Harvey Keitel, Danny Trejo and Henry Thomas Lead Ben Shapiro's Pro-ICE ‘Pawn Shop,’ Filming Temporarily Suspended In Montana

Ben Shapiro is at it again in his quest to conquer cinema. The Daily Wire's next film has started production in Montana, and if the goal was to grab headlines, mission accomplished.

via: Deadline

Following protest from locals, the city of Livingston, Montana has temporarily suspended production on Daily Wire‘s latest film, Pawn Shop.

During a special meeting on Saturday, the Livingston City Commission unanimously passed a motion raised by Commissioner Cindy Daniels in response to concerns raised by citizens over the disruption to businesses and the city’s only food bank, as well as lack of notice regarding some of the production’s more dangerous stunts.

“A motion to immediately temporary suspend Bonfire Pawn Shop LLC’s permit while seeking legal opinion from the city attorney in a timely matter to amend, suspend or revoke the permit to come back to the commission not after 5:00pm on October 5th,” the Commission concluded in Saturday’s meeting.

Deadline has reached out to the film’s producers at Daily Wire and Bonfire Legend for comment.

Since filming began, locals have protested the alleged use of blank gunshots, pyrotechnics and a staged car wreck without properly notifying residents and businesses, as well as its opening scene, which appears to dramatize ICE‘s fatal shooting of Renée Good in Minnesota back in January.

Meanwhile, the Livingston Food Resource Center (LFRC) released a statement explaining how the production has impacted its clients, who “already face numerous obstacles to meeting their most basic needs,” adding: “Since filming began across the street from our building, road closures and armed security guards have increased the barriers to accessing food. Our clients deserve to feel unequivocally safe accessing this essential resource.”

With dangerous stunts involving pyrotechnics, Livingston Fire Department confirmed they were on call, but some locals say they were not properly notified of the sequence taking place in their front yards. Deadline has reached out to the Montana Film Office.

Originally scheduled to film in downtown Livingston through Oct. 10, Police Chief Wayne Hard says the department has been contacted with complaints “on a daily basis” since production began, but there have been no reports of violence.

With Rust producer Carter Boehm serving on the production team, the latest collaboration between Bonfire Legend’s Sonnier and Daily Wire comes after their last film, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, was picketed by IATSE. Several crew members walked off over labor issues in South Carolina, shortly before Jonathan Majors was involved in an on-set accident that resulted in his co-star JC Kilcoyne needing stitches “all over his hands” after falling through a window.

Deadline has confirmed that the Pawn Shop production is not under an IATSE contract either, while it is under a “conditional start” with SAG-AFTRA.

A call sheet seen by Deadline lists the three leads as Harvey Keitel, Danny Trejo and Henry Thomas. That's Mr. White from "Reservoir Dogs," Machete himself, and Elliott from "E.T." — a kid who hid an undocumented alien from federal agents. So this checks out.

The director is Michael Polish ("Twin Falls Idaho"), and the script comes from Jake Harlen, who doesn't seem to have an IMDb page.

The synopsis for Pawn Shop reads: “When chaos hits the streets of Minneapolis, a young federal agent is left alone after his partner is seriously hurt and must find a way to survive an increasingly dangerous situation. Seeking shelter inside a neighborhood pawn shop, he becomes trapped with a traditional Hispanic father and his progressive college-age son, forcing three very different men to confront fear, conflicting beliefs and a crisis that tests their courage and humanity.”

What's more, the film's opening scene has been revealed through a leaked script, and there's no hiding the inspiration. The sequence dramatizes the fatal ICE shooting of Renée Good in Minnesota this past January. Harlen's script describes Good's stand-in, a character named Melanie, as "a fat blue-hair." It then lingers on the killing: "The first shot takes Melanie in the neck, below her covid mask. The second in the head, above her covid mask." It goes on to describe blood splattering onto her passenger's forehead and "matching covid mask."

Shapiro has spent years complaining that Hollywood won't make movies for conservatives. This is one way to fix that.

While we're at it, Shapiro isn't done with his quest. He's going arthouse, having written the screenplay for "Confession," the new film from "The Painted Bird" director Václav Marhoul. The 1938 Moscow interrogation drama, starring Rob Lowe, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nick Nolte, Emile Hirsch and James Franco, world premieres this month at the Warsaw Film Festival.