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The TV movie or feature film about imprisoned abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell has hired as its writer Andrew Klavan, a bestselling novelist whose book True Crime was made into a movie starring and directed by Clint Eastwood.
Those behind the Gosnell project set a record at Indiegogo in May by raising more than $2.1 million via a crowdfunding campaign. Klavan is expected to use gruesome details from a grand jury report to craft the story of Gosnell, who was convicted of murder after killing live babies born at his Philadelphia abortion clinic.
“As I’ve begun to get into the research materials, it’s started to come home to me that we’ve all taken on a huge responsibility,” Klavan said. “The women who were brutalized by this Gosnell monster — they can tell their stories. But all his victims, all those babies — we’ve got to figure out a way to speak for them somehow.”
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Klavan also wrote Don’t Say a Word, which was made into a movie starring Michael Douglas, and he authored a series of young-adult novels called The Homelanders. He also has written opinion articles for several newspapers, including a controversial piece in The Wall Street Journal that compared Batman as portrayed in The Dark Knight to President George W. Bush.
The producers of Gosnell, husband and wife Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, along with Magdalena Segieda, have made their case that their independent movie is necessary because the mainstream media and traditional Hollywood has largely ignored Gosnell and his crimes, and Klavan agrees.
“What really grabbed me about this is that, here you have the worst serial killer in American history — the banality of evil made flesh — and yet there’s this powerful bureaucratic inertia that provides him cover,” Klavan said. “Even when he’s discovered, there’s this real reluctance to bring the truth to the public. The Gosnell murders were an inconvenient truth that no one wanted to tell.”
Sept. 2, 3:13 p.m. An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Gosnell would be a TV miniseries. THR regrets the error.
Email: Paul.Bond@THR.com
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