Filmmaker Phelim McAleer is sending a big message to Kickstarter.
In protest of the crowd-funding site’s “censorship” of his TV movie project about convicted abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, McAleer commissioned a bold billboard near Kickstarter’s Brooklyn headquarters.
“Kicked out by Kickstarter,” reads the giant sign, which was put up on Tuesday afternoon. “Gosnell movie raises $1 million … and counting! To the public — we say ‘Thank you!’ To Kickstarter — we say … ‘You Stink at Censorship!’”
McAleer raised funds for his last film, “FrackNation,” on Kickstarter, so the filmmaker didn’t think twice about turning to the site again for his latest project. But soon after McAleer and his colleagues at Hat Tip Films submitted their posting in March, he said they received an email from Kickstarter ordering them to remove descriptions of “thousands of babies murdered” in order to adhere to the “community guidelines.”
Instead, he took the project to rival crowd-funding site Indiegogo.
“CEO Yancey Strickler said recently that he banned us because the project description has to be PG-13, but that’s not true.” McAleer told the Post. “That’s an actual lie. This is Kickstarter not wanting to do something because of their political beliefs.”
The Gosnell film has been a smash hit on Indiegogo, raking in a whopping $1.5 million from more than 16,000 backers in little more than a month. It’s the most successful film project on Indiegogo yet, McAleer said, and even overtook Spike Lee’s Kickstarter-funded film, which raised $1.4 million.
According to McAleer, Kickstarter eventually accepted the project after his colleagues pulled it from the site — but gave the filmmakers a stern warning that it would be taken down if any updates were “objectionable.”
Strickler responded to the censorship charges in an interview with National Review online earlier this month.
“The creators replied with a spirited defense of the graphic depiction they wanted to include,” he said. “We decided to bend our rules and give them the green light to launch at their convenience. They chose to make two of the copy edits we recommended. They launched elsewhere.”
Indiegogo has been “more than helpful” in getting McAleer’s film funded — the site even featured the project in its international newsletter.
“They’re genuinely open to diversity of opinion,” McAleer said.
The billboard will be up for one month on McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint. McAleer hopes his advertisement will make the company more “honest.”
“Kickstarter tried to censor a film that was about censorship,” he said. “They seem to have lost their sense of irony. They need to admit that they are now part of the establishment — the liberal establishment — and don’t like diversity of opinion.”