Once the domain of film students and YouTubers, crowdfunding an independent movie has now reached the upper echelons of Silicon Valley and American politics.
Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s running mate in the 2024 presidential campaign, is attached as an executive producer on a feature film project that is being billed as a COVID-set satirical comedy. The project, titled The Rash, will center on a character, a public-health professor, inspired by Jay Bhattacharya, the current National Institutes of Health Director under RFK Jr., who was an outspoken critic of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and later vaccination efforts.
Leading the apparent financing efforts is The Brownstone Institute, the Texas-based nonprofit founded by libertarian thinker Jeffrey Tucker, which was itself founded in response to the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent policy decisions. For its part, Brownstone notes that it is “well-positioned to be a fiscal sponsor of this effort” because the project “exists squarely within the purview of our mission.”
The announcement on Brownstone’s website says the story will take place during a health problem “that captures the public mind with contagious fear and loathing.” It continues: “This rash – real, imagined, or created – is viewed as a financial opportunity by dominant institutions on the cultural landscape. Among them is a pharmaceutical company with an off-the-shelf product called Zenvidia that seems to address the rash by making people forget all about it (with major side effects). Hilarity ensues as a Stanford public-health professor speaks out against the mania.”
Walter Kirn — the novelist behind the book Up in the Air, which later became the George Clooney-starring movie — is writing the screenplay. Kirn, himself a COVID policy skeptic, has already spent hours with Bhattacharya for research. Shanahan, who became a reported billionaire following her divorce from Google’s Sergey Brin, will exec produce with her partner Jacob Strumwasser.
There is a pitch deck and sizzle reel available via Brownstone’s announcement for interested investors. Wag the Dog, Thank You for Smoking and Dr. Strangelove are all listed as references for the project.
According to the pitch deck, The Rash has a prospective budget of nearly $6 million.