The perverse tale of blind obedience to authority first unfolded eight years ago in a McDonald’s restaurant in Mount Washington, Ky., just south of Louisville, when an 18-year-old employee was subjected to a humiliating strip search orchestrated by a prank caller pretending to be a cop.
Now it may be coming to a theater near you.
“Compliance,” a movie based on the McDonald’s strip-search hoax case, premiered last month at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and has been acquired by a major distributor, which expects to release it this summer.
Dozens of film-goers walked out of the debut and hecklers later screamed at director Craig Zobel that his 90-minute film was exploitative and misogynistic.
“Rape is not entertainment,” one of them yelled at a question-and-answer session with the director.
But critics generally have raved about the movie, which includes scenes with nudity and degradation.
Hollywood Reporter called it “a suspenseful psychological drama for viewers prepared to tolerate its extremes,” while bestmoviesevernews.com said it “works wonderfully as a horror suspense film without any gore or blood.”Distributor Magnolia Pictures would not let Zobel or others connected with the movie talk to a reporter last week, but he has said he was inspired to make the movie after reading about it.
“I read the article and couldn’t shake it,” he said. “It raised so many questions about why they went along with what they were told to do.”
Louisville lawyer Ann Oldfather, who represented the victim, Louise Ogborn, said her former client didn’t know about the movie until she was contacted last week by a reporter.
Oldfather said the director had a moral obligation to approach Ogborn before making the film.
“Anybody who wanted to be responsible in telling this story should have made an effort to talk to the person who went through it,” Oldfather said.
The Courier-Journal reported how Ogborn, a minimum-wage employee and high-school senior, was methodically searched and forced to strip after a man pretending to be a police officer called the Mount Washington McDonald’s on April 9, 2004, and accused her of stealing a customer's purse.Following the caller's instructions, an assistant manager took away Ogborn’s clothes and cell phone. The assistant manager later called in her fiance, who also followed the caller’s orders in forcing Ogborn to perform a series of humiliating tasks and ultimately sexually abusing her.
Ogborn’s ordeal lasted for three hours, until a janitor realized the caller was a fraud.
The alleged caller, David R. Stewart, a former prison guard who lived in the Florida panhandle, was charged with impersonating a police officer and soliciting crimes but was acquitted at trial. Police suspected him of making as many 130 similar calls to restaurants and stores around the country.
Zobel changed the names for his movie and set it in a fictional “Chick-Wich” restaurant in Ohio. But he said in several interviews with online publications that it was based on the Bullitt County case and that the “weirder and yuckier the things in our movie, the more likely it is that they really happened.”
Ogborn, who won a $6.1 million jury verdict against McDonald’s that was later settled for an undisclosed sum, has since married and had a child. She didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Stewart’s lawyer, Steve Romines, said his client hadn’t known about the movie.
McDonald’s corporate spokesman, William Whitman, didn’t respond to a request for comment and neither did its Louisville lawyer, Margaret Keane.
Legal experts, including Bill Hollander, an intellectual property lawyer who is managing partner of the Louisville firm of Wyatt Tarrant & Combs, said filmmakers may fictionalize someone’s life story without their consent, although they could be sued for defamation or invasion of privacy if they knowingly or recklessly get the facts wrong.
Jennifer Rothman, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has worked in the movie industry, said filmmakers customarily buy story rights from a subject to avoid subsequent litigation and criticism.
In an interview on New York Magazine’s entertainment website “Vulture,” Zobel admits that his movie, which isn’t rated, is challenging to watch, even for him. “It’s not for everybody.”He said he didn’t make it just for controversy but knew it would bother some people.
“So beat me up,” he said. “I am not going to apologize.”
He has described the film as about “the danger of letting go of one’s own common-sense belief system and giving it over to authority. I think that happens all the time, and the consequences, like in this movie, are huge.”
Ogborn’s character is played by actress Dreama Walker, who has appeared in the teen TV drama “Gossip Girl” and played Clint Eastwood’s granddaughter in the movie “Gran Torino.”
The Courier-Journal was told that Walker wasn’t available for an interview. But she told a Los Angeles Times movie blogger that she studied transcripts and interviews from the McDonald’s case to get her part right.
“My whole thing for playing the character was that she wasn't an idiot,” she said. “She was just really young, very naive and was in these high-stakes circumstances where she thought she was going to lose her job if she didn't do as she was told.
“We all think we would react in a certain way, react boldly,” Walker said. “Sometimes that's not really the case at all."
Oldfather said Ogborn is trying to put her ordeal behind her and most likely will never see “Compliance.”
“My feeling is the last thing she would ever want to do is watch a movie about something that was hell for her,” Oldfather said.
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Admittedly I didn't follow a lot of what was going at on at Sundance this year so this is the first time I've heard of this movie but I am familiar with the actual incident and what in the actual fuck? It's really shitty that this girl found out about this movie after it was in the can, screened, and picked up for distribution from a reporter and not from anyone actually involved. If you are not familiar with the incident I've included a clip from when it was on 20/20.