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Blacklisting A Pro-Life Movie

Producers of Roe v. Wade running into ideological production obstacles, even in conservative Louisiana
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The Hollywood Reporter says that makers of a feature film with a pro-life slant are having trouble getting it made — even in Louisiana, which is a strongly pro-life state. Excerpts:

As Nick Loeb walked to his car with a production assistant during a day of shooting his upcoming feature film, Roe v. Wade, outside Tulane University last week, a woman wearing a headset approached and asked: “Are you the director?”

“When I told her I was, she told me to go f*ck myself,” Loeb recalls. “Then she threw her headset on the ground and walked off. I found out later she was our electrician.”

Anecdotes such as this have become fairly common since Loeb and his production partner, Cathy Allyn, began shooting their pro-life feature film June 15 in and around New Orleans. While Loeb has been in the news in recent years because of his ongoing custody battle over frozen embryos with former girlfriend Sofia Vergara of Modern Family, there’s been little information about the filmmaker’s new project, save for a flurry of articles five weeks ago alleging that Facebook wasn’t allowing him to use its platform to raise money for the story of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion.

The radio silence — until now — has been by design, both for the security of the cast and crew and in order to obtain shooting locations. To accomplish the latter, Loeb and Allyn have been shooting the film, which will wrap principal photography around July 15, under a fake title that the pair will not disclose.

More:

Even with the secrecy, it’s been a challenging shoot. At Louisiana State University, Loeb says, “we were told we were rejected due to our content, even though it will be a PG-rated film. They refused to put it in writing, but they told us on the phone it was due to content.” At Tulane, where Loeb is an alum, the film shot one day, but after the school newspaper reported on the nature of the project, producers were denied a second day of shooting, according to Loeb. (Both Tulane and LSU say logistics were the problem, not the content of the movie.)

And then there was a synagogue in New Orleans that producers rented for catering and as a place for extras to hang out. “Once they found out what the film was about, they locked us out. We had to call the police so that the extras and caterers could retrieve their possessions,“ Loeb says.

A synagogue? A synagogue is so devoted to the pro-choice cause that they locked out pro-life filmmakers? Whose team are they playing for, anyway?

Read the whole thing.

The Louisiana reader who tipped me off to this asks:

Can we do something?  Be extras?  Provide locations?  Build sets? House or feed actors/staff?

Great question. If you are involved with this movie’s production and would like this kind of help, reach out to me, and I’ll see what we can crowdsource.

Isn’t this remarkable, though, what they’re having to go through just to make this movie? So much for liberal Hollywood’s tolerance of dissent. The Loeb news brought to mind this Medium essay by feminist Leslie Loftis on why Hollywood tolerated Harvey Weinstein for years, even though everybody knew he was a predatory pig. She talks about right-wing men (Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly) who got away with it for many years, and then:

But on the left there is a peculiar irony. These men tend to have elite feminist support because they publicly champion one critical cause: abortion. That was a common feature of the Hefner tributes, and here’s just one comment on Joss Whedon from Huffington Post, regarding his not-feminist-approved leaked Wonder Woman script. “It’s difficult to point out Whedon’s major flaws with this screenplay, because he’s done so much to support women. He’s donated huge sums of money to Planned Parenthood and made a short film to support the health care organization.”

It was the common theme back in Bill Clinton’s scandal days. Writer Nina Burleigh gained infamy for remarking,

I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential knee pads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.

The sexual predators of the patriarchy have elite feminists as their greatest allies. Support for Planned Parenthood earns a pass for everything else. But, of course the men who would use women as mere vessels of bodily fluid and confirmation of their dominance would support abortion! Think about it: if they didn’t, their sexual power plays would far more frequently end with inconvenient children, making the dalliance both harder to leave behind, and to hide.

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