Mediaite Q&A: Sonny Bunch Talks New Movie Site Rebeller, and Why He Wants to Cultivate Film Criticism on the Right

As the former executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon, the conservative news and politics site, Sonny Bunch, 37, is a consummate D.C media insider, with past stints at the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times and Roll Call.

But over the past few years, he has distanced himself from politics. In December, Bunch left the Free Beacon and began working for a newly launched, subscription-based film site, Rebeller, published by Cinestate, the swashbuckling indie movie studio founded by Dallas Sonnier four years ago.

It was a direction Bunch had been heading in for a while. He previously reviewed films for the Washington Times — and wrote film criticism for the Free Beacon during his tenure there. He contributes opinion pieces on film to the Washington Post, as well. “I just kind of like slowly transitioned away from writing about politics,” he tells Mediaite.

Rebeller also happens to be a production label under the Cinestate banner, and its first film, Run Hide Fight, about a 17-year-old girl who decides to fight back amid a school shooting, will be released sometime this year. It’s a prime example of what Cinesate – which also owns Fangoria, the recently reinvigorated horror film magazine —likes to call “outlaw cinema,” or movies that defy Hollywood mores. And in his role as editor in chief of Rebeller, Bunch is responsible for commissioning and editing pieces that meditate on such films — and building an audience around the Rebeller brand.

Less than a month in, Bunch says things are going well. He has launched a podcast, “Across the Movie Aisle,” in which he talks film with the journalists Alyssa Rosenberg and Peter Suderman. Though he declined to provide specific numbers, he says the site, which has a paywall, already has lured in a good number of subscribers. “I figured it would take us six months to get to the number of subscribers we currently have,” Bunch tells Mediaite. Still, he maintains that the site is very much in start-up mode.

In about two weeks, Bunch will leave behind the D.C area, where he has lived for the past 25 years. He is moving to Dallas, where Cinestate is based. In a phone interview, Bunch discussed outlaw cinema, why he wants to cultivate film criticism on the right and more. Edited excerpts follow.

Mediaite: Did you always aspire to write about movies?

I don’t know about always. My first job out of college was at Roll Call newspaper. I was doing political reporting. I will say that I’ve always been interested in movies. I took movie classes in college and all that. But I didn’t grow up wanting to be Roger Ebert, exactly.

That’s good because he’s hard to emulate. When did you start making moves to go to Rebeller?

The CEO of Cinestate, Dallas Sonnier, sent me an email: Hey, I want to talk to you about a project. I assumed he wanted to talk to me for a story. I had interviewed him for a piece six months prior to that. So he called me up, and he said, Hey, I’m starting this website. I want you to come run it. I was like, O.K., that’s not what I was expecting, but let me let me think about it a bit. I went down to Dallas. We talked for a while about what he was looking for and what the site might look like and what Cinestate and Rebeller were up to in the moviemaking world.

The thing about Rebeller that is most interesting to me is that it is not just a website. It’s a label for a movie studio. We just wrapped Run Hide Fight last month. That’s going to be the first movie under the Rebeller label. But at least one more Rebeller movie starts shooting in January. So it’s not just sitting here critiquing movies and saying what people are doing right and doing wrong — it’s actually getting out there and making stuff. It’s a big difference and a big change.

What’s your involvement with the production side?

None. I am not on the production side at all. It’s not like there’s a firewall between them, like business and editorial at a newspaper. But that’s not what I know how to do.

So your job is to generate an audience or a readership around the Cinestate universe?

Kind of. One thing that Dallas is very into is the idea of 1,000 true fans. The idea is you need to go out and find the people who will support you on a financial level that allows you to do what you love doing. So for a musician, 1,000 true fans means 1,000 people who will pay 100 bucks a year on your stuff. But I’m thinking more of the 10,000 true fans I need. If I can get 10,000 people to sign up for Rebeller and pay the 20 bucks a year in subscriptions I can do this forever. And frankly I would rather do that. I would rather find the 10,000 people who will pay for interesting and good content than 10 million people who might click on some slideshow or something.

Are you applying any of the lessons you learned as an editor at Free Beacon to Rebeller? The subject matter is different, but Free Beacon is also a niche site with a devoted readership.

There are things that you can take between the two. Understanding who your readers are is important, of course, and there’s something to be said for having a niche audience and targeting it. One of the things we’ve been working on is trying to get everyone who is interested in the movies that Cinestate has already made aware of the Rebeller brand. It’s hard out there in media world, but I am excited to try and build something that people are really into. I think that people are hungry for more thoughtful, more interesting essays and film writing than a lot of what they’re getting from elsewhere. And this isn’t to say there aren’t other good sites out there already. I like Film Comment a lot. RogerEbert.com. Vulture has some great writers. We’re just trying to cultivate that audience.

The paywall is pretty aggressive. Is that something that you’re tinkering with?

It was a big internal debate, how tight we wanted that to be. What it comes down to is any pay wall that doesn’t require a sign-in is too easy to circumvent. We have built the thing so that there is an option for people to read for free. You sign up, you get three free original pieces, and after that you hit the paywall for your month. There’s always going to be people who sign up for one piece and don’t come back. But I think people who come back on a regular basis are going to hit that paywall often enough, and find that it is cheap enough, to justify throwing down two bucks a month.

You’re coming from a conservative website. Do you consider Rebeller to be a conservative movie site? Scott Tobias’ Ringer piece on Cinestate mentions that some critics have read “conservative sentiments” into Cinestate’s movies.

I don’t know exactly how to answer that question. I am a person of the right. I’m a libertarian-conservative type, but I am often considered not quite libertarian or conservative enough for people on the right but way too much for people on the left. So one of the goals of Rebeller is, we’re not going to abide by some of the niceties of film writing and some of these movie sites. The whole Ricky-Gervais-at-the-Golden-Globes thing is a perfect example of the silliness that we are pushing pushing back against—the idea that Gervais should not make fun of certain liberal platitudes and hypocrisies strikes us as borderline hilarious.

Are there a lot of conservative film critics?

One of the reasons I’m happy to start this is because there aren’t that many of them, and I think there needs to be a space to cultivate them. I wrote a piece about this in the Washington Post maybe two years ago, that there aren’t that many conservative film critics, and the reason for that is that the incentives aren’t there. I mean, 99 percent of film critics are liberals. Why would any conservative want to get into that line of work where they know they’re not going to be able to succeed? But there are conservatives out there. National Review has a couple of that are pretty good — Kyle Smith and Armond White. John Podhoretz, previously at the Weekly Standard, actually took my spot at the Free Beacon. But they are limited in number, and one of the things I would be happy to do here is cultivate smart film writing on the right and give people a space to think through some of their movie thoughts.

We’ve also published plenty of liberals. Frankly, it’s easier for me to find liberals to publish than it is for me to find conservatives. Sheila O’Malley and Abby Bender, who published pieces with us this week, are almost certainly of the left. They wrote very good pieces about costuming in movies that I think got a pretty nice response. And a lot of the stuff is just apolitical. The director of Guns Akimbo wrote a piece for us about fandom and how it has gotten really ugly and negative. He’s not a person on the right, I don’t think, but it’s also just kind of an apolitical piece. This is one of the nice things about art. Not everything has to be about why why Trump is bad or why Hillary Clinton is bad or why Trump is good or why Hillary Clinton is good. There’s a lot of space for appreciation and aesthetic discussion and criticism and that sort of thing.

Do you feel in any sense like you’re out of the loop not being at the Free Beacon anymore?

In the sense that I’m not editing political news every day, probably yes, to a certain extent. But I still have my Twitter feed. I can still see what’s going on, more or less.

Tell me more about “outlaw cinema.”

The idea of outlaw cinema is essentially, look, we are we are making movies that are not really being made by the Hollywood machine. A movie like Bone Tomahawk or Brawl in Cell Block 99 or Dragged Across Concrete is a movie that is hard to get funding for because it is not a big giant comic book movie, it is not a big star-driven action feature, it is not a costume weepie that’s going to win a bunch of awards. So when we talk about outlaw cinema, what we’re talking about is working outside the system, working outside what is expected of movies and movie-making. And we are hoping to bring some of that back to back to the theaters. We think that there is an audience for that kind of outlaw sentiment. And one of the big reasons we started Rebeller was to get those people back in theaters.

I’ve read that Rebeller will also publish books and podcasts and do events. Is there anything in the works?

At launch we had [the podcast] “Across the Movie Aisle.” We also acquired a podcast for the network called “Just the Discs,” which is a show dedicated to physical media — new Blu-ray releases, that sort of thing. It’s a very fun show. It’s got a nice little audience. We are hoping to start a screening series, especially in Dallas. I’m moving to Dallas in about two weeks, and I think once we get down there we’re going to start hosting some screenings of Rebeller favorites and maybe try and see if we can get some actors and directors to come and hang out and do Q&A’s. There’s all sorts of stuff in the works.

How does it feel to be leaving D.C.?

I’ve lived here for almost 25 years. Before I started working in D.C., I lived in Northern Virginia, more or less. I’ve been here for a long time and it’s a big change. But it keeps us out of the various bubbles by living in Dallas.

Do you have a favorite movie?

I hate that question. It depends on what I’m in the mood to watch on any given night. But I will say that I gravitate toward the auteurist side of things. For instance, I just watched like five Walter Hill movies over the last couple of weeks, getting ready for a couple of pieces that we were publishing. I wouldn’t say that The Driver is my favorite movie of all time, but I like it a lot. The Warriors is not my favorite movie of all time, but I like it a lot.

How many movies do you watch a week?

I actually started tracking them on Letterboxd. I would say that, in any given week, I generally watch three to five movies. I watch about 20 movies a month, is what it comes down to. So between 220 and 250 movies a year.