Nearly a dozen crew members working on Pawn Shop, The Daily Wire‘s pro-ICE film that mocks queer shooting victim Renee Good, reportedly left a recent shoot in Livingston, Montana, after learning of the film’s right-wing politics, IndieWire reported yesterday.
The film, which stars actors Harvey Keitel and Danny Trejo, follows a federal agent hiding out in a Hispanic family’s Minneapolis pawn shop after rioting occurs over the ICE shooting of “a fat blue-hair” woman named Melanie. An ICE agent lethally shoots Melanie after she accidentally strikes an ICE agent with the back of her car while fleeing another immigration officer with his gun raised. The struck ICE agent dies, and a TV broadcasts edited footage of the incident, calling Melanie’s shooting a “murder.”
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In real life, Good, an American citizen and queer mother of three, was lethally shot on January 5 by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. The federal government immediately called Good a domestic terrorist and claimed she tried to run Ross over. Video evidence showed that Ross was not in the path of Good’s vehicle when he shot her to death. Her killing and the subsequent ICE shooting of veteran nurse Alex Pretti contributed to anti-ICE resistance by Minneapolitans.
“They’re rewriting the truth,” said local activist Brooklyn Wilde of the film’s depiction of Good’s death. Wilde, whose social media posts raised national awareness of the film’s production, said crew members reached out to her, saying they “were explicitly lied to about the content of the film, were only made aware when they got to set, and had to book themselves their own travel home to leave.”
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Despite requesting the film’s script before filming, an unnamed crew member (who feared retaliation) told IndieWire they didn’t receive any substantive plot details until well after accepting the job. They had only been told that it was a “fun action movie,” and considered the fictionalized depiction of Good’s death an “ideologically motivated distortion” of what actually occurred.
“If I had known this, then I would not have even accepted the job,” the crew member said, though he also admitted that some crew members accept film work without asking too many questions about the project’s content.
He said he asked producers during the shoot about protocols to keep the crew safe from angry protestors demonstrating at the filming — the producers reportedly laughed at his question. He considered requesting a pseudonym in the film’s production credits and considered how to leave on good terms, but ultimately departed the project quickly. Some others who wished to do the same only stayed out of fear of breaking their work contracts.
While most workers in general are allowed to quit, departing early during a contractually agreed-upon time period could expose job-deserters to a legal breach-of-contract claim, said Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar and UCLA law professor emeritus. Film workers can legally quit if they feel misled about the work they were promised and agreed to, but Volokh said the producer’s description of “a fun action movie” didn’t really misrepresent its particular political outlook.
The town commissioners of Livingston voted on October 3 to “immediately temporarily suspend” the production’s filming permit. The commission, however, unanimously reinstated the permit on Monday night, after Daily Wire producers threatened to sue the town for allegedly violating their First Amendment rights. The outlet’s lawyers said the production faced threats against its filming crew.
“Let us be clear: there’s only one reason the city commissioners ruled they were going to stop our production on the street: politics, pure and simple, and they pretty much admitted it,” The Daily Wire‘s transphobic co-founder and editor emeritus Ben Shapiro said in an October 6 press statement.
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