Citizen Ruth

For his first feature film, Citizen Ruth (1996), Payne wrote the screenplay with a friend, Jim Taylor. A broad skewering of the pervasive abortion debate in American public life, the film starred Laura Dern as a pregnant woman who becomes a pawn of both pro-choice and pro-life activists. With its…

…anti-abortion forces in Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth (1996). In 1997 Dern appeared in the landmark episode of the sitcom Ellen, playing a lesbian whose flirtation with the lead character (Ellen DeGeneres) prompts the latter to declare that she too is a lesbian.