Screenshot from Hollywood Does Abortion documentary shows protest outside clinic.
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
Hollywood Does Abortion is all about Tinseltown not wanting to do them. Or eventually caving and depicting the issue through a right-of-center lens.
The one-hour, 39-minute documentary traces a controversial topic that’s appeared more and more frequently over the decades on bigger home screens and smaller movie-house surfaces. From troubled pre-Roe vs. Wade days through today’s troubled post-Dobbs times. Political progress and retreat.
It features what feels like hundreds of quick cuts — clip after clip from flicks and telecasts and newscasts, plus tons of heads that won’t stop talking. Producers and writers and analysts and you-name-its.
Virtually every position on the subject is explored a bit, so a viewer can’t escape learning something unlearned before.
The dense panorama begins with Norman Lear’s TV heroine Maude shoving history forward by contemplating an abortion, and the public backlash that series generated; it ends with a monotone thought-balloon that we should all be tolerant and try to make the world a little better; and detours along the way for gossip and a peek at Marilyn Monroe’s abortion or miscarriage or whatever that momentary headline-grabbing, national trauma was.
The film — which was executive produced by Rachel Bloom, who will be honored July 18 at with the Freedom of Expression Award at the 46th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival — is interesting but not compelling. That may be due to its being somewhat choppy (fragmented, if you will) and mostly chronological.
Bloom, activist and co-creator and acting star of the CW musical/comedy/drama series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, probably couldn’t care less what critics say about Hollywood Does Abortion because, after having helped spearhead the pet project, it’s now out there, at festivals at least, and from her standpoint, the more publicity, the better.
But the doc isn’t unlike a high-school class in gender politics, emphasizing multiple historic pivots as if they were tiny subheads.
Showing dramatized pre-surgical exam is screenshot from Hollywood Does Abortion.
It flits, for example, from Dirty Dancing and its branding abortion as dangerous, whether illegal or not; to Evangelicals getting heavily involved politically; to Operation Rescue with its attacks on abortion clinics and doctors; to the era of folks again wanting the procedure to disappear under the rug and be safe, legal, and rare; to a tribute to Grey’s Anatomy and how consistent the TV series has been regarding a sensitive coverage of the subject; to the not unexpected reversal of Roe; to the evolution of abortion via a welcomed pill; to the rise of streaming and its shedding of pressures from corporate bigwigs and advertisers.
Hollywood Does Abortion, which has no explosions or car chases or, indeed, any action whatsoever, sidetracks momentarily into the evolution of gay relationships on screen, and to a dozen other headline topics. That’s its biggest flaw, trying too hard to do too much.
But there’s so much content — content that appears to change every second and a half — that pro-abortion activists can find plenty to love. And to hate.
Ditto, anti-abortionists.
Either way, it’s an immersive, mildly intriguing under-two-hour mental road-trip from that Maude show in the fall of 1972 to now.
Picturing happy post-birth, on screenshot from Hollywood Does Abortion, shows how Tinseltown and TV skirt controversial issue.
