Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I usually get yelled at when I support a crowd funding campaign that's not 100% indie with an article on here, but to me this is one of the more intriguing aspects of a large crowd funding campaign. Established folks pre-selling risky material directly to the fans when none of the suits will fund their projects is cool to me.
Until they can figure out the laws stopping small investors from actually getting to buy into a portion of the profits I'll always see a bigger value in taking a pre-order approach to these things, like the way the successful Rooster Teeth and Broken Lizard campaigns went for their films. They wrestled for years to get the Hollywood system to fund their stuff and couldn't make it happen, so they went right to their fanbases and said “Pre-buy the DVD and you'll help make this happen.”
Today I want to highlight one crowdfunding campaign that caught my attention. It's an ambitious one, but for a title that should intrigue most of the true blue cinephiles out there. It's a campaign launched by the producers who have teamed up to retrieve, restore and release Orson Welles' famously unreleased final film THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND.
After spending years tracking down the film's negative, negotiating rights and fighting to restore Welles' final flick producers Filip Jan Rymsa, Peter Bogdanovich, Frank Marshall and Jens Koethner Kaul have turned to movie fans all over the world to help them finish the job.
Releasing a lost '70s art film by one of cinema's greatest filmmakers doesn't seem to be high on the priority list for modern day Hollywood, but you can help make it happen. All I know is I want to see the movie that Welles fought so hard for, filming over many years at his own personal expense. Plus it stars John Huston as an Orson Welles-ish film director trying desperately to fund his big comeback film. How fitting is that for this project?
The rewards range from posters to cigars to an actual 35mm print of the finished film, but the real reason to donate is to pay respects to one of cinema's most influential voices and get a chance to see his final film. If you have the means, give it a look, will ya'?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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