The filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Anne McElhinney delivered a hard-hitting documentary debunking much of the scare-mongering and outright lying about fracking in the 2013 movie Fracknation, then followed up with a New York Times bestselling book, Gosnell: The Untold Story About America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, about the carnage wrought by the abortionist Kermit Gosnell. The book led to a yet-to-be-released feature-length dramatization starring Dean Cain.
McAleer’s next project is coming to the stage in New York City. In a chat last week, McAleer told me about Ferguson: The Play, a crowd-funded courtroom drama he wrote based strictly on grand-jury testimony following the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. McAleer has a Michael Moore-style impish streak and a Moore-style knack for creating controversy: When the play was in the workshop stage in Los Angeles two years ago, according to Deadline, cast members staged a mass walkout because they “felt uncomfortable in what they described as a play overly sympathetic to the police officer.” McAleer says the play simply lays out the facts, with no spin. Those facts tend to be inhospitable to the left’s narrative. I’m looking forward equally to seeing the play and savoring the horrified reaction from the notoriously left-wing New York theater audience. Performances begin Oct. 19.