Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Roe v. Wade’ features South Florida director and Roger Stone
It’s a cameo that doesn’t last long. But Roger Stone relished the role.
The Fort Lauderdale resident and longtime confidant of former President Donald Trump who has been the subject of years of welcome and unwelcome media attention — and who frequently vilifies the mainstream media — portrays a Washington Post reporter in a movie that hits streaming services on Friday.
He especially welcomed the idea of making the reporter look bad. “I played it like a Washington Post reporter: sleazy, deceptive, dishonest and biased,” Stone said Thursday. “I think I nailed it.”
Many critics have applied many of those descriptions to Stone. And while his description of the Post, which has won 69 Pulitzer Prizes, will be dismissed by some and embraced by others, Stone’s enthusiasm for the part is undeniable.
His character in “Roe v Wade,” a dramatic account of the seminal 1973 Supreme Court ruling on abortion rights, receives a leaked Supreme Court opinion, from a Supreme Court justice, before it is released to the public.
When the call came a few years ago asking if he was interested in the part, “I jumped at the opportunity.” Stone has particular enmity toward the Post, which he said — with the exception of one story written about his clothing in the newspaper’s Style section — hasn’t “written anything favorable or accurate about me” in the last 40 years. Stone is known for his sartorial flair and best- and worst-dressed lists. He rejected help from the wardrobe department, showing up for shooting in a rumpled seersucker suit and straw hat, which is what he said a Washington reporter would have worn in the early 1970s.
Stone’s role came about through Nick Loeb, a former South Florida political candidate and businessman. Stone has known Loeb’s father since Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 presidential campaign and advised the younger Loeb in some of his political endeavors.
The ask came before Stone’s Trump-related legal troubles. In 2019, Stone was arrested in a pre-dawn raid at his Fort Lauderdale Home under the direction of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who probed Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Stone was convicted late in 2019, but Trump commuted his prison sentence in 2020 and then granted him a full pardon at Christmas.
Stone’s involvement, and the political bent of the film, will undoubtedly be enough for many to make up their minds before it hits streaming services, including Amazon Prime, iTunes and Google Play, on Friday.
The movie involves lots of off-screen plot twists:
Loeb: The scion of wealth and former fiancé of actress Sophia Vergara, Loeb co-wrote, co-directed, co-produced and acted in the movie.
While living in South Florida, Loeb ran unsuccessfully for Delray Beach City Commission, started a campaign for a BrowardPalm Beach County seat in the Florida Senate before suddenly withdrawing, and ran — well, almost ran — for U.S. Senate.
Loeb is the son of John Loeb Jr., who was ambassador to Denmark under Reagan. The Loebs are heirs to the Loeb and Lehman banking families.
More recently, he’s been
embroiled in a years-long legal dispute with Vergara, a star of TV’s Modern Family, over the disposition of the former couple’s frozen pre-embryos they created via in-vitro fertilization while they were still together. They broke up in 2014, and on Monday, Loeb lost his final court battle in the matter.
Mike Lindell: The “MyPillow” guy, known for ads pitching his company’s products on cable TV and disseminating false claims that election fraud cost Trump the 2020 election. Last week, Lindell told an interviewer that Trump would be back in office, even though there’s no realistic scenario by which that could happen.
Loeb said the brief scene in which Lindell plays a TV anchor was shot two years ago when he “wasn’t famous.” In February, Lindell had a confrontation with a Newsmax anchor that went viral when he wouldn’t stop making unsubstantiated claims about election fraud and voting machines and the anchor walked off the set.
Conservative actors:
Hollywood has a small circle of openly conservative actors. Several have roles in the movie, including John Schneider, Jon Voight, Corbin Bernsen, Robert Davi and Joey Lawrence.
Stone and Loeb
In late 2011, Loeb summoned reporters to the Miami Beach hotel for an announcement about his planned U.S. Senate candidacy — an event orchestrated by Stone. Reporters who attended were less interested in Loeb than Vergara, who didn’t appear all that interested in what was going on.
She stopped about 10 feet from the lectern at which Loeb spoke, making it difficult for video cameras to get the two in the same shot. She chatted with people during most of the time Loeb spoke and answered questions.
The news of the day was that Loeb would not run for U.S. Senate after all, explaining that he couldn’t stand or walk for long periods because of a serious car accident the previous year.
Stone had also helped him with a previous campaign, for a Florida state Senate seat. Loeb dropped out of that race in 2009, citing turmoil in his personal life. His wife at the time, a native of Sweden, had traveled home, run into an old boyfriend and fallen in love with him, leaving Loeb in shock and heartbroken. At the time, he’d raised about $300,000 and spent more than $100,000 on the campaign. Loeb used his own money to make sure all campaign contributors got full refunds.
Before that, he narrowly lost a 2006 race for Delray Beach City Commission — after the Republican and Democratic establishment joined forces against him.
The movie
Loeb said it took about four years to make the movie, including raising the money and writing the script. He said he and his family didn’t finance the roughly $8 million cost. His father is pro-choice, and extended family members are all liberals, Loeb said.
He appears in the film as Bernard Nathanson, an abortion provider who crusaded for repeal of anti-abortion laws who later became an anti-abortion crusader.
Loeb said in a telephone interview that the movie presents a factual look at the 1973 case that recognized a right to abortion. “Roe v. Wade is the court case everybody has heard of but nobody knows anything about.”
Its point of view is clear from the location where Loeb held its premier: The Conservative Political Action conference in Orlando, the February gathering that was also the site of Trump’s only public speech since leaving office.
Brief reviews haven’t been kind. The New York Times said “even those on the fence [on the issue] might struggle to sit through the hammy acting and poor production values.” Variety, which covers the entertainment industry, was scathing about what it called an “atrocious anti-abortion propaganda piece” in which the directors “use cheap tricks and insinuation to prop up their swelling piles of falsities.”
Loeb said he expected reviews in the “liberal media” would “tear it apart.”
Lillian Tamayo, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of South, East and North Florida, which supports abortion rights and provides abortion services, said by email people should see the movie for what it is. “This film was produced by people who oppose safe, legal abortion, with the intention of furthering their goal of ending access to abortion in this country.”
Tamayo said most Americans want abortion to remain legal and safe. “Nearly one in four women in America will have an abortion by the age of 45, and every individual’s personal decision about their pregnancy — whether to parent, choose adoption, or have an abortion — should be respected and valued.”