HOLLYWOOD, March 31, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Kermit Gosnell's story had a hard time breaking through the national news media filter. Documentary filmmakers are hoping a TV movie will have better luck.
Three journalists who focused on exposing the extreme environmentalist agenda now want to bring the gruesome “house of horrors” story to the screen.
Phelim McAleer, Ann McElhinney, and Magdalena Segeida hope to raise $2.1 million to produce a made-for-TV movie about the life and crimes of West Philadelphia's most infamous abortionist.
Despite the salacious details of stomach-churning filth, murder, and macabre habits of storing fetal body parts, it took a national Tweetfest to break the news media's silence on the Gosnell case. Some in the media attempted to humanize Gosnell as a complicated idealist, a noble figure gone wrong.
Any story about Gosnell's life, the filmmakers say, belongs in only one category: “true crime.”
“Dr. Kermit Gosnell is the most prolific serial killer in American history,” McAleer said.
“He's not recognized as such because abortion is legal,” McElhinney told LifeSiteNews by phone.
“Gosnell killed more people than Gary Ridgeway, John Wayne Gacey, The Zodiac Killer, and Ted Bundy combined,” they said. “In a 30 year killing spree, it is thought he killed thousands of babies. And that’s not a national story?”
The trio do not envision a documentary but an entertaining, if chilling, film about Gosnell's deception, greed, and serial infanticide.
“Hollywood never would fund a movie such as this,” they said, “they haven't even tried.”
Drama is a new turn for McAleer's Hat Tip Productions. Irish journalists McAleer and McElhinney worked together on the documentary FrackNation. Segeida is the Polish-born producer behind Not Evil Just Wrong. Their other work includes Mine Your Own Business and The Search for Tristan's Mum.
They believe Gosnell's story has the power to change hearts about the unborn.“We know that two of the jurors, self-described pro-choice, changed their mind about abortion,” McElhinney told LifeSiteNews. In all, three-quarters of Gosnell jurors described themselves as “pro-choice,” despite the unanimous verdict.
She added that Gosnell's defense attorney, Jack McMahon, proposed moderately less pro-abortion laws across the nation. “I've come out of this case realizing that 24 weeks is a bad determiner” of viability, he said. “It should be like 16, 17 weeks…The law should be changed to that.” He also said state inspections may have prevented Gosnell's crimes altogether.
However, McAleer emphasized his role is as a journalist, not an advocate. “We're not a pro-life group and won't be creating one,” he told LifeSiteNews. He is committed to telling “stories the media refuse to tell.”
The producers have set a budget of $2.1 million, to be crowdsourced by donations made through their Indiegogo.com page. The service allows people to donate as little as one dollar toward the project, or as much as they like.
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They have already raised $118,000 as of this writing, with 43 days to go in their campaign. However, if the trio fails to reach their full goal of $2.1 million, they will not receive a dime of the money they have collected.
Indiegogo was a second choice. Originally, they planned to raise the film's budget through the website Kickstarter. However, they say the website demanded they change their description of Gosnell's crimes, an act McAleer called “particularly odious and alarming.”
“Indiegogo allows us to bypass the Hollywood studios and the usual funding sources for movies,” they said. They are offering rewards at different levels of sponsorship, including giving a DVD of the film to everyone who donated $25, or having a role as an extra in the film for $8,000.
“There are people out there who are tired of seeing their values belittled on TV, and Kermit Gosnell is a perfect story for this,” McAleer told LifeSiteNews.
“This is your chance to bypass the media 'information gatekeepers' to get tens of millions of Americans thinking about what happened in Philadelphia,” they added.