Making a comedy about the pandemic

RFK Jr.’s billionaire running mate is making a comedy about the pandemic

Nicole Shanahan has recruited a top screenwriter and enlisted Covid contrarian Jay Bhattacharya.

By Kelly Hooper

Covid contrarians tight with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are pitching Hollywood on an unlikely leading man: National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.

Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate in the 2024 presidential campaign, is searching for investors to fund a movie that pokes fun at the pandemic response with a star based on Bhattacharya, who rose to prominence with his anti-lockdown manifesto and relentless tweets opposing social distancing.

The script for the satirical comedy, “The Rash,” is by renowned author Walter Kirn, who wrote the novel “Up in the Air” that became an Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney. The new Kirn screenplay stars a “no-nonsense” public health professor at a Stanford-like California university — mirroring Bhattacharya — who speaks out against mass hysteria amid a mysterious outbreak of a contagious skin condition.

The story of the pandemic is one “of great heroes who stood up and said no” to “dangerous scientific experiments mixed with misleading propaganda, mass psychosis, and outright lies,” says the Brownstone Institute in a recent appeal sent to potential funders of the film.

The think tank that once counted Bhattacharya as a senior scholar added that “investors are terrified of the topic and Hollywood elites don’t even want it made.”

The push to make the film is among numerous examples, since President Donald Trump returned to office, in which the president or his allies have sought approbation from America’s culture-making institutions. They’ve had some success. Trump allies renamed the Kennedy Center in Washington to honor him in December and Amazon released a film last month about first lady Melania Trump.

Since 2020, a number of figures in Trump’s orbit have been involved in the creation and promotion of films criticizing public officials’ response to the pandemic or pushing fringe theories about it or vaccines.

Jeffrey Tucker, Brownstone’s founder and president, didn’t respond to requests for comment. In October 2020, he convened a group of scientists, including Bhattacharya, who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration opposing Covid lockdowns. It set off a vigorous debate about the pandemic response and prompted Bhattacharya’s predecessor at NIH, Francis Collins, to call him a “fringe epidemiologist.”

Bhattacharya, whom Kennedy also named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, is on board with the movie, an NIH spokesperson told POLITICO.

“Dr. Bhattacharya has spoken positively about the work Walter Kirn is doing, noting that the project reflects a strong commitment to free speech and open inquiry, and he welcomes thoughtful creative efforts that engage with these issues,” the spokesperson said.

Bhattacharya declined to comment. He’s spent at least 10 hours speaking to Kirn, who shares his views on the handling of the pandemic, for the film.

Shanahan is an executive producer of “The Rash” along with her partner, Jacob Strumwasser, according to Brownstone. Neither Shanahan nor Strumwasser could be reached for comment. Shanahan, a lawyer and entrepreneur, is reportedly a billionaire following her divorce three years ago from Google founder Sergey Brin. While married to Brin, she founded a philanthropy that focuses on extending women’s fertility.

Funding for “The Rash” nonetheless remains an obstacle. The estimated production budget is close to $6 million, according to a slide deck on Brownstone’s website.

Brownstone “is well-positioned to be a fiscal sponsor of this effort,” and the project “already has a top production company lined up along with some notable talent to make a first-rate film,” the website says.

In September, Kirn released a short teaser trailer for “The Rash” on social platform X, saying the film is in the financing phase and interested investors should contact him.

Kirn did not respond to a request for comment.

He said in the X post that he wrote the film for Shanahan and 0nset Creative, an independent production company founded by Alex Lee Moyer, a filmmaker whose credits include a 2022 documentary on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. In September, as a guest on Shanahan’s podcast, Moyer described the Jones documentary as a film about Covid, the “runway to Jan. 6” and “how off the rails the world went during that moment.”

Three pages of the script for “The Rash” are previewed on Brownstone’s website. In one scene, the governor of California and a character named Dr. Roman Fox orchestrate a celebrity singalong amid the outbreak. A “succession of celebs sing lines from the song ‘Aquarius’ by the Fifth Dimension,” the script reads.

“Some sing beautifully, some not,” the screenplay says. “Behind them are their yards and homes. One sings naked with his crotch blurred out, his body gleaming with oil.”

The song, a No. 1 hit in 1969 based on numbers from the musical Hair, previews a time when Jupiter aligns with Mars and “peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars.”

The scene appears to poke fun at a celebrity singalong of the John Lennon song “Imagine” during the early days of the Covid pandemic, spearheaded by actress Gal Gadot. At the time, the viral video was widely criticized as elitist and out of touch.

0nset Creative was “established in response to a landscape where media has become decentralized and old models are buckling under the weight of the times,” its website says. The studio is working on a handful of other projects in addition to “The Rash,” including “the first in depth documentary about Silicon Valley and its denizens” and another documentary on unidentified flying objects.

During the September podcast interview with Moyer, Shanahan said she and her partner, Strumwasser, had the “stupid idea” for a satire film inspired by the Covid pandemic and decided to run with it.

“We were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just laugh about how ridiculous this all was and how awful it all was?’ But also laugh at it because that means that it’s in the past,” she said.

Moyer said Shanahan approached 0nset Creative with the idea.

“I got to thinking, ‘Well, who’s the best person who can work on this? Who can write a script that’s worthy of this topic?’ And I thought of my good friend, Walter Kirn,” said Moyer.

Shanahan and Strumwasser gave Kirn creative liberty to tell the story in the way he wanted, and he came back with the script for “The Rash,” Moyer added.

Moyer said “The Rash” reminds her of conspiracy thrillers from the ‘60s and ‘70s like “Dr. Strangelove” and “Network,” as well as “some of the lighter influences from films in the ‘90s” like “Wag the Dog” and “Thank You for Smoking.”

“We need to be able to have a sense of humor about our collective trauma,” Moyer told Shanahan.

0nset Creative did not respond to a request for comment, and Moyer could not be reached.

A second scene in the script features a conversation between Fox and “Dr. Neal Chandra,” the character based on Bhattacharya. Fox declares “I’m the science” during the scene — an apparent reference to a 2021 interview in which Anthony Fauci, who led the U.S. pandemic response, said his critics were “really criticizing science because I represent science.” Fox encourages Chandra to sign a document supporting that statement. Chandra refuses.

In a description of the film’s cinematography, the slide deck on Brownstone’s website says the movie will “toggle between composed shots that reflect Dr. Chandra’s rational perspective and looser, handheld coverage that captures the surrounding chaos: influencers melting down on livestreams, press conferences spinning off-script, executives high on their own power.”

“The world bends while Chandra stands still,” the description reads.