Next week, an ever-smaller audience will tune into the Oscars to watch the Hollywood elite congratulate themselves on their bravery for sharing the opinion that Donald Trump is a bad man. Hollywood’s ironclad embrace of the Democratic Party line is nothing new—it is evident in Best Picture nominee A Complete Unknown. The film pretends that Bob Dylan was ostracized from the folk music scene because he went electric when in reality it was because he did not share their radical left-wing politics. This rewriting of history through the movies is sadly the rule, not the exception, when it comes to Hollywood biopics.

Hollywood productions have almost always reflected the political Left’s worldview, or at least the preferred narrative of the Democrats. President Woodrow Wilson, the only academic historian to serve in the White House, was a man of the Left and the founder of America’s modern progressive movement. He was also a segregationist born in Virginia during the Civil War, and his academic career was largely spent popularizing the Lost Cause narrative of the War of Northern Aggression.

In 1915, when movies were not two decades old, Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation in the White House, the first film to be played there. A giant leap forward in the language of cinema, The Birth of a Nation was a Lost Cause paean to the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen were portrayed as a noble and chivalrous brotherhood protecting white women from the predations of their freed slaves who had turned to drink, rape, and political corruption with wicked alacrity in the absence of slavery.

"It’s like writing history with lightning," the president reportedly remarked after the screening. "My only regret is that it is all so terribly true."

Ironically, neither the quotation nor the events depicted in the film were "terribly true." The sentiment, however, was correct. Cinema has the unique power to burn a striking impression on the psyche of popular audiences far more effectively than any academic like Wilson could have dreamed. Making a historical film, biopic, or period piece is writing history with lightning, and the product is certain to dazzle the imaginations of viewers far more than any rigorously researched tome. The Birth of a Nation proved so influential that the Ku Klux Klan, which had largely been stamped out in the 1870s, was refounded in 1915 and counted some six million members by its peak in the early 1920s.

As fewer and fewer Americans read books, movies continue to grow in their influence over public perceptions of history. Much as news consumption has moved from print to screen, historical pedagogy will be shaped more by Hollywood productions than rigorous literature. Film is simply too compelling an art form for the written word to compete.

Those with an agenda are drawn to this kind of power as moths to the flame. Patriotic mythmakers like John Ford and communists like Dalton Trumbo understood this in the 1950s and strove not for historical accuracy in their films but to morally instruct the nation.

By the time of the Vietnam war, most major studios went bankrupt and a new generation of auteurs, steeped in radical campus politics, took Hollywood by storm with low-budget, artistically inventive films. This Hollywood Renaissance entrenched the antiwar generation of boomer lefties—Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen—that is still working today. Once in power, they were loath to relinquish it and eager to deploy their arts on American history.

Oliver Stone is perhaps the foremost example of an activist director from that generation. His presidential trilogy (JFK, Nixon, and W.) reflects more than merely an innocent fascination with the commander in chief—it represents a lifelong ambition to define these men for his generation.

JFK is the most obvious example. The Kennedy assassination continues to loom large in the boomer imagination because they were becoming culturally aware at the precise moment of the president’s untimely demise. Forever young, Kennedy became a symbol of the boomers’ lost innocence and the focal point of counterfactuals about avoiding the Vietnam War. Into this milieu, Stone introduced a conspiracy theory about a CIA plot as some sort of revenge for the Bay of Pigs failure. Nixon doubles down through a scene where Kennedy’s defeated rival meets with some shadowy businessmen who ominously hint that Kennedy will not be in the picture if he runs in ’64. Today, a staggering 65 percent of Americans believe there was a wider conspiracy than the lone gunman, in part thanks to Stone.

Even when filmmakers strive to avoid outright propaganda, storytelling often necessitates relying on one historian’s view of ambiguous events. A recent example is the smash-hit Oppenheimer (2023) which, like many films of its type, originated from a filmmaker reading a book about a historical subject, thinking it would make a good movie, then hiring the authors to advise the project. The result is a communist sympathizer driving the on-screen treatment of a notorious midcentury communist of dubious loyalties. The film leaves one with the impression that Dr. Robert Oppenheimer was treated unfairly in the revocation of his security clearance. Whether the filmmaker seeks to deliberately advance an agenda or simply relies on bad advice, the general public comes to believe that which is not true.

There remains, however, some cause for hope. The crop of historical miniseries released by HBO in the early 2000s—Band of Brothers, John Adams, and Generation Kill—offer a model for the future of Hollywood historical adaptations. None is totally free of inaccuracy, but a certain dedication to realism prevailed among the filmmakers. It helped that the authors of Band of Brothers and John Adams were both serious historians. Likewise, Generation Kill tells a very recent story based on the first-hand account of Operation Iraqi Freedom by embedded reporter Evan Wright. In all three cases, the miniseries format works far better for a detailed account of history. Audiences will stream 7 to 10 hours of content broken into hourlong chunks as readily as they will sit for 2 hours to watch a movie; only one of these formats requires condensing. Last year, Masters of the Air served as a similarly good example.

All movies are propaganda on some level, historical movies more so than most. As the Left continues to dominate Hollywood, Marxists will rewrite our history to delegitimize the entire Founding of the United States, convincing millions in the process. Patriotic Americans can respond by rewarding those filmmakers who take their moral responsibility for historical accuracy seriously. Conservatives, moderates, and all those who value good historical education ought to support miniseries that prize accuracy over politics without sacrificing entertainment. The survival of the American experiment depends, in part, on such works—regardless of what the Oscars say.

James Erwin is director of Innovation Policy at Americans for Tax Reform and has previously written for National Review, RealClear, and The Hill.