What's next for the Kermit Gosnell movie?

Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer, with his wife Ann McElhinney, has raised more than $2.2 million for a film about the life of abortionist Kermit Gosnell. McAleer’s previous films have included, FrackNation and Not Evil, Just Wrong, a movie that refuted many of the claims in Al Gore’s global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. McAleer and I had this conversation at a conference in Atlanta.

You’re treating this as a crime story, right? You’re calling Gosnell a serial killer in some of your promotional material. It was ABC who called him a serial killer first. They said he was perhaps America’s most successful serial killer. He’s murdered hundreds, probably thousands, of people over a 30- to 40-year killing spree. That’s the classic definition of a serial killer: ritualized, progressive killing. He also kept trophies. He cut feet off babies and put them in jars. That’s what a serial killer does too.

This is a crime story. It’s not a political story. As you probably hear from my accent, I’m not from around these parts. One thing that I’ve noticed about Americans is you quite like your crime stories. I felt Gosnell’s story wasn’t covered in the media at the time, and it looked like no one was going to make a movie about him. In a genre where there’s lots of movies with lots of serial killers, I thought this was a gap … and I wanted to do it.

WORLD Magazine had a reporter there for most of the trial, but other than that, almost no one covered that story. Are you going to make the media’s silence a part of your story? It is part of the story. For prosecutors and people like that, this was one of the biggest cases of mass murder they’d ever been involved in. You have to ask, what stopped the reporters from covering this? … We’ll be looking at the crime, looking at what he did and how he got away with it. People turned their eyes away because they didn’t want to do anything that would reflect badly, I suppose, on abortion and abortion access. The media’s looking away is part of a wider pattern of people looking away over the 30-40 years. How was this man allowed to go on killing? Why wasn’t he stopped?

One interesting aspect of this movie is you crowdfunded it. You originally went to Kickstarter, and they turned you down. Do you mind sharing a little bit of that story? We went to Kickstarter because Kickstarter worked so well for our previous documentary, FrackNation, which was about fracking. We went there and did our little thing, and they say … we couldn’t put in the description that Gosnell had murdered thousands of babies or stabbed thousands of babies. That’s what he did! That’s what he was convicted of. He wasn’t convicted of thousands; he was convicted of sample charges that they could prove, charges that weren’t timed out under a statue of limitations. But, if you extrapolate backwards, he killed thousands. They said, if you write that, if you put that in the thing, we won’t allow you to go ahead on Kickstarter because it offends our community guidelines. And I said, “Well I don't want to be part of any community that doesn’t like the truth. You offend my community guidelines, which is the truth. So I’m going to Indiegogo instead.”

Kickstarter is by far the most popular funder. They have a much higher success rate than Indiegogo. You were taking some risks by going to Indiegogo, weren’t you? Kickstarter has almost a 50 percent success rate. Indiegogo has a 10 percent success rate. It was a risk going with Indiegogo, but we just couldn’t go with Kickstarter in all good conscience. Even in terms of the story, we’re journalists. If we see the truth, we’re drawn towards it, not running away from it.

You were not raising a trivial amount of money. It’s not cheap to make a movie. We asked for $2.1 million; we got $2.24 million. It was one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns ever and the biggest ever on Indiegogo. … It was a lot of hard work.

It was also an example of pro-lifers and people in the conservative movement coming together for you. Would you recount some of the milestones in that process? It was a gradual, bit-by-bit, incremental process of people and organizations finding out about this and sending out emails, sending out letters, Facebook posts. People said to me, “What was the most important thing?” We got on the Rush Limbaugh Show, but I think it’s hard to calculate exactly [what was most important]. I think that brought in $70,000. When you’re looking at $2.1 million, you’ve got another 25 of those to go. Every bit helped. There was not one wasted tweet or one wasted Facebook post. People need to know that if they forwarded that email we sent or a tweet that we sent out to 10 people and one of them gave, it was all part of that process.

Where do you go from here to fulfill the high expectations that have been set by this successful Indiegogo campaign? It’s like the dog that catches the car. A word of advice to anyone who is thinking of launching a crowdfunded campaign: You cannot work on your project whilst you’re raising the money. If you’re thinking of writing a script or doing whatever it is, it’s so all-consuming that your actual project gets suspended for the length of the campaign. …We raised it and now we have to make the film. We’re starting. Our writer is working, Andrew Klavan whom some of your listeners may know.

He’s a New York Times-bestselling author of thrillers and crime stories. He wrote a book called True Crime. Clint Eastwood made it into a movie. He wrote a screenplay where Michael Douglas starred in the movie. He has a caliber. He has a background. … He gets the story. … It has to be a film people will want to go and see because this is not an ego trip. Sometimes you make a movie, and it’s a piece of art, which is great. I’m not going to say this isn’t a piece of art, but it has to be entertaining and accessible to a wide audience. This is for ordinary people. … It’s a hopeful story in the end. The guy was caught. There are heroes. There are still American heroes who go above and beyond what's needed to bring justice to people.

So $2.2 million has now become something less than $2.2 million to actually make the movie because you’re paying Andrew what’s fair for a screenplay. Lets say you get the movie made for what you’ve raised so far. Once you get the movie made, you’ve got to promote it. The so-called P-and-A budget, which is the after-production promotions, often can cost as much at the production itself. How are you going to deal with all of those issues? Well, just to [increase] the pressure even further, we don’t have $2.2 million because Indiegogo takes about 10 percent as their fee, which is fair enough. Then people have signed up for rewards. That’s one of the deals when you do crowdfunding is you get DVDs or special gifts or special things. So we have to create the DVDs and send them out. That takes more money out of the budget. Some indies can cost $5 million. But there are indies being made in Hollywood now for a million or $1.5 million. We’ve had a lot of interest from studios, interestingly. We’ve had a lot of interest from TV stations and from video on demand.

The one great thing we have is the 26,500 people who donated to make this film. Studios love that. TV stations love that. That’s a ready-made audience who has literally and metaphorically bought into this movie. They’re going to bring all their friends, all their family. This is a ready-made audience of hundred of thousands.

They’ve got skin in the game. It’s not just your movie and Ann’s movie. It’s their movie right? It's not our movie. It’s their movie. It’s a tremendous responsibility. It actually is their movie. It’s an amazing responsibility to try and realize you’ve got 26,500, not critics out there, owners. They have every right to complain. But they’ve trusted us. And we will live up to that trust.

Listen to Warren Cole Smith’s conversation with filmmaker Phelim McAleer on Listening In: