Weeks ago we booked hotel rooms at The Mirage in Las Vegas, NV for the week of FreedomFest. Originally, since our film was selected to screen at the Anthem Film Festival, we booked rooms at the event location with the plan to stay the entire length of FreedomFest.
As chronicled in Jason Rink’s previous articles, our film was pulled from the film festival schedule after receiving outside pressure, effectively getting canceled, so we created a plan to host a private screening ourselves in Las Vegas. Within days, the screening was completely sold out.
Here are the two e-mails that both Jason Rink and I received on Thursday, July 7, 2022, from MGM Resorts.
The “recently discovered information” that we planned to host a ticketed event in our hotel room is false. We never had such a plan and any suggestion that we did would purely have been speculative and based on a rumor.
Being canceled from simply using our own money to stay in a Las Vegas hotel room during the same time we are premiering our film produces a lot of questions for me:
How did The Mirage discover this rumor about us hosting a ticketed event in our hotel room?
Did a left-wing journalist or someone at FreedomFest notify that hotel with the intent to get us kicked out?
Why didn’t MGM Resorts have the courtesy to contact us first and investigate the rumors that we were breaking our contract with them?
We’ve since found accommodations elsewhere and the premiere of our film, The Most Canceled Man in America, will still happen on July 14, 2022. I don’t expect to get the answers to the above questions but I’d really like to know.
Filmmakers Paul Escandon & Jason Rink canceled from Las Vegas hotel