Filmmaker David Zucker (”Airplane” “Top Secret” “Naked Gun”) saw the error of his liberal ways a few years back. He made some funny campaign ads in 2004, and now he’s back with a feature.

Zucker’s latest movie, An American Carol, is unlike anything that has ever come out of Hollywood. It is a frontal attack on the excesses of the American left from several prominent members of a growing class of Hollywood conservatives. Until now, conservatives in Hollywood have always been too few and too worried about a backlash to do anything serious to challenge the left-wing status quo.

David Zucker believes we are in a “new McCarthy era.” Time magazine film writer Richard Corliss recently joked that conservative films are “almost illegal in Hollywood.” Tom O’Malley, president of Vivendi Entertainment, though, dismisses claims that Hollywood is hostile to conservative ideas and suggests that conservatives simply haven’t been as interested in making movies. “How come there aren’t more socialists on Wall Street?”

But Zucker’s film, together with a spike in attendance at events put on by “The Friends of Abe” (Lincoln, not Vigoda)–a group of right-leaning Hollywood types that has been meeting regularly for the past four years–is once again reviving hope that conservatives will have a battalion in this exceedingly influential battleground of the broader culture war.

Zucker has always been interested in politics. He was raised in Shorewood, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, in a household where Franklin Delano Roosevelt was viewed as either a hero or a dangerous conservative. He was elected president of his senior class at the University of Wisconsin, and, when he addressed his classmates at commencement in the spring of 1970, his speech was serious–a friend describes it as “solemn” and political. Among other things, Zucker condemned the Kent State shootings and lamented the mistreatment of America’s blacks. Two years later, he appeared on stage with lefty leading man Warren Beatty and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. Zucker says at the time he was “very liberal.” (His brother Jerry remains an unreconstructed liberal and recently optioned a sympathetic movie about the life and times of serial fabulist Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame.)