to racism and economic inequality and we feature that struggle for justice in our work without apology.
Mainstream distributors are putting out content that LOOKS LIKE political content but it’s actually corporate dreck in disguise. This is the way we get films that push false solutions- like carbon capture and storage, and nuclear energy, or worse- neocolonialist racist ideas like population control or even fracking. This is why we need you. We need to stay true and real and grassroots and with the cutting edge.
We’ve been at it for 25 years.
Help us get to the next 25 years.
Josh Fox
