by WorldTribune Staff, July 3, 2018
A co-director of the upcoming movie “Roe v. Wade” said it has been filmed in relative secrecy in New Orleans out of consideration for the security of the cast and crew.
Several people working on the film quit and two colleges where it was set to film would not allow filming after they discovered it was a project that leans pro-life, co-director Nick Loeb told The Hollywood Reporter.
The original director quit on the first day of shooting, so Loeb and Cathy Allyn are co-directing. They are also producers, and they co-wrote the script.
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 alumus, 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.
Loeb told the Hollywood Reporter that on one occasion he was walking to his car with a production assistant during a day of shooting when a woman wearing a headset approached and asked: “Are you the director?”
“When I told her I was, she told me to go f–k myself,” Loeb said. “Then she threw her headset on the ground and walked off. I found out later she was our electrician.”
To maintain a low profile, the film, which will wrap principal photography around July 15, has been shooting under a fake title that the directors will not disclose, the report said.
“The film has been under such tight wraps that even the major cast members had not been revealed,” the report said.
Two Supreme Court justices are played by Hollywood’s more outspoken conservatives, Jon Voight and Robert Davi, and other justices are played by Corbin Bernsen, John Schneider, Steve Guttenberg, William Forsythe, Wade Williams and Richard Portnow.
Stacey Dash, the Clueless star, plays Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the former president of National Right to Life.
Loeb said he also ran into problems in attempting to raise awareness, and funding, for the film on Facebook.
In a May interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Loeb said “We’ve had a lot of difficulty raising the money in Hollywood so we decided to do a crowdfunder. We created a crowdfund site called roevwademovie.com and we launched on Facebook to try to raise money and even Facebook tried to shut us down.”
Loeb noted that Facebook has lifted the block but has now created a “shadow ban” where what they promote doesn’t show up in the feeds of the people who follow or like them.
“We even bought and paid for advertising and they blocked us from sharing paid advertising, so it’s been a struggle to get people to go roevwademovie.com to support the film,” he added.
Loeb said several actors walked away once they realized there was a pro-life tilt to the film. “We had to replace three local actors, including one who was to play Norma McCorvey, even after she begged for the role,” said Loeb. McCorvey was known as Jane Roe in the landmark legal case.
Among the crew members who quit in protest was a costumer who left after two weeks “because of the subject matter and pressure from her peers,” Allyn told the Hollywood Reporter.
When they shot in Washington, D.C., their location manager there sent an email that read: “I have been doing research on the movie trying to figure out who is producing and what the gist of the story is, and I finally found it, and so I am withdrawing from this project. I am a staunch pro-abortion feminist activist, and I will not be party to such horrible propaganda.”
Loeb and Allyn say that the timing is perfect for their film, since the Roe v. Wade decision has been in the news due to Justice Anthony Kennedy announcing on June 27 he will retire from the Supreme Court.
“But even without that news, it’s one of the most controversial political decisions in history. It divides us and makes us uncomfortable,” says Loeb. “When I delved into this, I discovered conspiracy theories, fake news, made-up statistics and a whole lot of people involved who switched their positions from pro-choice to pro-life, including Norma.”
The filmmakers are currently negotiating a distribution deal and are aiming for a January release date.
The movie is executive produced by Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and she also has a cameo in the picture.
“There are lots of surprising cameos from controversial people in the news that I can’t tell you about – or more people might walk off the set,” Loeb said.
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