Kings – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

Mr. Gast couldn’t even get to grips with the 300,000 feet of footage he’d been shooting. The London-based company, which King said would fund the project, turned out to be backing a Shell company in the Cayman Islands owned by Liberian Treasury Secretary Stephen Tolbert. Mr Gast flew to Liberia to arrange more money, but before they could make a deal, Mr Tolbert died in a plane crash.

Mr. Gast’s attorney David Sonenberg sued in a UK court, and after a year, Mr. Gast had his film and hours and hours of audio piled up in the bedrooms and hallways of his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

What he didn’t have was money, so he took on a number of side projects. At one point the Hells Angels hired him to make a film that would counter their reputation as a violent criminal – though they undercut their own case when several of them beat up Mr. Gast (without seriously injuring him) for refusing to give them the to give editorial control. (The movie “Hells Angels Forever” was popular.)

Not all of Mr. Gast’s monetary efforts have been film-related or legal. One night in June 1979, he and at least four other men were waiting at an airport near Charleston, West Virginia, for a plane carrying about 10 tons of marijuana that they smuggled out of Colombia. But the plane crashed on landing and spilled its contents down a slope. Mr. Gast was arrested, found guilty, and fined $ 10,000 and given a five-year suspended sentence.

In 1989, after years of struggling, Mr. Gast reunited with Mr. Sonenberg, who had since become a successful music manager. Mr. Gast persuaded him to take over the rest of the production process and even let him use a room in his Manhattan townhouse as a studio.

Mr. Gast was still keen to focus the film on the festival. But one day one of Mr. Sonenberg’s clients, hip-hop star Wyclef Jean, was in the studio when Mr. Gast was editing a clip of Ali. Mr. Jean was delighted and asked to see more and more of the footage.

There have always been infertile heterosexual couples in need of donor sperm, but with the legalization of gay marriage and the rise of single motherhood, the market has expanded over the past decade. About 20 percent of Spermabanken’s customers are heterosexual couples, 60 percent are gay women and 20 percent are single mothers.

To meet that demand, men provided sperm at a constant rate for years, some banks said. But the coronavirus has changed things. Existing donors were afraid to enter. New donor registrations were halted for months during the lockdown and never really recovered at some banks. Several banks said they had a lot of old frozen semen in store, but that it could only last that long.

“Donor recruitment is a growing challenge,” said Scott Brown, vice president of strategic alliances at California Cryobank. “And I would definitely say that people are still very interested in having children.”

Lots of people want smart sperm too. This is why some major banks are near elite colleges. They have sperm collection centers in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard. College men are one of the most reliable groups in realizing the potential chaos of creating about 50 biological kids around the world for about $ 4,000 over several months – and deciding that this is good business is.

A donor would typically go to a bank once or twice a week for months to produce enough sperm to sell to dozens of families.

“Much of their recruitment revolves around fraternities, but fraternities don’t come together,” said Rosanna Hertz, chairwoman of women and gender studies at Wellesley College and co-author of Random Families, a book on donor conception. “People want college degree semen, so to speak.”

So the banks became desperate. A recruiter told me that she had started advertising on outdoor paths since the gyms closed. A sales representative from another sperm bank said he hoped management could offer cash rewards to attract donors, but his bosses were concerned about setting a precedent.