'Kindergarten Cop' Canceled After Author Compares It to KKK Film 'Birth of a Nation'
By Erin Erhardt
Published August 9, 2020 at 8:23am
NW Film Center in Portland, Oregon, planned to open its summer drive-in series with “Kindergarten Cop,” a 1990 action-comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
However, the center decided to pull the movie from its summer lineup after “staff and community members,” including Portland author Lois Leveen, complained that the movie’s pro-cop message is unsuited for today’s political climate, Willamette Week reported Monday.
“Kindergarten Cop” stars Schwarzenegger as Detective John Kimble, a “tough cop” who “must pose as a kindergarten teacher in order to locate a dangerous criminal’s ex-wife,” according to IMDb.
Filmed in the city of Astoria in northwest Oregon, the movie was chosen as part of the lineup because of “its importance in Oregon filmmaking history,” NW Film Center said.
Lois Leveen — whose writings include “The Secrets of Mary Bowser,” a Civil War novel about a slave who becomes a Union spy — tweeted her displeasure with the showing.
“What’s so funny about School-to-Prison pipeline?” Leveen said Saturday. “Kindergarten Cop-Out: Tell @nwfilmcenter there’s nothing fun in cops traumatizing kids. National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end school-to-prison pipeline.”