Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

1953-2019

I know that this tribute is going to be one of many that will be published on TLE, many of which will be from people who actually knew J. Neil Schulman better than I did. While I never got the honor of meeting Neil in person, he still had an impact on the way I view individual freedom. It was in the year 2001, not too long after I discovered libertarianism through the works of Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith, when I had gone through what I call my “flirting with libertarianism period.” I wasn’t sure if I really embraced every aspect of libertarianism and I was constantly looking for more information on the subject. This was also before I discovered the works of Ayn Rand and long before I had even heard of Murray Rothbard. Hell, at the time I didn’t even know of the existence of Reason magazine. At the time I found myself searching for L. Neil Smith’s books that were out of print at second-hand book stores, when I came across J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night. At first, I thought it was one of the works of L. Neil Smith, since those two have similar names (common mistake). When I realized my mistake, I decided to read the description on the back, which actually showed that it was indeed a libertarian novel with a story that centered around an economic collapse. After reading the novel, I found myself intrigued by the very idea of a group of anarchists creating an underground network, which provided everything from underground markets to armed resistance against the government. To this day my favorite part of the book and its movie adaptation is the underground mall which sold everything from cannabis to nuclear weapons. Later, I would discover his other great works such as, Rainbow Cadenza and Escape from Heaven.

Then in 2013 I had heard that J. Neil Schulman had created a movie adaptation of Alongside Night. It was exciting to see any libertarian story get made into a feature film, and it was even more thrilling to see one of my favorite libertarian novels of all-time turned into a live action movie. I was even more intrigued when I heard that Neil had made a movie called Lady Magdalene’s a few years earlier. I tried searching for the movie online, but the only place that was showing it was Schulman’s YouTube page, which required his permission to view. I then offered to do a review in return for being able to see the movie, which he gracefully accepted. About a year later, Neil would offer anybody who wanted to see Alongside Night on his YouTube channel to either write a review for the movie or create some other form of promotion for it. I ended up writing a review that would appear on both TLE and the movie’s IMDb page.

J. Neil Schulman would later ask me to write reviews for his various literary works, such as Escape from Heaven, The Heartmost Desire, Nasty, Brutish and Short Stories and The Fractal Man. For each book I would write a review for both TLE and Amazon to help promote his work. Also, when the Blu-Ray/DVD for Alongside Night came out, I tried my best to promote the movie by leaving messages about its release on the pages of libertarian Facebook groups. I just wish that there was more that I could have done to help his film career take off.

I believe that the greatest aspect of J. Neil Schulman’s legacy is the way he inspired so many others like myself to move down the path of libertarianism. He also showed us that it is possible to make decent movies under such limited budgets. Despite his setbacks and hardships, he did show us that it was possible to create a film that was unapologetically libertarian, which is something that nobody would have thought possible twenty or thirty years ago. Recently, I saw an interview with drive-in critic Joe Bob Briggs, where he talked about how he expected to see a renaissance in filmmaking with the plummeting costs of film and various other production values. Later, he would become disappointed when he saw people going about filmmaking by trying to work their way up the ladder of major studios. This is what Briggs referred to as the “old ways”, which are slowly dying out. I would say that with the disappointing box office profits that we have seen in the recent years and with increasing popularity of streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, it looks as if Hollywood is starting to lose its power and influence over the entertainment industry. Maybe this is the time for libertarians interested in making freedom-oriented movies to step up and continue what J. Neil Schulman started with Alongside Night. What better way to honor the legacy of one of the greatest libertarian thinkers of all-time?

Some may say that as a filmmaker Neil was a little overambitious, which may be true. It’s also possible that he may have been a little too far ahead of his time with his dream of creating a new subgenre in American Cinema. Whatever the case may be, he has helped shaped the movement with his great storytelling and his great insight about the world around us. Some may see this as the elephant in the room, but I think that is worth mentioning that Neil believed that he had actually mind-melted with God, who actually turned out to be a libertarian. This earned him a considerable amount of ridicule and belittlement from hardcore atheists and Christians alike. Since my beliefs fall somewhere between agnosticism and modern-day Deism, I am still not sure what to think of the “Mind-Melt”. Though I do hope that he is now in heaven sitting at a table with God, Robert Heinlein, Sam Konkin, Murray Rothbard, H.L. Mencken, C.S. Lewis and maybe even Ayn Rand if she ever got over her distain for libertarians, while knocking back a few cold-ones in the name of freedom.