The Onion
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The satirical publication known as The Onion describes itself as “America’s Finest News Source,” and given how terrible the headlines at more traditional information purveyors have been of late, this jokey boast seems truer than ever. But while the site seldom lets the facts get in the way of a good (and hilarious) story, reality is said to have intruded on its latest project — a mockumentary entitled Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile — in a particularly unfunny way.
According to Onion CEO Ben Collins, Bad Pedophile lost its distribution after the September 10 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk because theater owners wanted to avoid potential controversy. No, Kirk doesn’t figure in the flick, but given the sort of incendiary rhetoric spewed by folks on both sides of our country’s currently enormous ideological divide after Kirk’s death, that hardly seemed to matter.
Fortunately, though, you haven’t lost the chance to see the movie on a big screen with an actual audience. The Onion crew cobbled together a string of independent venues brave enough to take a chance on the project in 25 cities across the nation. Included among them is Denver’s Bug Theatre, which will unspool Bad Pedophile on Wednesday, October 8, and Thursday, October 9, as part of a double bill with 2012’s Sex House, a tongue-in-cheek (and other places) send-up of reality TV that essentially predicted the direction the genre would head a decade or so in advance.
The press release for this oddball combo pack contends that the result will be “an unforgettable, thought-provoking night of films at the movies that is sure to be enjoyed by both hardcore cinephiles and theater masturbators alike.”
That’s a bold statement — but The Onion has been making good on such pledges for nearly four decades. And Denver has been part of its story for nearly as long.
The Onion was launched in 1988 as a weekly newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, by a pair of University of Wisconsin-Madison students, Tim Keck and Chris Johnson. A year later, the two sold the paper to contributing comic-strip artist Scott Dikkers, who subsequently planted The Onion in other college towns and added components such as The A.V. Club, an entertainment section about things that were actually happening. The Club debuted in 1995, the same year entrepreneurs Dave and Jeff Haupt ponied up $25,000 to buy franchise rights to The Onion in Denver.
Over the years that followed, several subsequent Onion print editions faltered, including the ones in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which withered in 2009. But the Denver edition lasted all the way until 2013, when the Denver Post stopped printing it.
Westword marked the end of this run with a list of our ten favorite Onion articles set in Colorado. The roster included “Colorado Judge Imposes Ban on Same-Sex Friendships,” “Boulder, Colorado, Named Best Place to Raise Abducted Children,” “Ravens-Broncos Matchup Rekindles Smoldering Resentment From Baltimore-Denver War of 1877,” “Colorado Wildfire Spreads to the Moon” and “Aspen Police Continue Search for Missing Ski.”
Attempts by The Onion to branch out into different sectors of the entertainment universe have been hit or miss. The 1999 book Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source scored a bullseye, and The Onion News Network, which came to life in 2007, had its moments. But The Onion Movie didn’t exactly replicate the success of The National Lampoon when it came to cinematic spinoffs. Production began in 2003 and suffered through various production nightmares until 2008, when it was finally released straight to DVD to little notice or acclaim.
Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile appears to be a more modest step back into theaters for the company. After all, it’s just twenty minutes long, and little was known about it until September 30, when CEO Collins shared this post on social media:
The Onion has spent the last two months working on a masterpiece. It’s a documentary titled Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile.
It’s so good, in fact, we were set to release it in theatres nationwide on October 2nd. Then two weeks ago, Charlie Kirk was shot.
Despite the fact that Charlie Kirk is not in this documentary, our distributor, a major national movie chain, got cold feet and pulled out. Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile had Donald Trump in it, so they bailed.
Look, I don’t think it’s good that we can’t make fun of the world’s biggest dead pedophile because he was friends with the president. So we kept going.
We called every independent theatre we knew in major metro areas to see if they wanted to screen it. Most said yes. Since we announced this morning, we’ve been inundated with requests to screen it across the world.
Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile will now be in more theatres on October 2nd than our original plan.
We went into this knowing we’d almost certainly lose money on it, but that’s not the point. It’s one of the funniest things we’ve ever done, and we want it out there.
Throughout this process we’ve learned something much more valuable: If you make good art right now, people will bust their ass to help you.
Experience Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile and Sex House at the Bug Theatre, 3654 Navajo Street. The October 9 show is sold out, but a second screening at 7 p.m., Wednesday, October 8, has been added. Tickets are $9.30.
