America is currently facing its biggest and most deadly wave of COVID-19 yet, but yes, Addison Rae, please go ahead and film your movie.
The TikTok star is currently filming He’s All That (a reboot of the classic 1999 rom-com She’s All That) — a film that the City of Los Angeles felt was so necessary to the cultural zeitgeist that it needed to shut down a major COVID-19 testing site in order to do so.
The film had received approval to shoot inside and outside LA's Union Station on 1st December, according to the city and county’s film office, and would gather 170 cast and crew members. Mind you, Los Angeles County has just reported an intense spike in coronavirus cases, hitting more than 5,000, and issued a new stay-at-home order.
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However, the move received heated social media backlash from the public. Ktown For All, a Koreatown-based homeless advocacy group, expressed outrage that the city would choose to close one of the only COVID-19 testing hubs that is easily accessible by public transportation. The locations team for the production company maintained that they did not know that Union Station was one of the city’s testing sites.
In the middle of a horrible and terrifying COVID spike, LA just cancelled all of its Dec 1 appointments at Union Station (one of the only transit-accessible facilities) with less than 24hrs notice because of A FILM SHOOT!! @MayorOfLA @metrolosangeles @lapublichealth WTF???!!??? pic.twitter.com/zwR36TH4G4
— Ktown for All 💜❤ (@KtownforAll) December 1, 2020
Late on November 30, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted that the city had reversed its decision and that the site will remain open for the hundreds of people with appointments the next day. "Working with @LAFD, @Curative & @MetroLosAngeles, my team has worked to reopen testing at Union Station on Tuesday. The 504 Angelenos who were scheduled for a test there can visit the kiosk as originally planned or any of the other 14 City sites, where we offer 38K tests daily," Garcetti tweeted.
It’s understandable that living through a pandemic can cloud your judgement to a certain extent, but this seems like a relatively easy call. No offence, but pretty sure nobody is itching to see a gender-swapped She’s All That reboot more than they want to, say, live.