Thread by @bansisharma

1. This Is Not A Movie Review
George Will is a historian. He doesn't write movie reviews, but he has written an opinion piece about a movie that I feel compelled to serialize. This should not be an obscure movie, but is. You will soon discover why. It's a movie about this man.

2. Directed by actor Nick Searcy (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “The Shape of Water”), this gripping true-crime courtroom drama, with dialogue taken from court transcripts and police records, made it onto 670 screens, and earned nearly $4 million.

3. The movie’s makers tried to raise money on a crowdfunding website that balked at graphic — meaning accurate — descriptions of the subject, saying “we're a broad website used by millions of people.” However, a pluckier site gathered nearly $2.4 million from 30,000 contributors.

4. Almost all regular critics of movies were offered copies of the movie. A major film will receive about 270 media reviews. This one received 12, even though in the October week it was released it was the top-grossing indie film and cracked the top 10 of all films in theaters.

5. The critics’ boycott of the film was just a continuation of the journalists’ indifference toward the trial of the man which the movie is based upon.

6. As the prosecutors drove to the courthouse in 2013 for the first day of the man's trial on eight counts of murder and 24 felony counts, they anticipated a difficult maelstrom of media attention. They encountered something far worse: virtually no attention.

7. So why such indifference? Because the man we are talking about is Kermit Gosnell -- ‘America’s biggest serial killer' -- and his innumerable victims were mostly the unborn or the newly born who weren't supposed to make out alive.

8. If Gosnell’s victims had been middle-class instead of inner-city minorities, there would have been more interest in an abortion facility where babies were heard crying, and where a woman victim of his slapdash procedure went home with an arm and a leg of her baby still in her.

9. According to grand jury testimony, early in Gosnell’s career of carnage he used a medical device lacking federal approval, “basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball.”

10. “They were coated into a gel, so that they would remain closed. These would be inserted into the woman’s uterus. And after several hours of body temperature, the gel would melt and these 97 things would spring open, supposedly cutting up the fetus, before it was expelled.”

11. In spite of — actually, because of — its gruesome substance, the two-month trial, which ended with Gosnell sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, was not covered by the mainstream media at all.

12. How did Gosnell become such a prolific killer without being noticed? Two reasons. People who should've known did not want to know because knowing would have forced them to answer questions about when in an infant’s gestation it is preposterous to deny that a baby is present.

13. And since most “reproductive rights” militants oppose restrictions on late-term abortions because pre-born babies supposedly have no more moral significance than tumors, Gosnell sincerely thought he was doing nothing wrong in guaranteeing dead babies from late-term abortions.

14. This is why, in the movie and as actually happened, a female prosecutor is accurately warned by her supervisor that she would be characterized as “the prosecutor who went after reproductive rights.”

15. A word can be worth a thousand pictures. In the movie “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” the word “snip” describes what the camera does not show: Gosnell’s use of scissors to cut the spinal cords of babies that survived his late-term abortion procedures.

16. No one knows how many — certainly hundreds, probably thousands — spinal cords Gosnell snipped before the 2010 raid on his “clinic.”

17. Law enforcement came looking for illegal drugs. They also found jars of babies’ feet, fetal remains in toilets and milk cartons, and a pervasive smell of cat feces — in a facility that had not been inspected for 17 years. Pennsylvania nail salons receive biennial inspections.

18. The movie “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” will soon be available on Netflix.

The End