Over in Conservistan, folks are all excited about a crowdfunding effort for a docudrama about convicted abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. Until now, the filmmakers behind this project -- Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney, and Magdalena Segieda -- have specialized in "I'm rubber, you're glue" documentaries such as FrackNation (a pro-fracking answer to Gasland) and Not Evil Just Wrong (an attempted rebuttal of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) Not Evil failed to get commercial distribution; FrackNation appeared in a couple of theaters and on Mark Cuban's little-known AXS.tv.
The Gosnell movie seems to be aiming higher -- or at least the filmmakers seem to have succeeded in making themselves darlings of the wingnut media this time. They announced the project last week and have received coverage at The Weekly Standard, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, Hot Air, Twitchy, Townhall, Newsbusters, the Washington Examiner, and LifeSiteNews, not to mention The Hollywood Reporter and the Toronto Sun. They've got a snazzy poster:
And that "serial killer" line is a fairly clever hook, which the filmmakers back up with a lot of whining about media suppression of the truth:
Dr. Kermit Gosnell is the most prolific serial killer in American History, but almost no one knows who he is....Oh, and Breitbart says the brave truth-tellers were even censored by Kickstarter!
The mainstream media or Hollywood don't think this is a story. Even though Gosnell killed more people than Gary Ridgeway, John Wayne Gacey, The Zodiac Killer and Ted Bundy combined. In a 30 year killing spree, it is thought he killed 1000s of babies. And that wasn't a national story?
But Jodi Arias who was on trial at the same time as Gosnell, for killing her boyfriend, just one person, was national news.
Hollywood think the Jodi Arias story is so important they have already made a movie about her which has been shown multiple times on TV.
The censorship of the Gosnell story ends now.
... their plan to raise more than $2 million via the crowd-funding website Kickstarter was thrown off course when the website objected to the description of the project and raised concerns about the political convictions behind it.Way to up your profile, folks! You're martyrs already!
"This is unacceptable to us and it should be unacceptable to any filmmaker particularly on a platform such as Kickstarter which claims to be all about artistic freedom," McAleer said. "Kickstarter's actions are particularly odious and alarming because they are an attempt to censor factual descriptions of a serial killer's actions."
In a news release, the trio said that Kickstarter attempted "to restrict the detailing of Gosnell's crimes."
... Kickstarter has so far not responded to questions about the allegations made by McAleer.
Is there a larger plan in this? Although the filmmakers are planning to do this one as a drama rather than a documentary, they want this to be a TV movie rather than a feature film. Is this something they think might appear during an election cycle, perhaps? Maybe sometime in 2016? Are they concerned that Hillary Clinton might have a good chance at winning over socially conservative white ethnics who might have rejected Barack Obama, even though she'll run as a pro-choice candidate? Are they trying to make precisely the kind of movie/political ad that was the focus of the Citizens United case? Is it supposed to be a counterweight to any Hillary Clinton biopics that might ultimately emerge?
Or is this yet another conservative attempt to persuade African-American voters that the "Democrat Party" is the party of black genocide? (Phelim McAleer described Gosnell to The Hollywood Reporter as "a black man who is racist against blacks and Hispanics"; the Reporter story says that "white women were afforded a cleaner waiting room and medical equipment than were women of color" in Gosnell's clinic.)
I'm not sure. But righties think they have a winner here.
Gosnell is less a look at our past and present, and more a look at our future, as more and more anti-choice laws go into effect.
ReplyDeleteAnd THAT, besides him, is what's pathetic.
So a private company can't decide what projects do or don't appear on its web site? Sounds to me as if these folks are advocating government control of crowdfunding.
ReplyDeleteKermit Gosnell's clinic was created by Pennsyvania's Draconian restrictions on late-term abortions and nothing else. With a rational abortion law such places could not exist.
ReplyDelete