In case you have not heard, a Roe V. Wade movie is currently being filmed in New Orleans that’s helmed by Nick Loeb — a hot dog condiment-hawking Wall Street scion probably best known for his prolonged legal fight over frozen embryos with his ex, Sofia Vergara — because … why not? It’s a decidedly anti-abortion, propaganda-ish take on the ruling, starring notable Hollywood conservatives like Jon Voight, Robert Davi, Corbin Bernsen, John Schneider, Steve Guttenberg, William Forsythe and Stacey Dash. It is titled, simply, Roe v. Wade.
In recent days, reports from the set have begun to surface about the film like this one from the Daily Beast and … hoo boy, what a doozy this thing appears to be. First off, because it deals with such a lightning rod issue, the film’s producers have been shady and deceptive about, well, just about every aspect of the movie.
Crew members have told The Daily Beast that the filmmakers have misrepresented the project from Day 1, distributing a “whitewashed synopsis” to location contacts in order to convince them to film at their respective spots. “Tulane University has been the only main [location] where we started shooting there and then they found out what the movie was about and kicked us out,” one crew member said. “There are other locations where they’ve just said no. The whole attitude on the project has been, ‘Don’t tell anyone any more than you have to tell them.’”
The hilarious/sad kicker in all of this is that eventually people working on a movie — both in front of the camera, and behind it — need to be shown the script, and when they finally do see it they have been so horrified by what they’ve read that they usually quit on the spot.
“They’re not keeping people in the loop with the script,” one crew member said. “When people finally receive the script, they’ve dropped out really fast. After people started dropping out, they said, ‘OK, don’t send people the scripts anymore.’ Instead, they’ve been changing lines and scenes before they shoot.”
Conservative actors Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Sorbo were initially cast as Supreme Court justices but left upon receiving the script. “That’s where it started as far as not sending out full scripts to actors, because they backed out and then it was a mad rush to find people to be the Supreme Court justices, and when they got on set they had no idea what they were doing. They didn’t get their lines until they got on set. They were kept in the dark,” according to a crew member.
Can you imagine how awful a script has to be for Stephen Baldwin and Kevin Sorbo to want to have nothing to do with it? Additionally, it’s apparently so bad that the film’s director and first AD both quit on day one, forcing Loeb — and his producing partner, Cathy Allyn — to take over directorial duties, which has not gone over very well at all.
“The first day of shooting, the actual director and the first AD quit. So then they decided that Cathy was going to be the main director, and she has very little experience, so she and Nick have no idea what they’re doing. Shots aren’t being set up right, and there have been communication problems with the cast,” the crew member recalled. “There was a moment where Joey Lawrence was trying to do a scene and Cathy said to him, ‘Now make a face like this,’ and he called her out and said, ‘That’s not what a director does. You tell me what I’m feeling and where I’m coming from, you don’t just say to make a face.’ A lot of actors are fed up with it because it’s amateur hour.”
If all that wasn’t enough, the film — which aims to be rated PG, despite graphic depictions of aborted fetuses — apparently features cameos by conservative trolls like Milo Yiannopoulous, who lost his career for defending pedophilia and recently advocated the “gunning down” of journalists, and Tomi Lahren.
But two members of the Roe v. Wade cast have been kept secret from much of the cast and crew: Tomi Lahren and Milo Yiannopoulos. The right-wing trolls have been cast in one-scene cameos, with Lahren portraying Supreme Court Justice Blackmun’s daughter, Sally, a Planned Parenthood volunteer who challenges her father (Blackmun penned the court’s opinion on Roe v. Wade); and Yiannopoulos as Dr. David Sopher, a British abortion doctor who invented the Sopher ovum forceps and “who’s performing abortions and feels they don’t matter,” according to a crew member.
In Yiannopoulos’ yet-to-be-filmed scene, Dr. Nathanson (Loeb) witnesses Dr. Sopher (Milo)—who is described in the script as “an Anglo-Jew from India, with an unusual habit of an awkward giggle at the end of every sentence”—perform 32 abortions between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m., an alleged event Dr. Nathanson recounted in his book The Hand of God. “You blokes are missing out on a fortune over there in the colonies,” Dr. Sopher tells Dr. Nathanson after performing the procedures.
Most other cast members are not aware that Lahren and Yiannopoulos are making cameos in the film. “There aren’t even pictures up of them in the production office,” a crew member told The Daily Beast. “Somebody requested that no pictures of them be up.”
It sounds like if we’re all lucky this whole project will be aborted (see what we did there?) and never see the light of day so no one is ever subjected to it.
(via The Daily Beast)
