‘Gosnell’ and ‘Irreplaceable’: The people’s films

Hollywood has a lot of power. But people are increasingly going around them to get stories told.

So this power duo of Ann McElhinney and her husband Phelim McAleer were doing what they do best, producing and directing documentary films like FrackNation, Mine Your Own Business, and Not Evil Just Wrong, among others with messages they believe in, without any affiliation with pro-life organizations or causes or much thought about it, in the film world. They were working on something else when they learned of the trial of notorious, infamous, murderous abortionist (a redundancy) Kermit Gosnell. They dropped everything once they learned the truths about the abortion clinic dubbed by authorities as a ‘house of horrors’, what went on there, what the team in Hazmat suits who investigated found there, what that abortionist did to women and babies, and how the media went silent on the trial once Gosnell went to court, with the full blown grand jury report detailing the most grisly acts and crimes again humanity, while media seats in the courtroom remained strangely empty.

Ann and Phelim swung into motion and started planning a film to document this historic moment in the the culture that spiraled out of control since abortion on demand became legal. It’s the logic of abortion taken to it’s conclusion, after all, and this case was emblematic. They had formerly worked with Kickstarter to fund FrackNation, and went back to that crowd source funding process for this project. After all, as Ann’s bio records,

FrackNation bypassed traditional funding methods and instead turned to Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website. In 60 days, 3,305 backers donated $212,265 to tell the truth about fracking. It was one of the most successful campaigns in Kickstarter history.

However, this time, Kickstarter kicked them out. The language used in the film was too offensive, the site organizers decided, and it had to be edited out and toned down.

Wait. What? The language in the film was the language of the grand jury report, finding what they found at Gosnell’s ‘clinic’ and describing it in plain spoken words. In other words, the filmmakers were rejected for describing the actual scene and details of the crime, and not soft-peddling the truth with fuzzier language and actual omissions.

Instead of doing that, Ann and Phelim went to Indiegogo and launched an awareness campaign to crowd fund the film project on a deadline. They are passionate and determined.

Dr. Kermit Gosnell is the most prolific serial killer in American History, but almost no one knows who he is.

The Grand Jury investigating Kermit Gosnell’s horrific crimes said this:

This case is about a doctor who killed babies … What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors …. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.

Gosnell is serving several life sentences but the media basically ignored his crimes and his trial. They ignored the facts that emerged from the trial, like the fact that the babies he murdered suffered terribly. Here is what a neonatologist told the Grand Jury:

The neonatologist testified… If a baby moves, it is alive. Equally troubling, it feels a “tremendous amount of pain” when its spinal cord is severed. So, the fact that Baby Boy A. continued to move after his spinal cord was cut with scissors means that he did not die instantly. Maybe the cord was not completely severed. In any case, his few moments of life were spent in excruciating pain. (Report of the Grand Jury)

The mainstream media or Hollywood don’t think this is a story.

That doesn’t matter, if enough people do, say the filmmakers.

It’s a frightening testament to the power of the media that very few people even know about Kermit Gosnell: America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.

This is your chance to bypass the media “information gatekeepers” to get tens of millions of Americans thinking about what happened in Philadelphia.

How’s it going? I covered the Gosnell case and trial and repored here things that didn’t hit the mainstream radar, or stick for long once it did. It seemed at the time that this case may just be the one that turns the culture around on abortion, or at least generates serious public discussion about what this license has wrought in the four decades since Roe. It did that, for a short time. But things went back to business as usual soon after, and this story seems to have faded from memory in a culture that hardly grasped it in the first place.

So I was very interested in how this project is going, once I discovered it. Since I first had the dynamic Ann McElhinney on my radio show in early April, I’ve watched her and Phelim take their campaign to social media and mainstream media by leaps and bounds.

NRO reports, and get how the report comes out:

Ann and Phelim Media recently reached $1.6 million in donations to their Gosnell film crowdfunding campaign, with $500,000 left to raise before May 12.

The company switched to crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to raise the money to finance their film after claiming that their initial choice, Kickstarter, had attempted to censor the project.

On Tuesday, Ann and Phelim Media purchased a billboard ad, and placed it half a mile from Kickstarter’s headquarters in Brooklyn. The ad reads, “To Kickstarter — We Say . . . “You stink at censorship!”

Kickstarter’s CEO, Yancey Strickler, recently told National Review Online that the Gosnell project was not suppressed and the filmmakers blew an editorial exchange out of proportion.

What Kickstarter refers to as blowing “an editorial exchange out of proportion” is another way of covering up what really happened. Kickstarter couldn’t deal with the truth, in the plain language of the Grand Jury report the filmmakers report.

And as Phelim McAleer told the Hollywood Reporter:

“Kickstarter tried to censor us – it didn’t work. When faced with a different point of view, their first instinct was to censor,” McAleer said.

He adds, though, that he believes Kickstarter was within its rights because it’s a private company. “But they need to be honest and announce that certain opinions and ideas are not welcome,” he said. “It’s sad, but that’s the truth.”

With 11 days left, the Gosnell project has raised $1.66 million, 79 percent of its goal. If it reaches $2.1 million, it will become the most successful movie or TV project to raise funds at IndieGoGo.

Here’s the site.

Then there’s ‘Irreplaceable‘, a film about the state of the family across the globe. And though produced by MPower Pictures producer John Shepherd, it’s sponsored by Focus on the Family, an organization trying to shift its focus to a more pro-active effort as this, and it’s an admirable effort. I saw it last week in a private screening, and know what it’s about, how it’s done, and how it affected the packed theater in which I viewed it. I thought it would be a good effort, and effective to sort of ‘get the ball rolling’ on re-thinking the family, since we all have one and it’s in a state of crisis around the world.

But it’s remarkable, how simply they hit the primeval sense we all have of needing to belong, and knowing that we belong or grieving the loss of belonging to others in what civilization has always known as family. It’s so fresh, stark, and basic. The narrator and main researcher is a family man from New Zealand who sets out on a journey around the world to talk with experts and regular people about family relationships, the state of the family today, not so much to focus on what’s wrong but on what we might or can do to make it better for everyone. Because God knows, we need to.

From the website:

Every member of the human race has the desire for significance—a desire to belong. And the family is where those deepest longings are fulfilled.

Unfortunately, the word “family” has all but lost its meaning in our modern cultural landscape. And the fallout has been significant. Divorce. Crime. Poverty. Addictions. Abuse. Our attempts to redefine and reimagine the family only make these problems worse, not better. When the family is weakened, society suffers. But strong families make the world a better place.

Irreplaceable is the first in a series of feature-length documentaries that will approach the concept of the family from a number of different angles. The goal of each documentary is to recover, renew and reclaim the cultural conversation about the family.

And besides the series, it’s a new movement. It launches with a nationwide event on May 6th at 700 theaters nationwide in America, and goes from there. Details on the site.

I must admit, I was inspired by the project, and impressed by the producer in an interview we did on my radio program. But when the once-only screening happened on a work night, I was pretty tired and attended with the hope that it wouldn’t be long. After it got rolling, and the New Zealand narrator/researcher started traveling, interviewing, piecing together whatever he discovered on his journey, I got drawn in more.

But something happened around or just after the middle of the film, when the packed theater settled down from their popcorn munching and bobbing around, and grew more still and silent. And it built to a point when no one in the place moved, no one turned their head away, or made a sound. It was riveting, and a couple of people around me were quietly crying. I was moved, a bit choked up, but holding together and impressed with how well they did this film.

Then it blindsided me. Because it sort of seemed to blindside the narrator/researcher from New Zealand. He didn’t expect to have the deep revelation that hit him any more than I did, and by hitting him the way it did it hit me. Maybe that’s an excuse. Maybe it would have hit many of us deeply no matter what, because of the human truths about relationships and belonging and family, or whatever it was that made people cry. And I found myself wiping away tears. It was deep and rich and raw and human. And it was okay to be wounded and imperfect.

This May 6th event is intended to start something. I hope it starts the healing process. God knows we need it.