His "Garden State" movie and the plan for the new one don't look very formulaic. I stopped going to movies when I didn't need to find a place to make out with my girlfriend anymore and I stopped watching fiction movies when I got bored of seeing the same old stuff over and over.
He should list this in his discussion of risks, in that he never quite explains why its bad to put the financiers in editorial control of his movie, although they clearly do a good job of narrowcasting typical formulaic movies (to the small fraction of the population who likes that kinda stuff and therefore might not like his stuff). Also as per the narrowcasting comment his movies now sound interesting to me although I got bored with movies and stopped watching a long time ago (like most people, looking at percentages). So his risks section also needs a better plan to reach outside the usual movie going public than a kickstarter and maybe the Sundance festival.
He may get more money from the general public if he writes to a general public audience who has no idea who he is, rather than what appears to be indie movie fans. I'm not asking for a major editorial content change, just add another 10% length explaining why would the average dude off the street who doesn't do the movie thing since he was a kid, care, much less send him some dough?
Note that I've personally sent/kickstarted Jason Scott the nonfiction documentary producer enough to buy a plane ticket or two over the years, this isn't a new idea.
Now this is assuming what I got out of imdb and kickstarter has any relation to reality. Maybe Garden State is just another boring romantic comedy or teen fart joke formula movie. Can anyone who's actually seen his movies, comment?
Garden State is one of my favorite movies, and even I'll admit it's a pretty formulaic bildungsroman, very much in the vein of Cameron Crowe. The strengths of the movie are less in the overarching plot and with the details, such as the soundtrack, cinematography, and excellent script.
At first blush, this new script looks remarkably original. That being said, everything's relative: there's the old cliche that every possible story has already been told, and I think the trick is less to put forward something new and more to put forward something great.
In terms of the strategy behind the campaign: it seems very much in the vein of the Veronica Mars kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-m...), in the sense that its appealing more to the fans of the original work (I'd imagine the cult of Veronica Mars fans and the cult of Garden State fans has some significant overlap.)
Sorry for hijacking this thread, but it is totally fascinating to me which German words make it into the English language. "Bildungsroman", nice one. Is this actually used often?
He's not trying to convince someone who never watches movies to pay him. He's trying to convince people who watch movies and want to see the director's vision to pay him. This campaign is a way of funding his movie without catering to popular tastes. If you haven't heard of Zach Braff, you're probably not the target of this kickstarter.
It's probably worth adding that Zach Braff is exceedingly well known amongst my peers. I'd be very surprised if someone I met at a party hadn't heard of him.
Garden State resonated with me in a way few movies do. I was in a similar emotional state at the time, so that helps, of course. You can read a plot synopsis elsewhere, but what hooked me, and has stayed with me, was the emotional honesty in most of the scenes.
Looking at the numbers he probably wont need to go looking to recruit people who havent heard of him, Scrubs is one of the most popular comedy series of recent times and Garden State was a pretty big hit.
Garden State was a good quirky indie romantic comedy, it wasnt particularly formulaic in execution but if you can dislike entire genres for being the same there are probably plenty of things to find in it to not like.
Yeah that's exactly what I mean by narrowcasting. Wikipedia claims $26.7 million north American box office, if you estimate $10 per ticket that big hit equals 2.67 million north americans watched it. Google's quick guess of population of north america in 2008 five years ago was 528 million. That means movies are so incredibly narrowcasted that if 99.5% of the population can't be bothered to watch, its a big hit.
If you try to appeal to only a tiny 5% fraction of the general population, you get 10 times as many paying viewers than if you get a pretty big hit solely within the tiny moviegoing crowd. Thats the power of broadcasting or mass media vs narrowcasting.
Many people have commented that its a cool movie, I'll add "Garden State" to my list.
Well, in the sense that it cost $3.5mil to make and made $26.7mil just in NA, it was a "pretty big hit".
This is the same reason Kevin Smith gets to keep making movies: he doesn't spend a lot and makes the studio a bunch of profit on DVD and foreign sales, even if his NA box office tanks.
Not that it completely undercuts your point, but you have to limit your numbers to the population that sees R-rated movies in the theater.
There's a chunk of your "population that can't be bothered to watch" that were too young, or who were in nursing homes, prisons, hospitals, etc. and can't reasonably watch any movie in the theater.
Doing new things within the constraints of a genre is one of the marks of good art. All blues songs are the same just as all romantic comedies are the same. But Silver Linings Playbook was still a damn good movie.
He should list this in his discussion of risks, in that he never quite explains why its bad to put the financiers in editorial control of his movie, although they clearly do a good job of narrowcasting typical formulaic movies (to the small fraction of the population who likes that kinda stuff and therefore might not like his stuff). Also as per the narrowcasting comment his movies now sound interesting to me although I got bored with movies and stopped watching a long time ago (like most people, looking at percentages). So his risks section also needs a better plan to reach outside the usual movie going public than a kickstarter and maybe the Sundance festival.
He may get more money from the general public if he writes to a general public audience who has no idea who he is, rather than what appears to be indie movie fans. I'm not asking for a major editorial content change, just add another 10% length explaining why would the average dude off the street who doesn't do the movie thing since he was a kid, care, much less send him some dough?
Note that I've personally sent/kickstarted Jason Scott the nonfiction documentary producer enough to buy a plane ticket or two over the years, this isn't a new idea.
Now this is assuming what I got out of imdb and kickstarter has any relation to reality. Maybe Garden State is just another boring romantic comedy or teen fart joke formula movie. Can anyone who's actually seen his movies, comment?