The plans of police unions to boycott Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in the wake of the director’s participation in an anti-police brutality rally have been called off by at least on police union.
An official representative from the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the New York police union that first conceived of the boycott, told TheWrap that they changed their mind at the last minute…
“We’re not giving this guy anymore free publicity,” a union spokesperson Albert O’Leary said. “We have nothing to say about it.”
Tarantino’s movie, The Hateful Eight recently opened in limited release on Christmas Day. It had premiered earlier in December with zero reports of any police protests or disruptions, in spite of the threats.
Daniel Nussbaum writing for Brietbart, reports:
Tarantino touched off a firestorm of controversy when he marched in and addressed the RiseUpOctober rally in New York City just four days after NYPD officer Randolph Holder was shot and killed in Harlem while pursuing a suspect. The director referred to police officers as “murderers,” telling demonstrators: “When I see murders, I do not stand by. I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.
Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch quickly issued a statement calling for a boycott of The Hateful Eight, and law enforcement groups representing thousands of officers across the country—including the LAPD, Philadelphia PD, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and the National Association of Police Organizations—quickly joined the effort. FOP executive director James Pasco vowed his organization would deliver an economically damaging “surprise” to Tarantino’s film ahead of its release.
But Tarantino stood by his comments about police officers, and has doubled down, in the months since the New York rally.
He also told the Los Angeles Times that police brutality apologists were trying to silence him from speaking about criminal cops.
But as for the boycott, he said he was not worried in the least.
“People ask me, ‘Are you worried?’ And the answer’s no, I’m not worried, because I do not feel like the police force is this sinister black hand organization that goes out and f–s up individual citizens in a conspiracy sort of way,” Tarantino said at a Hateful Eight press conference in December. “Having said that, a civil servant shouldn’t be issuing threats, even rhetorically, to private citizens. The only thing I can imagine is that they might be planning to picket us, picket one of the screenings or maybe picket the premiere, or one of the 70mm screenings.”
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