Tag: mass shootings
Ads Pulled for Gory Universal Thriller ‘The Hunt’ in Wake of Mass Shootings
Comcast unit is pausing its ad campaign for ‘The Hunt,’ due in September, and reviewing materials
In the wake of a trio of deadly massacres, the studio is evaluating its strategy for the R-rated Blumhouse satire in which elites stalk “deplorables.”
“Did anyone see what our ratfucker-in-chief just did?” one character asks early in the screenplay for The Hunt, a Universal Pictures thriller set to open Sept. 27. Another responds: “At least The Hunt’s coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.”
In the aftermath of mass shootings within days of one another that shocked and traumatized the nation, Universal is re-evaluating its strategy for the certain-to-be-controversial satire. The violent, R-rated film from producer Jason Blum’s Blumhouse follows a dozen MAGA types who wake up in a clearing and realize they are being stalked for sport by elite liberals.
Over the Aug. 3 weekend, ESPN pulled an ad for the film that it had previously cleared, while AMC ran the spot during the season premiere of its drama The Preacher. It’s unclear whether the ads were identical, but the one yanked by ESPN opened with a sound resembling an emergency broadcast signal. A rep for ESPN parent Disney declined to comment on the move, but an ESPN source says no spots for the film will appear on the network in the coming weeks.
The Hunt stars Betty Gilpin from GLOW and Hilary Swank, representing opposite sides of the political divide. It features guns blazing along with other ultra-violent killings as the elites pick off their prey. The script from Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse reviewed by The Hollywood Reporter revolves around third-rail political themes. (Original title: Red State Vs. Blue State.)
A studio source says that even before the recent attacks, which left 34 dead in El Paso, Texas; Dayton, Ohio; and Gilroy, California, some reshoots were done based on a recent rough cut. Universal and Blumhouse declined to comment.
While one high-level Universal source says the studio has pulled some ads that are beginning to air and appear online “for content and placement,” others say the matter is still under discussion internally. A major ad blitz on television and the web had been planned for the beginning of September, says one insider. A trailer is already online.
Given the fraught political climate — particularly in the wake of the attack in El Paso, which was motivated by anti-immigrant bigotry — studio sources say Universal is evaluating its plans in what one called “a fluid situation.” A high-level insider says top executives want to stand by Blum, one of the studio’s most prolific and successful producers, as well as filmmaker Craig Zobel, and see the project as a satire addressing an issue of great social importance. But this person says plans could change “if people think we’re being exploitative rather than opinionated.”
From a business perspective, The Hunt presents a gamble for Universal in these divided times. The satire Assassination Nation, which also pitted the woke versus the unwoke in uber-violent fashion, represented the top sale at Sundance 2018 at $10 million. But the film fizzled upon its release later that year, earning just $2 million with no international rollout. Says one person involved with that film, “We thought people would get the joke.”
The Hunt made some executives at Universal skittish back in May 2018, when film chief Donna Langley acquired the script and fast-tracked it at a modest $18 million budget. It is unclear whether there were any other bidders on the property, the sale of which was brokered by CAA, but insiders at several studios told THR at the time that they did not pursue it because of the explosive premise. One executive says he didn’t even read the script, noting, “The idea seemed crazy.”
This is not the first time a studio has been faced with real-life events that rendered a film release more complicated. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, for example, Warner Bros. moved back the Arnold Schwarzenegger starrer Collateral Damage and abandoned a trailer that featured a bomb attack in the U.S. The 2017 Death Wish remake was delayed several months in response to a mass shooting in Las Vegas. And Oliver Stone’s 1994 satire Natural Born Killers was criticized for inspiring copycat killings.
Certainly, satire can be a dicey genre for studios to pull off. Just ask Sony, which became the target of a 2014 hack blamed on the North Koreans over the Seth Rogen comedy The Interview.
The script for The Hunt features the red-state characters wearing trucker hats and cowboy shirts, with one bragging about owning seven guns because it’s his constitutional right. The blue-state characters — some equally adept with firearms — explain that they picked their targets because they expressed anti-choice positions or used the N-word on Twitter. “War is war,” says one character after shoving a stiletto heel through the eye of a denim-clad hillbilly.
“Employees in different departments were questioning the wisdom of making such a movie in these times,” says one filmmaker with ties to Universal. “In light of the horrific [recent shootings], is this not the most craven, irresponsible, dangerous exploitation?”
That point is countered by a Universal executive, who says the movie “is meant to show what a stupid, crazy world we live in,” adding, “It might even be more powerful now.”
Article via HollywoodReporter
Mass Shootings Can Be Contagious, Research Shows
There were three high-profile shootings across the country in one week: The shooting in Gilroy, Calif., on July 28, and then the back-to-back shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, this past weekend.
That’s no surprise, say scientists who study mass shootings. Research shows that these incidents usually occur in clusters and tend to be contagious. Intensive media coverage seems to drive the contagion, the researchers say.
Back in 2014 and 2015, researchers at Arizona State University analyzed data on cases of mass violence. They included USA Today‘s data on mass killings (defined as four or more people killed using any means, including guns) from 2006 to 2013, data on school shootings between 1998 and 2013, and mass shootings (defined as incidents in which three people were shot, not necessarily killed) between 2005 and 2013 collected by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
The lead researcher, Sherry Towers, a faculty research associate at Arizona State University, had spent most of her career modeling the spread of infectious diseases — like Ebola, influenza and sexually transmitted diseases. She wanted to know whether cases of mass violence spread contagiously, like in a disease outbreak.
So, she plugged each data set into a mathematical model.
“What we found was that for the mass killings — so these are high-profile mass killings where there’s at least four people killed — there was significant evidence of contagion,” says Towers. “We also found significant evidence of contagion in the school shootings.”
In other words, school shootings and other shootings with four or more deaths spread like a contagion — each shooting tends to spark more shootings.
“So one happens and you see another few happen right after that,” says Jillian Peterson, a criminologist at Hamline University in Minnesota and founder of the nonpartisan think tank, The Violence Project. She wasn’t involved in the Arizona State research but has found similar patterns in her own research.
Towers and her colleagues also found that what set apart shootings that were contagious was the amount of media coverage they received. “In the incidences where there were four or more people killed, and even school shootings, those tended to get national and even international media attention,” says Towers.
She also found that there is a window when a shooting is most likely to lead to more incidents — about two weeks. Towers and her team published their results in 2015.
It’s a form of social contagion, says Peterson, somewhat like a suicide contagion — that’s when a high-profile suicide leads to more people to take their own lives. For example, following the suicide of actor Robin Williams, researchers documented a 10% spike in suicides in the months following his death. Vulnerable individuals who are already struggling with suicidal thoughts read or watched news reports of the actor’s death and then took their own lives.
Mass shooting contagion is similar, she says.
Peterson has interviewed living mass shooters in prison and people who knew such perpetrators and has found that these individuals often start out feeling suicidal.
“We can show about 80 percent were actively suicidal prior to the shooting,” she says.
Now, the vast majority of people who are suicidal don’t attack others. And people with any kind of mental health problems aren’t more likely to be violent than others. In fact, they are more likely to be victims of violence than those without mental illness.
But Peterson says that in very rare cases, a tiny minority of people considering suicide go down the path of violence toward others. She has come to think of mass shootings as a form of suicide. “They’re angry, horrible suicides that take a lot of people with them,” she says. “The shooter never intends to live; there’s never a getaway plan. Typically they tend to think of this [as] their kind of last moment.”
Other researchers have documented the same in studies of active shooters.
“About half of the school shooters I’ve studied died by suicide in their attack,” Peter Langman, a clinical psychologist in Allentown, Pa., told NPR earlier this year. “It’s often a mix of severe depression and anguish and desperation driving them to end their own lives.”
Vulnerable individuals who are also angry and already considering violence may read or watch the news of a mass shooting and identify with the shooter and be inspired by them.
“So a mass shooting happens and then vulnerable individuals who are actively suicidal and in crisis and hear about the shooting and see this as kind of a script that they could also follow,” she says.
Access to guns and a venue allows them to follow that script.
“There is this element of wanting notoriety in death that you don’t have in life,” Peterson says. “So when one happens and it makes headlines and the names and pictures are everywhere and the whole world is talking about it, that becomes something that other people see as a possibility for themselves.”
Now it’s hard to know yet whether the shooter in Dayton, Ohio, was consciously influenced by the shooter in El Paso, the one in Gilroy, Calif., or another shooting.
But Sherry Towers notes that there’s clear evidence that the shooter in El Paso, Texas, was inspired by the shooting at a mosque in New Zealand back in March.
“It’s in his manifesto that he published online,” says Towers. “He mentions that he wanted to emulate the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooting.”
Peterson and other researchers who study mass shootings think the media should avoid showing the shooters’ images and dwelling on their life histories and motives. “The fact that we give them that notoriety is problematic,” says Peterson.
Article via NPR
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Suspect in Kroger shooting tried to enter black church before attack
The gunman who fatally shot two people at a Kentucky Kroger supermarket this week may have intended to shoot up a predominately black church instead, according to a new report.
The new development supports the theory that the shooting may have been a racially motivated hate crime, WAVE 3 News reported.
Suspect Gregory Bush was captured on surveillance video trying to enter the First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown 15 minutes before the Kroger shooting, Jeffersontown Police Chief Sam Rogers told WAVE 3 News.
Had he arrived only an hour and 15 minutes earlier, he would have found 70 people getting ready to leave the church’s mid-week services, church administrator Billy Williams told the station.
Williams first spotted a man wearing similar clothing to Bush during a routine scan of the church’s security footage — and cops confirmed the attempted intruder was in fact Bush.
The FBI is investigating, though investigators would not speculate on a motive, according to the report.
But the son of a witness to the Kroger shooting told the outlet the suspect walked past his dad and said, “Whites don’t kill whites.”
The Louisville Urban League called for a hate crime investigation in a Facebook post.
“Because of the FB posts of the alleged perpetrator and the comments he made to a man in the parking lot of the grocery store, we thought it necessary to clearly state our desire and support for a hate crime investigation,” the statement said.
“We recognize that the alleged perpetrator may have had a mental inquest warrant filed previously, however his FB posts, his comments, and his visit to First Baptist Jeffersontown lead us to express our concern.”
The First Baptist congregation had been taking safety precautions after Dylann Roof opened fire, killing nine people — including a prominent pastor — at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC.
“We have several members that are armed during our midweek service which is what we passed yesterday,” Williams told the station. “And we have people that are armed on Sunday as well.”
via: https://nypost.com/2018/10/26/suspect-in-kroger-shooting-tried-to-enter-black-church-before-attack/
A Parkland student shielded others with his body — and is the last to leave the hospital alive
A Parkland student shielded others with his body — and is the last to leave the hospital alive
Anthony’s attorney, Alex Arreaza, said Wednesday that the teen was released over the weekend and that, although he is thinner and weak, Anthony is in “good spirits.”
Arreaza told The Washington Post that one bullet had “clipped” the teen’s liver and three others had hit his legs. He said that because of the teen’s injuries, doctors had to remove part of one of his lungs.
Arreaza said that Anthony cannot speak for long periods of time without becoming winded and that the teen will need physical therapy and possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. But, he said, the teen is “happy he’s home.”
“He’s a little shellshocked right now,” Arreaza said. “But his spirits changed completely once he got home. The most noticeable thing is that he was smiling a lot more.”
Arreaza said it’s unclear at this time whether the teen will return to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He said last month that the teen’s family intends to sue Broward County, Broward County Public Schools and the Broward County Sheriff’s Office for failing to protect the students.
Hundreds of Anthony’s fellow students returned to school earlier this week from spring break and were confronted with a new normal: added security, identification badges and clear plastic book bags.
In a memo to parents, school principal Ty Thompson likened the new security procedures to “when you enter a sporting event, concert, or even Disney World,” according to the Associated Press.
“As a first step, we are looking to see if we can get the kids through these entrances in a timely manner,” the principal wrote. “It is very difficult to balance both convenience/privacy with safety/security; if there is more of one, the other often suffers, but I will do my best to balance the two.”
Carly Novell, a senior and editor of the school newspaper, posted a photo of a clear backpack Monday on Twitter, joking, “But how satisfying would it be to put glue all over this backpack and peel it off.”
“On the real though, I want my privacy and my comfort. I don’t have that in school. I barely even have my education in school anymore,” she said in a subsequent tweet, pushing back against the new security protocol.
Kyrah Simon@kyrahsimonThese clear backpacks accomplish absolutely nothing. Not every item placed in the bag is visible and there is no possible way to monitor the contents of over 3000 backpacks. It’s great to know that this is where my community puts its resources.
Sheri Kuperman, a parent who has three children at the school, told the Sun-Sentinel that she has no problem with the security but that she is not convinced it will make her children and others any safer.
“We go through metal detectors when we go the airport,” she said, according to the newspaper. “I don’t know if it’s going to stop anything or not.”
After the recent shooting, Anthony was asked on the “Today” show whether he knew he was a hero — and the teen shook his head.
“He’s a hero in my book,” his attorney said, adding that Anthony is “the real deal.”
At least 20 people killed in shooting at Texas church
At least 20 people have been killed in a church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, according to Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt.