Multiple Oscar-winner Clint Eastwood will film his upcoming Ballad of Richard Jewell in Georgia, ignoring a pro-abortion boycott in the movie and TV industry.
Production on the film, that stars Oscar winners Kathy Bates and Sam Rockwell, as well as Jon Hamm and Olivia Wilde, will begin this summer in Atlanta.
Clint Eastwood is coming off his surprise hit The Mule, which starred the 89-year-old, grossed over $100 million domestic, and was itself shot in and around Atlanta last summer.
Eastwood’s decision makes sense for a couple of reasons. Although he is probably pro-choice, the screen legend has never been the kind of movie star to jump on whatever Hollywood’s latest fad is, especially boycotts and the like. I can’t ever remember seeing his name on a petition of any kind.
Secondly, everything that happened to his main character, the late Richard Jewell, happened in Georgia during the 1996 Summer Olympics, which were held in Atlanta.
The boycott was launched in reaction to Georgia’s Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act (HB 481), which outlaws abortion in the state after a heartbeat is detected in the unborn child, which is generally at right around six weeks.
They hysteria around the bill, which started with Alyssa Milano, at first manifested itself with a bizarre sex strike. The aging actress, who is married, threatened to withhold sex if Georgia signed the bill into law.
“Until women have legal control over our own bodies we just cannot risk pregnancy,” Milano said in a tweet. “JOIN ME by not having sex until we get bodily autonomy back. I’m calling for a #SexStrike. Pass it on.”
The idea of Milano and her pro-abort harpies denying men sex was met with howls of laughter across the county, except among free clinic employees who feared for their jobs. But the whole thing was called off as the sex strike was seen less as a threat and more of a gift after 108-year-old Bette Midler signed on.
And so, the silly sex strike morphed into a misguided boycott that earned a lot of lip service from companies like Disney and Netflix, but, other than a few smaller production companies, has not yet really taken hold.
Thanks to lucrative tax incentives and warm weather, Georgia has become known as the Hollywood of the South. Tyler Perry’s mammoth studio is located just outside of downtown Atlanta.
The anti-abortion law is certain to be challenged in the Supreme Court, and appears to be designed especially for that challenge, and does not go into effect until January 1, 2020.
This probably won’t be the only controversy that attaches itself to Eastwood’s film.
The Ballad of Richard Jewell is based on the 1997 must-read Vanity Fair article titled “American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell,” that lays out the heartbreaking death by a thousand cuts Jewell suffered at the hands of a corrupt F.B.I., the fake national news media, and late-night comics.
Stop me when any of this sounds familiar…
While working security at the Summer Olympic Games, Jewell spotted a suspicious backpack. His training immediately kicked in and, while risking his own life, the 33-year-old cleared the area saving God only knows how many lives. Nevertheless, one person was still killed and 111 others injured.
Jewell should have been hailed as an American hero, but instead he became a national joke and villain after corrupt F.B. I. director Louis Freeh decided to oversee the investigation personally. Without a shred of evidence connecting Jewell to the crime, only rumors spread by people who didn’t like him, his name was leaked as a person of interest to a fake news media. The 88 days that followed, the days while under suspicion, ruined Jewell’s life forever.
Because he was a white, overweight southerner temporarily living with his mother, all the prejudices and bigotries that have only gotten worse among our media, entertainment, and law enforcement elites kicked right in, and as a result, for nearly three months, a completely innocent man was held up for national derision and ridicule.
Basically, he was tried and found guilty by the establishment media and humiliated into a national punch-line by Jay Leno and others.
In the end, Jewell would successfully sue NBC News, CNN (aka The Usual Suspects), the New York Post, and Piedmont College for defamation. Jewell also unsuccessfully sued the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which first published his name as a suspect because dictation is journalism, or something.
The national media publishing what the Deep State tells it to without scrutiny or skepticism… Gee, whoever heard of such a thing?
Naturally, our media have learned nothing in the two decades since this disgrace — except how to double and triple down.
In the end, a lot of good people tried to help Jewell, even by making his dreams of working in law enforcement come true, but in 2007, at the age of 44, Jewell died of diabetes, heart and kidney disease, and was never able to live down those 88 days.
I have nothing but faith in the idea that Eastwood is the perfect director for this job, the iconoclast to remind us that fake news has plagued this country for decades and that the establishment American media are nothing less than a dumpster fire of bigotry and lies.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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