The Profit

The Profit (2001)

A dark journey into an evil mind where the only good is... The Profit.

This period piece is a fictional biography of a cult leader's rise to power and his subsequent descent into isolation and paranoia.

Date of release
2001-04-01
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (11)
Runtime
2h 8m
Genres
Drama
Director
Peter N. Alexander

Casting

Interesting facts

The Profit is a feature film written and directed by Peter N. Alexander. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in France in 2001. Distribution of the film was prohibited by an American court order which was a result of a lawsuit brought by the Church of Scientology, although the filmmaker says that the film is not about Scientology. As a result, The Disinformation Book Of Lists and The Times have characterized The Profit as a banned film in the United States.

Production

The film's director stated that the script was based upon a fictional character he had created with "many parallels to reality." Filming took place over the course of eight weeks during the summer of 2000, with locations near Fort De Soto Park, Ybor City and Tampa Bay, Florida. Half of the cast came from Tampa Bay, Florida, and cameo appearances by Scientology critics included Bob Minton, Stacy Brooks, Jesse Prince and Ken Dandar.

According to the director, the film's cast and crew faced harassment from Scientologists throughout production. Representatives from the Foundation for Religious Tolerance of Florida — a Scientology front group — came to the shooting sites of the film and handed out fliers which demeaned the film's financial backers.

The founder of the Foundation for Religious Tolerance of Florida, Mary DeMoss of Clearwater, Florida, characterized the movie as a "hate propaganda film," denied that anyone from her foundation followed crewmembers home and stated that the fliers were passed out in order to let crew members know "who was behind this."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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