This story is actually five months old, but I heard some rumblings about it this week from friends in the film industry, who openly wondered if the movie will actually be released as planned in 2019. I had a hard time believing some of the stories they told me, so I looked it up to see how much of it has been openly reported and damn, if it isn't all true.
Nick Loeb, whose biggest claim to fame to date has been suing his ex-girlfriend Sophia Vergara for custodial rights to her frozen embryos, has been directing a movie looking at the 1973 landmark decision Roe v. Wade, starring a secret cast of conservative actors, like Robert Davi, Stacey Dash, Jon Voight, Steve Guttenberg, Jamie Kennedy, and Corbin Bernsen (who wrote and directed the movie "Christian Mingle" in 2014, inspired by the app). Apparently, it also includes appearances by conservative flamethrowers Milo Yiannopoulos and Tomi Lahren. But Loeb and his producing partner Cathy Allyn promise the movie will be balanced and fair to both sides of the debate. With a cast line up like that, that's totally believable, isn't it?
Or maybe there's a clue in their GoFundMe pitch, in which they describe the film they want to make as “the untold story of how people lied, how the media lied, and how the courts were manipulated to pass a law that has since killed over 60 Million Americans.”
Another tip-off that things might not be as balanced as they suggest is the complete secrecy in which the production was held. Even the crew didn't necessarily know what movie they were on. When they found out, some quit. A favorite anecdote from The Hollywood Reporter article on the troubled production:
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 fuck myself," Loeb recalls. "Then she threw her headset on the ground and walked off. I found out later she was our electrician."
The script was even too graphic for actors Kevin Sorbo and Stephen Baldwin, who quit when they discovered that props included "buckets of baby fetuses". The production has become so embattled that a Daily Beast reporter was actually assaulted by a crew member, something for which Bernsen shrugged off. “Sometimes we grab, sometimes we talk to you,” Bernsen said. "“the movie’s been under great attack.”
How Christian of him. Some times we pray for you, some times it's the Crusades, because we're under great attack.
Filming was supposed to have wrapped several weeks ago, but per its IMDb page, it's still considered in production. Some of the difficulties lie in getting permission to film in various locations (Tulane University revoked permission after a single day of filming).
Daily Beast got their hands on a leaked script, and not only is it chock-a-block with conspiracy theories about Margaret Sanger and eugenics and Planned Parenthood's suspected profit motive of selling baby parts, it also has a lovely little anti-Semitic subplot:
In addition to Sanger, the villains of Roe v. Wade are undoubtedly the abortion-rights movement’s inner circle, consisting of Larry Lader, Cyril Means, Dr. Nathanson and Betty Friedan. They’re depicted as a shady cabal of rich lefty Jews who meet in exotic locations like St. Croix and the Russian Tea Room to boast about the money they’re raking in through abortions—over daiquiris or pastrami sandwiches. “It pays to fight for a good cause!” Lader exclaims at one point before the crew clinks martini glasses; at another, Dr. Nathanson sings a song that goes “There’s a fortune… in abortion,” which he’d referenced in his book Aborting America.
The film posits that the abortion-rights’ activists “have Hollywood on their side,” and paid $10,000 for Golden Girls’ famous abortion episode (it was Maude, not Golden Girls), as well as “put pro abortion stories into TV shows and movies” like Cabaret. They’re also said to have influence over the media, with Lader boasting, “We control the media… They write whatever we tell them.” If that weren’t enough, there’s a sequence at the Playboy Mansion where Playboy Playmates are auctioned off as dates, with all the money raised going towards Planned Parenthood and NARAL.
I imagine this will do as well as Dinesh D'Souza's ouvre of work.
